Fix

James Dixon

Description

The Fix: How the First Champions League Was Won and Why We All Lost is an engrossing examination of the 1992/93 UEFA Champions League season. In 1980s Europe, revolution was in the air and the corridors of footballing power were not immune from the forces sweeping the continent. The breakup of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the USSR gave UEFA a problem. There were more national teams and league champions than their post-war competitions were designed to handle. Rather than the collapse of communism, the bigger headache for administrators was the success of capitalism. Gordon Gekko-styled businessmen like Silvio Berlusconi (AC Milan) and Bernard Tapie (Marseille) were beginning to involve themselves in football with less than benign motives. Against the backdrop of constant threats from the continent's most powerful clubs to form a breakaway super league, the UEFA Champions League was born. The Fix looks at that infamous first season, from its humble beginning on a Faroese hillside to its ultimate conclusion in a French courtroom.

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 24 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785319426
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
James Dixon, 2021
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright.
Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781785317781
eBook ISBN 9781785319426
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Contents
Preface
The Iron Curtain Raiser
New Kids from the Bloc
The Rossoneri
Luck of the Draw
The Old Enemy
Davids vs Goliaths
The Auld Enemy
East Meets Best
Cr me de la Cr me
The Group of Death
A Header for Eternity
Libert , galit , Conspiracy
The Real Fix
1992/93 Results
Acknowledgements
Photos
For my wife, Jennie.
Thank you for all your support and patience.
I love you as much as you hate football.
Preface
IN MARCH 1991, there was a European Cup quarter-final between Yugoslavia s Red Star Belgrade and East Germany s Dynamo Dresden. The referee was Alexey Spirin from the USSR. Less than 18 months later two of the countries no longer existed, Yugoslavia was in the process of violently dissolving itself, and the very competition they were taking part in had metamorphosed into the Champions League.
The pace of political, economic and social change right across Europe during the late 1980s and early 90s was swifter than at any time since the Second World War, and football was by no means immune from being shaped and remodelled by these forces. The impact wasn t just felt behind the old Iron Curtain as our friends to the east of Stettin and Trieste undoubtedly experienced the most immediate turbulence through perestroika (economic and political reform), glasnost (openness and transparency) and lustration (purges of communist officials in their successor states).
The new post-communist world order meant the break-up of club and international teams, and domestic leagues, and it turbocharged a liberalisation of the market for human footballing capital. Athletic achievements were currency in the propaganda of the Cold War and the ruling parties would refuse players the opportunity to play abroad until they were past their prime.
No sooner had Nicolae Ceau escu and Todor Zhivkov been toppled as the communist rulers of Romania and Bulgaria respectively did Gheorghe Hagi leave Steaua Bucharest for Real Madrid and Hristo Stoichkov depart CSKA Sofia for Barcelona. Money was talking. The eastern European players wanted it, their clubs needed it and the big-name western European clubs had it.
But it wasn t just the big-name players that wanted to go west, and with UEFA s three-foreigner rule making the hoarding of talented non-nationals at your club a luxury that few could afford, a wave of talented Czechs, Romanians, Yugoslavs and Ukrainians could soon be found at middling clubs in western Europe s domestic leagues where the wages would still dwarf what could be made back home.
Take Steaua Bucharest s 1989 European Cup Final team as an example. Virtually the entire line-up was scattered over the continent less than 12 months after going toe to toe with AC Milan for the biggest prize in continental club football. With the notable exception of Hagi, none were at what could be called fashionable clubs; Dan Petrescu was at Foggia and Marius L c tu at Real Oviedo, while others could be found in Turkey, Belgium, the French Second Division and perhaps saddest of all, tefan Iovan, the owner of 34 international caps and the captain of Steaua s victorious 1986 European Cup Final side against Barcelona, was powerless to prevent Brighton and Hove Albion s relegation to the third tier of English football.
In the 1980s it was normal for two or three of the European Cup quarter-finalists to be from behind the Iron Curtain each season. In 1981/82 the east even had parity with the west when Universitatea Craiova (Romania), CSKA Sofia (Bulgaria), Red Star Belgrade (Yugoslavia) and Dynamo Kiev (Soviet Union) made the last eight alongside Aston Villa (England), Anderlecht (Belgium), Bayern Munich (West Germany) and holders Liverpool (England). Yet in a stunning contrast, there have only been two Champions League quarter-finalists from eastern Europe in the entire 21st century - CSKA Moscow in 2009/10 and Shakhtar Donetsk in 2010/11. 1
