A year on, and it looks like this change to La Liga kick-off times will actually happen, following an offseason that has revealed just how parlous Spanish finances are, Barcelona’s debt and Mallorca’s financial troubles only the most obvious examples. It’s now apparent La Liga executives see a shift to suit Asian television audiences as critical not just for revenue growth at Real Madrid and Barcelona, but for the whole league — even if it’s at the expense of Spanish tradition.

I would argue that there are root problems in La Liga’s foundations behind these levels of debt that need to be addressed with as much urgency as reaching out to a new market, but at least La Liga is starting to realise that a two-club league is not the way forward, as World Football Insider reports.

“We are trying to change gear the way the Spanish league is promoted, not only the league but the players and also the sport of football,” Francisco Roca, La Liga’s chief executive, told Soccerex delegates today.

“I say changing gears because so far most of the promotion of the Spanish league has been driven by the individual efforts of FC Barcelona and Real Madrid.

“This has been extremely successful for us because those are the two elite teams of the Spanish league, but it’s not enough.

“They will obviously continue to do their individual efforts to do their tours every pre-season but we think that as a competition we are mature enough to be able to promote not only our two elite teams but also the other teams of the Spanish league, especially the first division.”

Famously, unlike the Premier League, television rights in Spain are sold individually by clubs, with the income for Barcelona and Real Madrid dwarfing all other clubs: Real Madrid and Barcelona have deals worth about €150 million  a season, while the likes of Valencia and Sevilla earn around €30 million a year, at best. Ultimately, as great as that is for Barcelona and Real Madrid in the short term, in the long run it makes for a weaker league and a less appealing global “product” (ugh). The Premier League and Manchester United have demonstrated the ancillary benefit of being seen as the biggest and best club in the biggest and best league, at least as collective marketing power has driven that perception.

If any informed Spanish observer knows, I’d be curious to learn if overseas television revenue is also sold individually by clubs in La Liga, or whether it’s sold collectively and shared equally: if it is the latter as I suspect it is, it would appear this drive to the Asian market may be one way to financially compensate for that huge domestic imbalance in revenue, that only hurts smaller clubs and drives madcap spending by the big two. Because while there has been discussion of selling La Liga rights collectively in the domestic Spanish market too, such is Barcelona’s debt and reliance on their individual television deal that seems very unlikely to change right now.

Elsewhere, in discussion of that imbalance and the drive to the Asian market, La Liga CEO Francisco Roca said, according to SportBusiness, that “this is not about short-term. The real benefits are in the medium and long-term. As a league we have to promote our clubs and we have to recognise that promoting the league is not just about Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.”

And fairly enough, with much of the team also coming from Barcelona and the Spanish team playing a similar style, the Catalan-language daily El Punt proclaims that Barcelona’s style won the world, and notes that six Catalans played in the final.

El Punt – Barcelona Edition, published in Barcelona, Spain. 12 July 2010.

El Pais, published in Madrid, Spain. 12 July 2010.

Courtesy newseum.org

Those protests saw a million-strong crowd show reaffirming the desire of the Catalan people for greater regional autonomy within Spain for Catalonia, and protesting a recent Spanish high court ruling that threatens to end its right to call itself a nation.

El Punt – Barcelona Edition, published in Barcelona, Spain. 11 July 2010.

La Vanguardia, published in Barcelona, Spain. 11 July 2010.

These front page images in a soccer-mad region on the day Spain plays in its first-ever World Cup final tell a different story to that of a Spain united by football. Spain’s success at the World Cup, it is being said, has brought unprecedented displays of Spanish national pride to Catalonia or the Basque Country, as this Guardian article today argued:

Catalans and the Basques have been flying the flag for the Reds

They call it “the red effect”. It has spread down Spanish streets on the torsos of hundreds of thousands of fans wearing the shirt of the national soccer team, La Roja or “The Red”, and threatens to over-run even the most obdurately separatist corners of the country. On nights when the team notches up another World Cup victory it turns into a musical chant: “I am Spanish! Spanish! Spanish!” they shout joyfully. “I am Spanish! Spanish! Spanish!” [ . . ]

Such an outpouring of national pride also raises challenging questions about Spain’s vision of itself. This is a “nation of nations” according to some, who see Catalonia and the Basque country as unrecognised nations which, like Scotland, deserve their own football teams. Spain oppresses other nations, according to separatists, including to the Basque terror group Eta – which exacts its revenge in blood. The country’s constitutional court disagrees. “Our constitution recognises no nation but Spain,” it affirmed on Friday in a stern rebuke to Catalans who hoped a new autonomy statute might formally allow them to be known as a nation within Spain.

