The recent NIT Tournament Champion; last season’s winningest Triple-A baseball team; the Junior Varsity conference title; few people remember who lost and who won within the second-best competition in any given arena. But when it comes to the world’s most popular game, is the Europa League—the second tier below its most illustrious club competition, the UEFA Champions League—more than just a pan-European JV tournament?
This question is especially poignant for clubs within the English Premier League. The EPL is arguably the world’s best domestic league; it is inarguably the world’s most lucrative. Beginning next season, every Premier League club will make between £100 – 156 million from English TV rights income alone, not even beginning to factor in merchandise and match day revenue. That kind of money can make a huge difference in the class of player a team can afford to recruit; to put it into perspective, the team that finishes last in the EPL next season stands to earn more money from television rights than every team payroll in the MLS combined. Seriously. Just one season of TV income in the EPL, for the team that finishes with the worst record, would’ve been enough to pay the salary of literally every player in MLS in 2014.
Although the Champion’s League isn’t quite as lucrative as the EPL, it’s close—and again exponentially more lucrative than the Europa League. Sevilla, last year’s Europa League Champion, earned 14.6 million Euros from their Europa League campaign. Belgium’s RSC Anderlecht, who earned the least money among Champions League contenders in 2013-14, earned almost as much as Europa Champions Sevilla, with 12 million Euros; teams with larger markets that progressed further in the tournament, like Manchester United and PSG, earned twice as much, earning 35 – 40 million Euros. And the Champions? Real Madrid netted 57 million from their championship run.
All of that is to say, compared to either the EPL or the Champions League, the Europa League is chump change. While getting to play other clubs throughout Europe might be an attractive prospect, adding 6 to 10 fixtures to an already crowded schedule (considering EPL clubs also play in both the FA and League Cup competitions) certainly increases the level of fatigue in a squad. So, if your team is mid-table, is Europa League qualification really worth fighting for?
That answer, at least financially, is absolutely not. Fighting to qualify for the Europa League, or even, say, fielding the best squad possible within the Europa League during a floundering domestic EPL season with a relegation battle in the cards, just doesn’t make financial sense. It’s the functional equivalent of someone making millions on Wall Street going home at the end of the day, showering and changing clothes, and then clocking in for a part time job at Burger King. You’ve got a good thing going, why waste your energy on something set to make you less than 10% of your revenue at the normal nine-to-five?
But football supporters are football supporters; we don’t go to the pub or the stadium to watch pencils be pushed and books be balanced. Even though a team’s finances have a very real impact on the pitch, on the quality of player a team can field, the players’ performance, not their paycheck, is how the game is measured and remembered. Although the players who make them can, cup runs can’t be bought. Full coffers to pay players are like a jug of gasoline; it’s the fuel that makes things happen behind the scenes, but it won’t get you there on its own.
Although, as an Arsenal supporter, I’m loath to quote a Tottenham player (insert Europa League qualifying joke here), former Spurs midfielder Danny Blanchflower’s famous phrase comes to mind: “The game is about glory.” For teams that are often mid-table contenders, or even frequently locked in relegation battles, the Europa League offers international club football, offers a new competition, in which participation (unlike the FA Cup) is not guaranteed annually.
Ask any Fulham supporter to list their most memorable moments of the past decade, and few, if any, will leave out the Cottagers 2009 – 2010 Europa League run. Although Diego Forlan broke their hearts in the 116th minute of the Cup Final, their victory over Juventus was a stunning a night of football as you will ever see. Down 1-3 to one of the giants of Italian football, Fulham returned for the second, home leg at Craven Cottage with their work cut out. But when Juventus went down to ten, and then to nine men, Fulham began to believe, and when Clint Dempsey’s marvelous chip from the edge of the area beat the keeper (I can still hear the announcer shouting “It’s a Dempsey Super Strike!”), the small club from London completed their four goal comeback, beating Juventus 4-1, 5-4 on aggregate.
That kind of football match is priceless. And it is especially so for a club like Fulham who are without the oil billions backing some of England’s other football clubs. Money buys great players, great players often produce beautiful games and great results, and even secure silverware. But the day a team’s bottom line is more important than its trophy cabinet is the day the game has died. That night in London five years ago, Roy Hodgson chose to put on one of his strongest players in Clint Dempsey as a substitute, gunning for glory, not holding back for the more lucrative EPL. He made the right choice, both philosophically and tactically, and was rewarded with a goal for the ages that put his club through to the next round, a moment no Fulham supporter is likely to forget; and that, in the end, is why we show up in the first place.