The Europa League

For the first time since Manchester United finished bottom of their Champions League group in the 2005-6 season, the Premier League will be represented by less than the full compliment of United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal in this season’s last 16. This week, Liverpool got the away win they needed at Debrecen, but slip out of the Champions League thanks to a 1-0 win for Fiorentina at home to already-qualified Lyon.

It is tempting, in this new age of English dominance in Europe that has seen Premier League teams make up three of the four Champions League semi-finalists for three consecutive seasons (albeit only producing a winner once), to view this as some sort of disaster – both for Liverpool and for the English contingent at Europe’s top table. I’m not so sure it is.

Liverpool, guaranteed to finish third in their group with a game left to play, will now enter the newly-rebranded UEFA Europa League, previously the UEFA Cup. This will no doubt be reported as Liverpool suffering the ignominy of having to play in a “pointless”, devalued competition that will only make it harder for them to perform as well as they should in the Premier League (though they seem to be making things difficult enough for themselves as it is). And, as something of an insult to teams like Valencia, Roma, Hamburg, Villareal, Benfica, Werder Bremen, last year’s winners Shakhtar Donetsk and, of course, Merseyside rivals Everton, they will likely be tipped as favourites to win the competition.

Apart from the fact that having a high-profile English club involved in the tournament’s knockout stages will certainly improve the Europa League’s viewing figures in the UK (the sort of thing I’m sure UEFA will have hoped would happen when they re-launched the competition) just as the still-highly-possible entry of Inter Milan would in Italy or Bayern Munich might in Germany, does it deserve to be so much maligned as a legitimate European competition?

At a time when the gulf between the richest clubs and those unlikely to ever break into Champions League qualification spots is wider than ever before – and remembering that no team from outside the now-defunct G14 group of Europe’s ‘elite’ clubs has ever won the Champions League – surely the Europa League can be as exciting, unpredictable and as exotic as the European Cup is and was in bygone days. The team names are weirder, the cities more obscure, the players more appreciative of the occasion, the matches more memorable in the long-run – for many teams making an appearance it will be their first trip into Europe or their first for a lifetime; and most of their fans will tend to believe it’s probably their last.

The romance that many curmudgeonly, nostalgic pundits lament the loss of in the big-money Champions League is, I think, still very much alive in the Europa League. Teams who are barely known outside their own countries can have a good run in their division or cup one year and face the prospect of thrilling away trips to clubs in bigger, more high-profile leagues, or – especially in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union – a chance to face old rivals from other nations.

Many of these are, to me at least, if not in football terms then politically and historically intriguing, despite those who may scoff at the apparently low level of competiton. For example, this season has seen Croatia’s Slavija Istocno Sarajevo take on MFK Kosice of Slovakia (Kosice won 5-1 on aggregate, incidentally), while Polonia Warsaw of Poland met Dutch side NAC Breda. Exotic ties like these just don’t happen in the Champions League.

And the competition is more balanced – and so less predictable. Picking a UEFA Cup winner at the beginning of a season (or even halfway through) is far harder than in the Champions League, where the eventual winner will almost certainly come from a pool of four or five teams. Sure there are favourites, and the fixture list throws up its brutal mismatches – Roma hammering Gent of Belgium 10-2 on aggregate this season springs to mind – but none are ever as tedious as in the Champions League. The gulf between the sides likely to end up in the last sixteen and those destined to return to the drudgery of their minor European leagues is so huge that the competition is, often, barely worth watching before Christmas. Other than maybe the Barca/Inter/Kazan/Kiev group this season, there’s barely a shock in sight going into the knockout stages.

So maybe Europe’s second competition is something of a glimpse back in time, to the days of the European Cup of the 60s and 70s, when no one nation dominated and any side could win. The European Cup that Celtic won and Nottingham Forest retained. Maybe. Either way, it’s a shame to denigrate it so much and suggested that winning it “doesn’t matter”.