Thousands of Catalans marched through Barcelona’s streets denouncing the court’s decision to strike out parts of the statute. The march was led by the socialist head of the regional government, José Montilla, and his two predecessors. A massive flag bearing the red and yellow stripes of Catalonia, supposedly originally drawn on by the bloodied fingers of a warring Catalan count, preceded the procession.

But the march could not have been worse timed, according to Josep-Lluis Carod-Rovira, deputy leader of the Catalan regional government and a leader of the separatist Catalan Republican Left party. “This is ridiculous,” he complained. “We will end up with more Spanish flags being waved for the Spain-Holland match on Sunday than Catalan flags on the Saturday demonstration.”

Barcelona did not experience the same wild celebrations that provoked gridlock in parts of Madrid after the semi-final win against Germany on Wednesday, but Carod-Rovira is right that growing support for La Roja overshadows attempts to assert Catalonia’s “different” identity.

The pictures above on the covers of El Punt and La Vanguardia from Saturday’s demonstration suggest the importance of Spain’s World Cup success is being overplayed in that account, as we see waves of Catalan flags and nary a Spanish one, despite Carod-Rovira’s concern that “We will end up with more Spanish flags being waved for the Spain-Holland match on Sunday than Catalan flags on the Saturday demonstration.”  It appears politics surpassed the World Cup.

Despite this, a Málaga daily portrays Spain as playing today “for an entire country”. Perhaps for 90 minutes. . .

Málaga Hoy, published in Málaga, Spain. 11 July 2010.

Images courtesy newseum.org. Any better translations from native speakers gratefully accepted!

BARCELONA’S new chief has admitted the club have had to take on a £125million loan to ease debts and cash-flow problems.

Nou Camp president Sandro Rosell, who replaced Joan Laporta last week, revealed the extent of the financial woes and admitted players’ wages for last month have not been paid.

He also told how they were forced to sell Dmitro Chygrynskiy to former side Shakhtar Donetsk for £12.5million.

Rosell said: “We found a club in debt, with liquidity problems. At this point we have to take a loan to pay the wages of the players.

“The squad were supposed to be paid at the end of last month and still haven’t been.

“We’ll fix a loan of 150m euros (£125m). The banks know we have a business plan that will allow them to recover the money. The club is not bankrupt because it generates income.”

It may get worse for Barcelona; they’re heavily reliant on a massive $1.5 billion television contract with Spanish company MediaPro, currently seeking bankruptcy protection.

The point is this: if a club as massively successful as Barcelona are scraping for loose change just to pay their players, it’s just one more reminder of the dubious long-term economic set-up in place in European leagues.

What this does, though, is validate the concern of UEFA about the debt level taken on by European clubs, with their new regulations aimed to restrict such debt to come into place in the coming seasons.

One other possibility to restrict overspending would be a salary cap solution. The Irish league recently became reported to be the first top-tier European league to introduce a salary cap, with a 60% limit on spending per club on salaries as a proportion of turnover — yet it also seems Ireland tried this before in 2008 with a 65% limit in place, a system that broke down to be replaced by the new cap.

This kind of “soft” salary cap is of course much more palatable to clubs that want to spend more than others (especially big clubs that generate large revenues, of course) than a “hard” salary cap, like that in MLS, restricting each club to spending the same set amount of money on salaries league-wide. This is probably why then-Barcelona President Joan Laporta made the following comment last summer: “Maybe we have to establish some parameters for revenues and players’ salaries but maybe not as strict as in MLS.”

The 60% number adopted by the Irish League is the same as that adopted by Leagues One and Two in England, and so seems to have some general acceptance as a “reasonable” limit to place on wage-spending.