While the tumult was most apparent on the eastern portion of the continent, the end of the post-war economic consensus and the importation of Americanised capitalism with its tenets of deregulation, monetarism and greed would impact European football more.
The 1992/93 season, which this book focuses on, was part of a three-year format innovation which helped pivot the old European Cup from a romantic lottery, pursuing the egalitarian ideal of champion versus champion, to what we recognise today as a de facto European Super League with virtually guaranteed participation, and crucially, income for the biggest club sides.
Of course, it was the openness of the European Cup and the quirks it spat out that the bigger clubs railed against. They might play more than 40 games to win their domestic league then draw one of the competition favourites or be caught cold by a plucky underdog and their European dreams and revenue streams would be over by September.
What s the point of having power and influence if you re not going to use it to stack the deck in your favour?
The high-rollers wanted bigger stakes and fewer risks. The more games they could play against each other the more revenue they would pocket - not just from the matchday fan coming through the turnstile but from selling television rights. Soon, not content with a loaded deck, the bigger clubs and leagues started to want to control who was let into the casino altogether.
Football and commercial television were crashing together and nowhere could this be seen more apparently than in Milan. Silvio Berlusconi, a TV magnate who was aggressively expanding his commercial TV holdings and providing a direct challenge to the Italian state broadcaster, Rai, bought AC Milan in 1986. Berlusconi was not in football for the municipal prestige that many traditional, largely benign owners were, although that would come in useful later in his political career. Television needed football and, in Berlusconi s eyes at least, football needed television. He may have been right, and to a large extent the European Cup only existed because of television.
Bizarrely, despite the first floodlit football match taking place at Bramall Lane, Sheffield, in 1878, the Football Association had outlawed the use of such lighting. Adding floodlights to an inauspicious list of things the FA has banned that at one time or another has included players being able to earn money from football, England competing in the World Cup and women.
Only in 1950 did the FA somewhat relent, sanctioning the use of floodlights but only for non-competitive fixtures. Seventy-two years previously the Sheffield fixture had proved the popularity of night-time football by attracting 12,000 paying supporters, nearly three times the gate of that year s FA Cup Final.
Arsenal hosted floodlight friendlies in 1951 against Hapoel Tel Aviv and Glasgow Rangers but Wolverhampton Wanderers popularised the practice. In 1953/54, while winning the First Division, they hosted South Africa, Celtic and Argentinian side Racing at Molineux. The following season the Charity Shield was played under lights between Wolves and FA Cup winners West Bromwich Albion. The two local rivals played out an entertaining 4-4 draw in front of 45,000 fans.
Later that season, Spartak Moscow played Wolves as part of their goodwill tour. This time the BBC cameras were in attendance, beaming coverage of the second half live to the nation. The enormity of the moment can only be summed up by its rarity. The BBC only showed ten minutes of highlights of England s 1954 World Cup victory over Switzerland - three days after the match was played - and the quarter-final defeat to Uruguay didn t trouble the schedulers at all.
Kenneth Wolstenholme was commentating for the BBC and later recalled, It was quite a foggy night at Molineux, which only added to the atmosphere and meant you could hardly see the other end of the pitch with the naked eye. Our cameras were at the wrong end when Wolves were attacking in the first half. Fortunately for Kenneth, the BBC had decided to broadcast a student debate from the University of London Union in lieu of the football during the first half. Wolves won 4-0 thanks to a thrilling final ten-minute spell in which all the goals were scored.
However, the visit of Honv d of Budapest in December 1954 really captured the public imagination. The Magnificent Magyars had become the first foreign team to beat England at Wembley in 1953, demolishing Walter Winterbottom s men 6-3 and skewering notions of English exceptionalism. Hungary had finished as runners-up to West Germany in the 1954 World Cup but were still considered by many as the best side in the world. The stars of that team - including Ferenc Pusk s, S ndor Kocsis and Zolt n Czibor, who scored 18 goals between them at the World Cup in just five matches - were all in the Honv d line-up to face Wolves.
The match was in many ways a mirror of the 1954 World Cup Final. The Hungarians raced into a two-goal