To suggest that Benitez’s Liverpool wouldn’t be ecstatic to be lifting a European trophy at the end of this season and therefore qualifying for the Champions League next season and playing in the showpiece UEFA Super Cup match, is ridiculous. Similarly, how much would David Moyes love to bring Everton their first continental silverware since the 1985 Cup Winners’ Cup victory over Rapid Vienna? A quarter of a century is a long time to wait for prominence on the European stage – that it’s not going to be the European Cup they could be lifting is probably more a matter of finance than football. It certainly won’t matter too much to the trophy-starved fans.

I love the Champions League, as I made clear on this blog earlier in the season, but I think the way it completely overshadows the Europa League is unfortunate. Rather than constantly expanding the Champions League to include teams and leagues that the European giants will simply walk over (which for me is the truly pointless part of UEFA’s current strategy) giving the “lesser” tournament a bit of genuine support could really help. There is a great deal of affection around for the long-gone Cup Winners’ Cup, as this was really seen to be a trophy worth winning. The Europa League could well go on to be that too, if the governing body can keep themselves from messing around with its format for a couple of seasons. While no one wants endless group stages and seventeen two-legged rounds meaning beleaguered clubs with tiny squads are forced to play 200 matches a season, it’s a shame that, as a tournament, it’s so easily dismissed.

The fact that the mostly-empty 20,000 seat Bulgarian Army Stadium where I sat to watch CSKA Sofia play Sliven in October wasn’t even big enough to host the Europa League tie with Fulham a few weeks earlier (the 38,000 or so crowd packed into the nearby Vasil Levski National Stadium instead) should be enough of an example: to many, this “pointless” trophy does really matter.

CSKA Sofia vs OFC Sliven 2000

The Bulgarian capital, Sofia, is a confused, often contradictory mish-mash of a city – a wonky collaboration of different structures and layouts with a landscape suggesting both its chequered history and, seemingly, rather fragile self-image.

One of the oldest cities on the European continent, having existed for around 7000 years, and yet one of the youngest capital cities, Sofia’s striking Soviet neo-classical buildings sit alongside and engulf ruins from its Ottoman past and odd, Eastern-influenced religious follies that look an awful lot older than they really are.

Apparently harmless stray dogs roam the parks and streets, sleeping in the shade of trees and cars and going largely unnoticed by the locals (though we did manage to somehow pick one up around the Soviet Army Monument who followed us for a good twenty minutes across the park until we were forced to dive into a smoky café to lose him).

The roads are broken and slippery – trams and trolley-busses rumble along them as they have for decades with everything including them looking long in need of repair, except, of course, the post-Soviet, Westernised shopping malls and trendy bars.

Sofia this weekend was everything I expected it to be – slightly sad, slightly broken, rather beautiful, fascinating, alien and bursting with historical and cultural intrigue. The former Communist party headquarters, emblazoned with the exotic-looking Cyrillic script, brought back every photo I’d pored over as a teenager when teachers started to tell me about this exciting thing that had recently finished called the ‘Cold War’. I was only disappointed to find out that the huge red star that had once been on the building’s roof had been removed in the early nineties when people kept trying to set it on fire.

There was another reason I was here, however – the football. Soviet (and in particular post-Soviet) football, to me, seems to represent everything that fascinates me about the former Eastern Bloc countries.

During the Cold War, most Soviet countries’ main football teams were, like most other things, state controlled. This was reflected in their names, many of which – in cities like Moscow, Kiev, Prague and Sofia – retain them. The teams controlled by the secret police (first the notorious Cheka, then the KGB) were styled Dynamo, those representing the railway workers became Lokomotiv, the car industry teams were named Torpedo, while the army teams were named CSKA. Naturally, there was much more going on between the various clubs than just football – the clubs were as much organs of the state as anything else, while the consensus between football historians seems to be that football games were always seen as a place where the common man could turn up and speak as freely as was possible.

Rivalries between the heads of the various Soviet agencies were played out on the football pitch, while much of Russia’s satellite states’ populations saw their teams as their nation’s representatives in the USSR – naturally the Moscow-based clubs dominated the Soviet ‘Top League’, so when, for example, Dynamo Kiev won the championship in 1961 or, even more shockingly, little Dinamo Tbilisi of Georgia in 1964 and 1978, it was a matter of national importance – and a rare moment for the fans to feel truly separate from Russia.

