Our league is healthy when you look below Platini and his big four

What the Champions League needs is another all-English final. For only when Michel Platini, the UEFA president, sees how consistently his pride and joy is dominated by the strongest four English clubs might he do something about the way the contest in our league has been ruined by his competition.

• The argument against the Premier League, when compared to the old Football League Division One, is that it is uncompetitive and only four clubs can win it; but that is not the Premier League’s fault.
• Look at the rest of the table, the other 16, and nothing has changed. Start the league at fifth place and run it down to 20th and teams still leap up and down in a manner that is perfectly healthy.
• In the last four years, Fulham have gone from 12th to 16th, dropped further to 17th and then bounced back to seventh, going into Saturday’s game at Chelsea. That is 15 place shifts, at an average of just under four each season. Portsmouth were 17th, then ninth, then eighth, falling to 14th this season, before the weekend defeat at Arsenal. Blackburn went from sixth to 10th to seventh to 15th.
• Over the last four years, beyond the Champions League quartet, the 12 Premier League clubs that have survived every season have moved, on average, 11.5 places up or down at a rate of roughly three places each season. That is just how it used to be.
• There has been the odd seismic leap (Aston Villa 16th in 2005-06 to fifth in 2008-09), the odd crashing fall (Tottenham Hotspur fifth in 2006-07 to 11th in 2007-08), but our popular, if slightly optimistic, belief that on the first day of the season anybody could win the league still stands; providing we close our eyes and pretend the top four do not exist.
• For what has changed in recent years is that four clubs have been cemented in place at the top, placed there by the extreme wealth afforded from the Champions League. Platini huffs and puffs about the English game but the biggest problem for the Premier League is UEFA’s money and that is beyond the control of domestic football administrators.
• The only way to address it would be to insist that all benefits from the Champions League were divided equally between Premier League clubs, which sounds wonderful, but would only hasten the agitation for a breakaway, closed-shop, European super league. Manchester United do not slog their way to Moscow or Rome for the benefit of Bolton Wanderers.
• UEFA have a similar problem because Platini knows that to pursue proper wealth redistribution would lead to abandonment by the biggest clubs, and provoke civil war with football’s governing bodies. So he likes to talk about equality but sticks with a system in which 75 per cent of television and sponsorship money and 50 per cent of new media contracts from the Champions League goes directly to 32 clubs, usually the biggest and richest ones.  
• The remaining cut stays with UEFA (£477m in the bank and counting, thank you very much) to cover expenses and administration and what is left is divided between member associations, leagues not represented in the Champions League group stages, teams eliminated in the early knock-out rounds and winners of the top domestic leagues who failed to qualify.
• By comparison these payments are unsubstantial but, even so, they remain with the elite, the big fish in small pools, perpetuating the hierarchy in domestic competitions. The champions of Moldova are still compensated in some small way if they fail to reach the last 32 of the Champions League, with no thought of how that might affect the Moldovan league, which has now had the same winner nine years running.
• As England consistently have four clubs racking up the big numbers in the last 32, it is the Champions League money that seals the first tier of the Premier League. By maintaining this success, there is an added effect, because the same clubs get invitations to play on summer tours abroad, increasing their profile in lucrative foreign markets, creating extra revenue, and tightening their grip further.
• And what is amusing is that these monsters that UEFA have created have lately turned on their masters and are on the brink of making the Champions League as much a closed shop as the upper echelons of the Premier League. And now, of course, something must be done.
• Yet if UEFA would care to look over the last four seasons in which Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal have proved impossible to shift domestically, they will find that beneath them, a healthy, vibrant, competitive system still exists despite this, which is the irony, and perhaps the place to start.