If we look at the spending from this fairly recent table in the biggest leagues, each of the big five leagues except for Germany has exceeded that 60% figure on average this past decade (which means some clubs would have been way over that number, and Italy hitting an absurd 99% level in ’01-’02):

Interestingly, Barcelona would not have been impacted by a 60% spending limit on wages; according to this outstanding analysis of Barcelona’s economics a couple of months ago by Swiss Rambler, their wages accounted for a reasonable 55% of their turnover last year. However, Barcelona’s success has in part led to their current predicament, as they offered their players massive bonuses that were suddenly all realised at once when they won everything under the sun last year. Their costs rose hugely last year due to higher wages and bonuses, from €166m to €211m. All the same, though, it seems a soft salary cap would have done nothing to prevent their present problems paying wages, as their revenue has continued to grow too.

Moreover, the obstacles to implementing a salary cap are obviously considerable philosophically and logistically for European clubs; at the very least, such a system in the top European leagues would (like UEFA’s debt regulations have secured) need the support of the European Club Association, representing a 100-odd of Europe’s elite clubs continent-wide. At the very least, you would think, the biggest four or five leagues might be needed to collectively agree to implementing a salary cap before any one of them does, for fear of losing competitiveness for their clubs in the Champions League (unless a league-wide economic implosion appears imminent anyway).

And to go back to Ireland again, their new salary cap set at 60% of revenue replaces the previous “Salary Cost Protocol”, that was supposed to restrict spending to 65% of a club’s income in any given year. But the failure of that system suggests a soft cap without tough enforcement and examination of clubs’ books is pointless, as the Irish Independent pointed out in February 2009, after the end of the first year the Salary Cost Protocol was supposed to be enforced:

When clubs were frequently failing to pay players, slashing budgets in haphazard fashion and investing in new additions when logic dictated otherwise, the defence from Abbotstown was that the necessary checks and balances were in place to punish the offenders. We had licensing deadlines, and the 65pc Salary Cost Protocol, which would serve as judge and jury come January.

Or so we thought. January 31 has been and gone, the accounts submitted and the individual cases have been judged. And, aside from the sorry plight of Cobh Ramblers, who effectively exited the League of Ireland proper yesterday, the news from the FAI is that everyone else has received the report card they were looking for. Nothing to see here, folks.

Sure, a few parties have been given the provisional OK subject to fulfilling a few more terms and conditions — after all, where would we be in Irish football without more deadlines — but the sum total is that after a calamitous campaign, where numerous clubs practised their business flagrantly, the sanction is a rap on the knuckles and a sterner warning not to do it again.

No wonder those few clubs who have lived within their means and within the letter of the law are exasperated. “It’s like a year’s grace has been granted,” said one official, who didn’t wish to be named yesterday. The frustration is understandable.

All that said, the benefits for global soccer from salary caps being introduced in Europe’s top leagues would be enormous. But a soft cap might not make as big a difference as it might seem at first glance, and getting agreement and implementation in the messy set-ups of European leagues quite a challenge compared to the single-entity of MLS, for example.

Despite the current financial crisis in English football, it’s not down to a lack of television revenue for the Premier League. Indeed, that revenue is the envy of the world, with the £1.782 billion deal signed last year for domestic live game rights alone.

The Premier League’s deals are negotiated collectively; the threat of, say, Manchester United going it alone has long bubbled under the surface, but the overall size of the deals the League have managed to negotiate, and the long-term benefits of it for the Premier League as a whole, have kept even the biggest clubs behind the collective agreements.

The biggest clubs do receive more than the smaller clubs, with the money divided as follows:

25% is paid in merit payments determined by where a club finishes in the final league table;
50% of the domestic revenue is split equally;
100% of the non-domestic revenue is split equally among the clubs.
25%  is paid in facility fees, based on how often a club is shown on TV in the U.K., with each  club guaranteed a minimum of 10 facility fees.

But it’s still a far more equitable system than many other top European leagues have in place.

As Forbe’s explains:

Last season the club that got the least under that formula, Middlesborough, received 30.9 million pounds, compared to Manchester United, which got the most, at 51.1 million pounds.

That is a ratio of one to one and two thirds. Though not strictly analogous as clubs negotiate TV rights individually not collectively as in the EPL, the ratios in the top Italian and Spanish leagues are one to 16 and one to 14, respectively.

La Liga’s leadership has been looking to follow the Premier League’s example to close this gap for the benefit of the league as a whole. The problem they have is the entrenched power and massive revenue Barcelona and Real Madrid receive from selling their television rights individually. In 2006, the two companies signed deals worth a combined 2.1 billion euros with Grupo Mediapro in 2006 that expire in 2013.