After the fall of the USSR, however, things changed enormously for former-Soviet football – as it did for everything else in the Eastern Bloc counties. No longer state-controlled or funded, the past 20 years in almost every fledgling, individual league has seen teams struggle for funding, lose promising players to the big leagues of England, Italy and Spain, and, crucially, become rife with corruption while its infrastructure crumbled. Much like the nations themselves.

The two main teams in Sofia, and indeed in Bulgarian football, are Levski – named after Vasil Levski, the revolutionary who fought to free Bulgaria from Ottoman rule in the mid-nineteenth century – and CSKA, the former Soviet Army team. Both teams’ grounds are based in the huge, overgrown city park once known as Freedom Park (now Borisova Gardens), a sprawling collection of long-drained ponds, dangerous looking playgrounds and weathered busts of Bulgarian and Communist heroes.

Levski Sofia’s Vasil Levski Stadium, also the national stadium, is a relatively well-maintained 43,000-seat arena whose impressive façade faces the Soviet Army Monument and also hosts the city’s basketball club. Hidden behind it however, no more than 100 yards deeper into the park, is the Bulgarian Army Stadium (formerly the People’s Army Stadium), home of CSKA Sofia – the most successful of Bulgaria’s clubs and, as the club’s online literature would have it, historically the best-supported. You wouldn’t think it to look at the ground.

A crumbling concrete monstrosity, the Bulgarian Army Stadium holds 22,000 and can be accessed from four ancient, rusted turnstiles around each side. There is a modern entrance and an ‘official club store’ (little more than a park-keeper’s cabin), but other than that the stadium, from most angles, looks all but abandoned. Covered in the graffiti of CSKA’s many firms of hooligan ‘Ultras’, tickets cost between 2 and 8 lev – or £1 and £4. Two lev will get you access to the intimidating-sounding (not to mention characteristically Soviet) ‘Sektor G’ – the home stand of the hardcore supporters.

We were a little apprehensive, understandably, and bought the 5 lev (£2.50) medium-priced tickets – which sent us to Sektor B (pronounced ‘v’). Sektor B turned out to be 30 or so rows of bird shit and sunflower seed-covered seats (hence at the top of each stand old folks sell pieces of newspaper to sit on for a couple of stotinka each), but we were right at the edge of the pitch, and able to sit where we liked. The stand was sparsely populated, as indeed was the whole stadium for this Sunday evening Bulgarian Premier League game: while the Bulgarian Army Stadium comfortably holds 22,000 people, the average attendance for a league game is around 5,000. Sunday’s attendance, in fact, seemed like far less than this.

That’s not to say there was no atmosphere – far from it. The CSKA Ultras were out in force, filling one section of Sektor G and jumping up and down continuously, singing their hearts out and even lighting flares in the second half:


It’s hard not to compare the experience of seeing CSKA with going to a top-flight match in the UK – indeed it’s in many ways very funny to do so. I have a feeling that the fans sat around us on Sunday, smoking and constantly chewing on sunflower seeds, would express jealousy that in our league we get to watch some of the best footballers in the world, in some of the biggest and most luxurious stadia. I, on the other hand, might express my own jealousy that they get to wander into their local park and watch top-flight football for less than the price of the hot dogs they were selling outside.

The quality of the football was also, to my surprise, not as low as I had expected. Fitness levels were high and while some players looked tired – CSKA had been in Rome only three nights before for a Europa League match – it certainly was no worse than Championship football. The quality of the refereeing, on the other hand, was a little more suspect – many of the crunching tackles would certainly have warranted yellow or even red cards in the Premiership, while here there was only one card shown all game. There was also the fact that the referee blew the whistle for half time when a corner was due to be taken – to much jeering and bemused laughter from the generally jovial crowd (the biggest laugh coming when a ball floated into the ‘Sektor b’ stand, smashing one of the old plastic seats to bits).

CSKA won 1-0, and after a pleasant stroll back through the park, we were back in town in time for dinner and a couple of cheap local beers. The atmosphere at the match had been friendly, funny, exciting and entirely alien from any experience of the game I had had before. Suffice to say, I found what I was looking for in Bulgaria.