More Money, Better Football: A Defense of Manchester City, Paris Saint Germain, and “New Money” in the Footballing World

Last season (2011-2012), the Manchester City football club lifted its first Premier League trophy ever, just ten years since emerging from a five-season stint in second division football. Before the 2010-2011 season, Man City had never finished in the top 4, and before Roberto Mancini took over in 2009, the club averaged about 13^th place in the top flight since the EPL’s inception in 1992. How could a club emerge from such mediocrity in three short years? Money is the short and simple answer, and many footballing fans hate it.

However, I would like to point out a few facts to those “football purists” who loathe seeing teams like Manchester City and Paris Saint Germain pay exorbitant fees for premium players.

Let’s take arguably the most successful European teams since the turn of the century: Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United, and Chelsea. If we look at the Champions League semi-final spots since the 1999-2000 season, those four teams make 25 of the 52 spots (48%), three of the teams have been in the semifinals at the same time five different years (including four of the past five tournaments), and if we look domestically, Manchester United and Chelsea have 10 of the past 13 EPL titles and Real Madrid and Barca have 10 of the last 13 La Liga crowns.

Throw AC Milan, Bayern Munich, and Liverpool into the mix, and those seven total teams account for 36 of the 52 total spots (almost 70%) since 1999-2000. If we whittle the list down to only the winners and the runners up, those seven teams account for 11 winners and 7 runners-up out of 13 for each (85% of the winners and 53% of the runners-up, for almost 70% of the total). Essentially, four teams in an inner circle, and three more on the periphery have completely dominated European football for the past thirteen years.

These numbers may not seem incredible to those accustomed to leagues containing 20-30 teams, (like most American professional leagues) however the Champions League begins each year with 32 contestants drawn from a pool of fifty-two nations. The ten highest ranked of these nations alone (England, Spain, Germany, France, Portugal, Italy, Russia, Netherlands, Turkey and Ukraine) total 182 teams. This leads me to estimate a total of 900-1000 teams who begin each season with the possibility (however remote) of a spot in the Champions League. With the vast scale of the CL in mind, the numbers of four and seven make European football seem more top heavy than the concentration of wealth in America.

To this end, those who complain that previously mediocre teams now owned by deep pocketed billionaires  ruin football have simply gotten scared. They have grown attached to one team among the small cadre of successful clubs and now feel threatened by outsiders trying to break into their inner circle. In this instance, money acts as an equalizer more than anything else, allowing clubs with less storied pasts to infiltrate the ranks of Real Madrid’s and Manchester United’s. Rather than despising competition, the footballing world should welcome new faces to its dominant elite with the hope that they signal the break up of their monopoly over worldwide footballing dominance.