Barcelona club president Joan Laporta said today in an interview with Reuters that they could consider change. Oddly, his words were described in this piece as an expression of outright opposition to such collective sales (“Barcelona are unwilling to accept a system of sharing television revenue”), but there is a reluctant acceptance that change may be coming:

“I don’t want to damage the interests of Barcelona Football Club, because we have to compete with teams in other countries,” Laporta said in an interview with Reuters Television at his office next to the Nou Camp stadium.

“In England, we are talking about 2 billion euros for Premier League rights so we have to compete against clubs that are making more money than us,” he added.

“But if there is a change in the system we will face that. I’m open to look for other systems to balance what every club represents in this business. I’m open to discuss other possibilities to make money (for) all of us.”

This change in the system could come from government action, as Bloomberg reported in December that new legislation means the biggest clubs “may have to negotiate future accords collectively with smaller Spanish soccer teams.”

It was much easier to persuade the biggest English clubs to share revenue in the Premier League, because the institution of the Premier League itself rewarded their greed: previously, the entire four division Football League had shared in the collective sale of television rights. The breakaway that formed the Premier League ensured much more revenue went to the top clubs, and the growth of those sales and of the Premier League as a global marketing phenomenon have kept them more-or-less happy since.

Given the structure of the Premier League, a corporation owned by all 20 clubs with one vote each, it would likely take another breakaway of the elite clubs to end collective television rights’ sales; and the balance that rewards the big clubs plentifully enough makes that highly unlikely.

And it’s one aspect of English football’s financial set-up that other parts of Europe do look keen to copy, as the prospective change to La Liga shows: it may be the only way they can keep up with the global selling power of the Premier League as a whole and the benefits this has for the biggest English clubs, with the potential of overseas television rights only starting to be seriously tapped.

Well, the FIFA Club World Cup started today in Abu Dhabi, but buried in the aftermath of the World Cup draw and on the final day of the UEFA Champions League group stage, you might have blinked and missed it.

The opening game itself turned out to be something of a surprise, or at least a downer for the tournament, as New Zealand amateurs Auckland  ”shocked” Al Ahli of host nation UAE (they have the same name as the more famous Al Ahli of Egypt), beating them 2-0.

And just like that Al Ahli are done, and the quarter finals will get underway (the byzantine current rules mean the Oceania confederation champion, in this cause Auckland, has to take on the home nation champions in a play-off to join the other five reigning confederation champions).

Shock or not, it leaves the tournament in the media wilderness of Abu Dhabi without a host nation representative alive. The other qualifiers are Pohang Steelers (Korea, AFC), TP Mazembe (Congo, CAF), FC Barcelona (Spain, UEFA), Atlante (Mexico, CONCACAF) and Estudiantes (Argentina, CONMEBOL). The European and South American champions have byes to the semi-final stage, a somewhat ludicrous concession to ensure their participation.

The tournament is being hosted in Abu Dhabi for the first time, after three successive tournaments in Japan since the it became an annual event in 2006. On the eve of the tournament, FIFA’s Vice-President Jerome Valcke was forced to defend the decision to host the tournament in the UAE capital:

FIFA tournaments are not bound to a specific country. UAE submitted the best hosting bid, which is why we’re here today in Abu Dhabi. And now we know the decision to move this World Cup to the UAE was the right one. I don’t think Europe is ready to host the Club World Cup yet, because there are already too many matches there. Apart from the fact that the UAE bid was the best, we’re in any case convinced that interest in the tournament here and in other regions of the world is rather greater than it would be if we held it in Europe.

There’s nothing wrong with FIFA tournaments taking place outside Europe — the world’s sport obviously still has a Euro-centric problem — but this is one case where there is too little European attention. The same goes for North and South America too. Surely rotating the tournament around the FIFA confederations would make the most sense to generate interest over time all around the world.

I may in the minority in that I’m not against the idea of a Club World Cup in principle; but FIFA still has plenty of serious issues to resolve regarding timing, location and explaining to everyone else why they should care when two teams get byes to the semi-final to begin with.

Big Story
Yesterday’s stunning day of UEFA Champions League action is of course the focus of discussion today, with every game providing talking juicy points for the press.

