San Siro’s bleak ennui shows Uefa has diluted Champions League allure
Little can dilute San Siro’s distinction as a soaring citadel of the game, a monolith whose giant concrete towers and protruding red girders often strike terror into the hearts of opponents. Except this enfeebled Milan team are ill-equipped to match the grandeur of their setting. Essentially a collection of Chelsea cast-offs, they have such scant hope of adding to this club’s seven European Cup triumphs that the loudest sound they elicited from the Curva Sud on Tuesday night was a shrill chorus of contempt. By the time Dominik Szoboszlai guided in a volley for Liverpool’s third, the place was half-empty.
Only 55,000 tickets had been sold, 16,000 fewer than for last Saturday’s Serie A game against Venezia. It is not quite the image Uefa had in mind when the draw brought two of the continent’s three most-decorated institutions together on the opening matchday.
The first act of a transformed competition should bring a breathless atmosphere of renewal, not a bleak sense of ennui. But the abiding impression of Liverpool’s routine 3-1 victory, at the expense of a fabled enemy, is that Uefa has watered down the ingredients vital to the Champions League’s allure.
Take jeopardy, for instance. Under the old six-game group-phase format, teams would have a fair idea in September that 10 points would all but guarantee qualification for the knockout stage. Now they have no clue – with a sprawling mini-league lasting until late January and only 12 of 36 teams eliminated without the chance of a play-off – how many will be sufficient. And so, just as Liverpool’s win was light on outright euphoria, Milan’s defeat could hardly be considered terminal. Such is life under this strangest of systems, where the imponderables outweigh the certainties.
But something else is detectable in the swathes of empty seats: a sense that even Milan fans, desperate to end a 17-year wait without European glory, have had their fill of being fleeced. Pitchside tickets are £295, double what they were 12 months ago for a Champions League night. And so the rossoneri disciples decide that there must be cheaper ways to watch at home. It does not help, naturally, that their team are already teetering towards crisis, with two points in their first three domestic games leaving them 10th in the table. Usually San Siro is febrile for Liverpool’s visits. This time the only roar was that of the increasingly croaky stadium announcer, screaming Christian Pulisic’s name for all he is worth.
Uefa’s calculation is that this year’s shake-up will produce more of the marquee match-ups that everybody will clamour to see. But it turns out that even a repeat diet of Milan versus Liverpool, the Champions League final in 2005 and 2007, can give the audience indigestion. It creates a resentment that not only is there too much football, but that people are being coerced into paying over the odds to watch it.
Creeping feeling of overkill
The increasingly fragmented TV landscape tells its own story: where last season this fixture would have been a guaranteed TNT Sports blockbuster, it is now shunted off into the boondocks of Amazon Prime. And there are only so many luxury subscriptions most household budgets can tolerate.
The creeping feeling of overkill is far from confined to Milan. Over at Bayern Munich, where a 9-2 win for the hosts over Dinamo Zagreb seems almost frivolous, home fans held up a variety of banners: “Too many games”, “Too many events”, “Too much complexity”, “Too much injustice”, “Too much financial imbalance”. There are limits as to how much an absurd scoreline can be savoured. In Bavaria, just as here in Lombardy, there is an appreciation that the tapestry of European football is now too sprawling for its own good.
Arne Slot speaks of how proud he is to join a noble Dutch tradition at San Siro, once graced by such titans from his homeland as Frank Rijkaard and Patrick Kluivert. But the Milan of 2024 look light years removed from that vintage, with four of their starting XI – Pulisic, Alvaro Morata, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Fikayo Tomori – deemed surplus to requirements at Chelsea. With the gulf in financial power, it is little wonder they fold so tamely against Liverpool. While their revenues last season of £325 million look impressive on paper, they are still dwarfed by Liverpool’s £576 million. On the pitch, the contrast is no less stark: after Pulisic’s surprise early strike, they were simply gobbled up. An apt motif, when you think about it, for a sport that is eating itself.