After Germany’s football fest, rocky road lies ahead for European game

While English and Spanish supporters mingled good-naturedly enough in front of the Brandenburg Gate on Sunday afternoon, plenty of glad-handing was going on a few metres away. Hotel Adlon Kempinski is one of Berlin’s most famous addresses and made an obvious honeypot for Uefa’s delegation, along with a galaxy of special guests, before the Euro 2024 final.

Arsène Wenger, flying the flag for Fifa in Gianni Infantino’s absence, posed for photographs in the lobby. The Formula One driver Lando Norris fiddled with his phone, while Europe’s football association heads huddled around tables with staff and acquaintances. Anyone not full from the previous night’s lavish dinner could order a “doner kebab” of sous-vide cooked veal and truffle shavings. The summer had passed successfully, went the consensus. Uefa and Germany had not been without wobbles but the show was drawing to an amenable close.

When they went their various ways the following morning, they could reflect that football’s most essential elements had come out on top. Spain, at best a cautious pick for the title beforehand, had provided outstanding winners and unleashed two fresh superstars in their dazzling young wingers. After meandering halfway though, the tournament had picked up again from the quarter-final stage as most of its heavyweights showed up. Supporters had travelled in unprecedented numbers and turned every match into its own vibrant universe, each one a festival of colour and noise.

Might it have proved to be a correction point, an overwhelming signal that the club game’s ever-worsening mammonism and pursuit of growth in service of a powerful few cannot hold? Anyone with their ear to the ground at the Adlon Kempinski would have put such quixotic thoughts on hold. Conversations were already turning to the struggles that lie ahead in a European football landscape whose course may be defined by events over the next 12 months.

In less than a year the expanded Club World Cup will have concluded, its 32 teams whittled down to one during a long American summer. That is assuming it takes place at all: an announcement about its host cities is, at long last, understood to be imminent but plenty else is unresolved. The sight of Javier Tebas, president of La Liga, walking in from the German sunshine was a reminder of the faultlines Infantino’s pet project has exposed.

Tebas told the Guardian in January that he was “going to try” to halt the new competition and he has been joined by the European members of the players’ union, Fifpro, who started legal action against Fifa in June. There are serious concerns about its potential effect on player welfare, which will not have been alleviated by some of the evident fatigue at Euro 2024, and a can of worms may be opened if the case reaches trial. Some of the questions asked by the unions refer to football’s broader governance and the potential for unilateral decisions about the calendar to violate competition law. It is far more than a debate about fixture lists.

The clubs will be looking on keenly: particularly those who, while slated to participate next summer, are nonplussed by the prizes on offer. While Carlo Ancelotti was quickly whipped into line after saying Real Madrid would not find the economic benefits worthwhile, he was not simply saying the first thought that popped into his head. Madrid are not the only club wondering whether Fifa, which has thus far failed to strike a deal for the competition’s global media rights, can find sufficient incentive for them to book their transatlantic flights.

This matters because, as one country’s football federation president resignedly opined in the Adlon Kempinski, the elite are hellbent on going wherever the money is. If Fifa cannot offer it, might somebody be tempted to test the Madrid commercial court’s recent ruling that football’s authorities had “abused their dominant position” when the Super League project reared its head back in 2021? That day may appear far off to the naked eye but Uefa, already confronted with Infantino’s attempt to upstage the Champions League, faces a more consequential battle to control its increasingly powerful clubs.

The new Champions League format, which will begin in September, promises those organisations some of the cash they want and bloats the calendar further with at least two additional games per team in the group stage. Uefa needs it to be a success and there is widespread acknowledgment that the general public, at this point, have little idea of how the “Swiss system” works. In an age of short attention spans it is a natural worry. While plenty of senior figures in European football are happy with the model, others wonder out loud whether it is a transition point to a different format from 2027. Is it inconceivable that we land on, to summon a hypothetical example, a 32-team event whose places are at least to some degree decided by performance in the previous three-year cycle?

Nobody knows who would be around to oversee that process. Aleksander Ceferin, the Uefa president, announced in February that he will not run for a further term when the next election comes around in three years. Ceferin is thought to remain of that mind but a number of close allies, representing smaller and medium-sized countries in particular, would like him to backtrack.

Were Ceferin to run again he could quite conceivably do so unchallenged; incumbents are rarely deposed and there is no obvious alternative who would command a groundswell. Should he stick to his word, the field would be open. Perhaps somebody with a playing background such as Andriy Shevchenko, who has made a positive impression in his early months heading up Ukraine’s federation, could turn heads if tempted to stake a claim.

It all adds up to a medium-term picture fraught with instability and powerful competing interests. Uefa’s leadership is content with the image its flagship event has presented over the past four and a half weeks and overall it deserves to be. But, as its invitees filed out along the red carpet and on to their shuttle services for Olympiastadion’s gala event, it was hard not to think of the rockier road that lies ahead.