The British press naturally focused on Liverpool after their home defeat to Lyon. Paul Hayward considers the future of  Rafa Benitez (“Everything that can go wrong is going wrong at the moment”, Rafa said after), and Kevin Gardside says fans are losing faith in the Spaniard, though Henry Winter reminds us how many players Rafa was missing in their defeat to Lyon and Gabrielle Marcotti gives sensible reasons for why Liverpool would be “mad to sack Benitez now”.

An even longer-term crisis is focused on up north in Scotland, as Rangers crushing defeat at home 4-1 to Romania’s FC Unirea has Ewan Murray saying that “The most comprehensive thesaurus in the world would barely contain the words to describe this Rangers performance. The latest evidence that Scottish football may be in terminal decline rather than just suffering a rough spell arrived on another harrowing night in Glasgow.” Rangers boss Walter Smith faced calls for his immediate resignation.

Still, probably the most surprising result of the night came in Spain – Barcelona’s coach Pep Guardiola tried unconvincingly to sound unperturbed by their defeat to Rubin Kazan at Camp Nou. And the last minute goal conceded by Arsenal to AZ Alkmar is picked over by Rob Kelly in the Telegraph, who had seemingly been waiting for a chance to make the obvious conclusion that the current team is not a patch on Wenger’s old “invincibles”.

Worldwide News

• It was also a night of Champions League action in the CONCACAF region, as Columbus went through to the knock-out stage, with DC United awaiting results to see if they will progress and Houston hoping to advance tonight (though that looks less likely). It looks like it could be a better year for MLS in continental action after last year’s debacle, when only one team made it to the quarter-final stage and no-one beyond that.
• Notts County were forced by the Football League’s Fit and Proper Persons Test to reveal to them who owned the club, a process undertaken with much reluctance but finally completed. We still don’t know ourselves who exactly is behind the wall of mirrors, but at least someone in authority does.
• Following the famous beach ball goal against Liverpool, the Guardian trawls through other examples of “outside agents” interfering in the game. My favourite is definitely Bryn the police dog.
• To follow-up on Monday’s item about direct supporter involvement in clubs, Exeter City have announced their Supporters’ Trust has now contributed over £1 million pounds to the club since it was set-up just six years ago. Remarkable.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

When a conference on supporter involvement in English football includes speakers from Barcelona, UEFA, the F.A. and non-league football clubs, you know something unusual is going on.

This isn’t the Leaders in Football conference of a couple of weeks ago, but it might have been just as important: Supporters Direct’s annual conference concluded last week in Birmingham, and it seems to have cut to the heart of the question of how and why supporters should be involved in the governance of their clubs.

As a little background, the mission of the national organization Supporters Direct is fairly simple:

Through establishing and developing supporters’ trusts, we aim to bring about responsible, democratic representation at spectator sports clubs, and so help promote the highest standards of governance, accountability and embed those clubs deeper into their communities.

Since Supporters Direct was founded a decade ago, they have supported the growth of trusts — non-profit democratic supporters’ societies — at clubs across the country. Ian at Two Hundred Percent has a must-read take on the proceedings of the conference.  Ian believes Supporters’ Direct is at a crossroads, on “the question of whether supporter ownership of clubs is always a good thing.”

As Ian mentions, what’s more important than any sweeping generalisation or any single example of success (say Exeter) or failure (say Notts County) is the broadness and depth of the movement as a backbone for British football clubs: over seventy now have a supporters’ trust representative on their board of directors, over 150 have a supporters trusts, and over 150,000 fans are involved in the movement.

This broad base belies the argument against supporter involvement that fans are too short-sighted to be involved responsibly in their clubs. Trusts have saved many clubs from the wall, and given supporters a direct stake in the team they support — in a responsible, democratic and non-profit form, as the legion of advice on the SD website on how to set-up a successful trust iterates.

This can work from top to bottom. The representative of Barcelona present, Lander Unzueta (Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer), had previously attended SD’s inaugural conference in 1999 as a Barcelona fan-activist seeking change at his club — three years later, thanks to the democratic structure at Barcelona (as a member-owned club), Unzueta was elected to Barcelona’s board. It’s clear that supporter involvement can work for the good of the game at the highest and lowest levels in different ways, whether it’s through democratic representation or outright ownership, as in the successful cases of FC United of Manchester and AFC Wimbledon.

This perhaps is, as Ian at Two Hundred Percent says, the key for the trust movement: “there is no “one size fits all” answer to the question of how supporters trusts should work,” he writes. At some clubs, trusts have been proven unable to successfully balance majority shareholdings with the interests of other directors. At some, outright ownership has worked — just as other structures of ownership have successes and failures, of course.

But in most cases, stronger supporter representation in governance of the club has been an undoubted positive. Ian reports on a workshop at the conference which showed “the importance of developing strong relationships with local authorities, and that clubs with a strong supporters trust (or that are trust owned) are likely to be able to build closer ties with their communities, because they are more likely to be perceived as working for their community rather than being simply private businesses being run for private gain.”

I find this all very interesting from the perspective of American sports as well, as we think about the future of MLS. Especially in a country where public funding of stadia is widespread, should we not take a serious look at how supporters can become part of the clubs that are often receiving substantial public funding from taxpayers?  Would it not be wise to look to see how supporters could take a responsible stake in governance of their clubs and work towards embedding them into their communities?

Click below for the full-size version.

2009-10 La Liga Map -- Click for full-size

You might not have noticed, but the UEFA Europa League (formerly the UEFA Cup) started play this week. Despite the rebranding, you probably still don’t care too much who wins it — oddly enough, the tournament is back where it started in that sense. In the 1950s and 1960s, then known as the Fairs Cup, its purpose and meaning were unclear, and complaints rained down that it was just another pointless competition cluttering up the schedule. Then came the glory years for the UEFA Cup of the 1970s and 1980s — when and why has the tournament actually meant something?

The Inter-Cities Fairs Cup

The UEFA Cup has rather curious origins as the International Industries Fairs Inter-Cities Cup (lets call it the Fairs Cup for short, shall we?), a tournament first organised in 1955 only for teams representing European cities hosting trade fairs. It’s not particularly obvious from anything I can find why UEFA wanted to promote trade fairs — which at the time were a big deal, showcasing a city’s industry to investors and consumers from around Europe — but it was Switzerland’s Ernst Thommen, Italy’s Ottorino Barrasi (both future FIFA vice-presidents) and England’s future FIFA president Sir Stanley Rous from England who got the tournament off the ground, independently of UEFA.

The first tournament stretched over three seasons from 1955-58, in the early days of European competition — the European Cup was founded two weeks earlier than the Fairs Cup in April 1955. Teams from Barcelona, Basle, Birmingham, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Lausanne, Leipzig, London, Milan and Zagreb took part in the inaugural Fairs Cup. Similar to the Europa Cup today, British teams hardly saw the tournament as a priority, as the F.A.’s historian explains: “In those days the Football League and the FA Cup were the priorities for English clubs. They were wary of European competitions, then so new, in case they got in the way of their ‘bread and butter’ competitions.”

The tournament took three years to complete, as matches were timed to coincide with trade fairs, presumably to raise the profile of the fairs and at the same time promote intra-European football. Each city was only only allowed to enter one team (a rule that would remain in place until 1975), and the initial reaction to this was for cities to put together scratch teams from several clubs in to represent them — such as the London XI, which lost to Barcelona in the first Fairs Cup final 8-2 over two legs.  The Times‘ correspondent at the match noted the disability that “representative” city teams drawing on numerous club sides had. “Barcelona are a club side, and they demonstrated better teamwork throughout the entire match.”

The second tournament was for clubs only, but the stipulation that they must be from cities holding trade fairs was continued, and sixteen teams entered. Barcelona won again, in a contest that spanned three years to 1960. Similar to today’s Europa Cup, the Fairs Cup operated under a cumbersome and drawn-out group stage system until the semi-final stage.

After the second event, the tournament was contested within a single season; this added to the fixture list burden on many teams, and complaints began to spread about its purpose.  What, after all, did it really mean to be the best team in Europe that holds a trade fair?  Yet as football under the floodlights against exotic European competition became an increasingly glamorous and money-spinning priority for top European teams, the appeal of the Fairs Cup grew as a secondary European tournament, hanging onto the coattails of the benchmark European Cup.

The UEFA Cup

And instead of dying a silent death like so many other ill-conceived intra-European contests (stand up, Anglo-Italian Cup), the Fairs Cup was given purpose in the early 1970s as a serious competition, when it was taken over by UEFA and renamed the UEFA Cup, with the trade fair connection removed. It was now the ‘Runners-Up Cup’ — with only the national champion going to the European Cup, the chance for exciting European action for teams finishing second in their leagues quickly gave the Cup a prestige for two decades that it never otherwise had before or since. A playoff between the last and first winners of the Fairs Cup, Leeds United and Barcelona, was played to decide who would keep the Fairs trophy; perhaps fittingly, Barcelona — the most successful team in the history of the Fairs Cup — won.

Tottenham Hotspur won the first edition of the UEFA Cup in 1971-2; the glorious teams that won the tournament in the 1970s speaks to the quality on show, with Liverpool winning it twice in the early 1970s ahead of their European Cup glory years, and Juventus winning their first ever European trophy in it in 1977. The tournament was where many great teams first burst on to the European stage, just before they become enough of a powerhouse to win their domestic leagues consistently and graduate to regular European Cup competition. With countries having just one entrant to the European Cup, the UEFA Cup was always bound to be filled with prestigious teams.

Spurs' captain Allan Mullery lifting the UEFA Cup, celebrating their victory in 1972

The beginning of the end for the UEFA Cup’s prestige came with the launch of the UEFA Champions League in 1992. With countries now having as many as four entrants to that, the quality of the UEFA Cup inevitably suffered. Its purpose became even more confused in 1999, when it was merged with the European Cup Winners Cup, and a group stage was added in 2005-6, guaranteeing teams more games but only adding to the sense it was all rather pointless. With teams that had failed to qualify from the group stage of the Champions League also parachuting into the tournament, it was not so much the Runners Up Cup any longer, but the Also-Rans Trophy. The attitude towards the tournament shown by Spurs manager Harry Redknapp earlier this year — despite his club’s many glory moments in the tournament over the years — showed how far it had sunk, as Spurs put out a weakened team seemingly bent on eliminating themselves.

UEFA Europa Cup

The format has been changed once again for the 2009-10 season with the rebranding of the tournament as the UEFA Europa Cup, with the Intertoto Cup also folded directly into it. I have to call on Wikipedia to explain how it’s all going to work, because it’s really not worth trying to keep track of this ourselves:

A new format for the UEFA Europa League will be introduced for the three-year cycle, starting in the 2009–2010 season. The biggest change is that there will be a group stage with 12 groups of four teams (in a double round robin) instead of eight groups of five (in a single round robin).

Qualification will also change significantly. Associations ranked 7–9 in the UEFA coefficients will send the Cup winner and three other teams to the UEFA Europa League qualification, all other nations send a Cup winner and two other teams, except Liechtenstein, Andorra and San Marino, who will only send a Cup winner. Usually, the other teams will be the next highest ranked clubs in each domestic league after those qualifying for the UEFA Champions League, however France and England will most likely continue to use one spot for their League Cup winner. Additionally, three places in the first of four qualifying rounds are still reserved for Fair Play winners. For the inaugral 2009–2010 season these places will go to Rosenborg of Norway, Randers of Denmark and Motherwell of Scotland.

Generally, the higher an association is ranked in the UEFA coefficients, the later its clubs start in the qualification, however every team except the title holder has to play at least one qualification round.

Apart from the teams mentioned, an additional 15 losing teams from the Champions League qualification round two will enter in the fourth and last UEFA Europa League qualification round, formerly known as the first round, and the 10 losers of the Champions League qualification round 3 will directly enter the UEFA Europa League group stage. The 12 winners and the 12 runners-up in the group stage will advance to the first knock out round, together with eight 3rd placed teams from the Champions League group stage. The losing finalist for the domestic cup competition will still be entitled to be entered for the UEFA Europa League should the domestic cup winners qualify for the UEFA Champions League.

Right, then. Got that?

The central reason for the latest name changes has little to do with the format — the tournament already had a group stage, after all — but as a branding tool with UEFA taking over the sale of television rights for the entire tournament, instead of teams selling their own rights. With the central sale, UEFA has raised the value of the competition, which one supposes will also mean more prize money and thus more incentive for teams to take it more seriously.

What UEFA hasn’t done is managed to raise the meaning of it all to supporters across Europe; the tournament now seems as pointless to win as the Fairs Cup of the 1960s with the plethora of entry requirements and drawn-out groups stage. The tournament’s glory days of the 1970s and 1980s seem to be confined to the same dustbin as the name UEFA Cup.