AMSTERDAM — Over the course of the last year, setting out from his home about an hour north of Rotterdam, Remco Ravenhorst has followed his team to the glittering shores of Lake Lucerne and the concrete sprawl of suburban Berlin.
He has seen his beloved Feyenoord play in the sleepy Swedish town of Boras and the firecracker hostility of Belgrade, Serbia. He has visited Prague, twice. He traveled all the way to Gjilan, on the far side of Kosovo, even though he knew that pandemic-related regulations meant he would not be allowed to enter the stadium.
It has, he admitted, been quite an expensive enterprise. He has leaned heavily on the understanding of his employer, though he did skip a trip to Israel after deeming the two-week quarantine on arrival a little too much to swing. His commitment has been commendable, particularly given that it has all been for a competition even he thought was a joke when it was created.
When UEFA, soccer’s European governing body, announced the details of its third continental tournament last summer, Ravenhorst was somewhere between unimpressed and unmoved. The event, the Europa Conference League, seemed to offer a pale imitation of European soccer: all of the games but none of the history, meaning, glamour or appeal.
“I wasn’t convinced,” said Ravenhorst, a former president of the Feyenoord Supporters’ Group. “Together with the idea for the European Super League and the changes to the Champions League, it seemed like it would just increase the gap between the bigger leagues and the smaller ones. It felt like another step toward a Super League in disguise.”
He was hardly alone in that sentiment. Though Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA president, had promised the competition would make European soccer “more inclusive than ever before,” the reception for it was lukewarm at best.
Europe’s major leagues saw it as another burden, players’ organizations worried that it would increase the risk of burnout and fan groups grumbled about yet another expense for those who wished to follow their teams. Feyenoord’s first home game — against the Kosovo side Drita — seemed to bear out all of the criticisms. In bright sunshine, De Kuip, the club’s ordinarily crackling stadium in Rotterdam, was barely half full.
Nine months later, though, Ravenhorst rather sheepishly acknowledges that his feelings have changed. He is not alone. Last week, when Feyenoord hosted Slavia Prague in the first leg of its Conference League quarterfinal — with the Czech side securing a 3-3 draw with a goal in the 95th minute — De Kuip was packed.
“The perception has totally changed,” Ravenhorst said. “There is a real positive energy now. People know we have an actual chance, and that gives you the feeling that you could have these kinds of games more often. It does not just have to be the same four, five or six teams from the same four, five or six leagues.”
Before the Conference League’s debut, that is precisely what European soccer had become. Since 2013, only three teams from outside Europe’s major television markets — England, Spain, Italy, France and Germany — have qualified for the quarterfinals of the Champions League: two Portuguese teams, Benfica and F.C. Porto, and, in 2019, Feyenoord’s great Dutch rival Ajax.
The Europa League has, traditionally, been a little more diverse, but in recent years that, too, has been increasingly vulnerable to the massive financial advantage enjoyed by teams from Western Europe’s grand leagues. Since 2018, only one side from outside the Big Five leagues — the Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk — has qualified for the semifinals.
“There is a very small space for teams outside the top 20 clubs on the continent to reach the knockout rounds of European competitions now,” said Kyriakos Kyriakos, a board member at the Greek team PAOK, which hosts Olympique Marseille in the second leg of its quarterfinal on Thursday in Thessaloniki. “For Greek teams, and for all of the midlevel championships in Europe, the Conference League has provided that opportunity.”
The lineup for the inaugural quarterfinals illustrated that perfectly. England, France and Italy were represented — through Leicester City, Marseille and Roma — but so too were the Czech Republic, Norway and Greece. The Dutch had two contenders: Feyenoord and PSV Eindhoven.
In an era when executives from the most powerful teams and the wealthiest leagues compulsively promote the idea that the key to European soccer’s growth lies in ensuring as many meetings as possible between the continent’s superclubs, the Conference League offers a different paradigm.
It has, in many ways, been something of a throwback to European soccer as it was in what might be thought of as the sport’s premodern era, before the advent of group stages and seeded draws and the major leagues’ being granted automatic entry for multiple teams in each competition.
To the fans following the Conference League, the relative unfamiliarity of the teams involved has not diminished the tournament. It has enhanced it. Where the Champions League feels like a treadmill running between a handful of cities, year after year, its youngest sibling has an air of adventure. “It is quite expensive, but the destinations are part of the attraction,” Ravenhorst said. What else, he said, would draw him to Boras or Lucerne or Gjilan?
The appeal, though, runs deeper than just the opportunity for travel. “The level is high, and the games are between opponents who are more or less equal,” Kyriakos said. “The fans have loved it. The games have all been sold out.”
That has not just been the case in Greece. Even in England, generally cynical about any idea perceived to be newfangled, Leicester City sold every single ticket for the visit of PSV last week. PSV had already done the same for Thursday’s return match, though it lost it, 2-1, and was eliminated.
Parity has not necessarily come at the expense of quality. As Ravenhorst pointed out, Feyenoord’s group — consisting of Slavia Prague, Union Berlin and Maccabi Haifa — “felt like it could be in the Europa League.”
Most important, perhaps, the teams themselves have become invested in the tournament. Roma’s visit to Bodo/Glimt in the first leg of the quarterfinal was marred by an altercation in the tunnel between a member of José Mourinho’s coaching staff and Kjetil Knutsen, the Norwegian team’s manager. Bodo lodged an appeal with UEFA when both were punished for the fight.
Kyriakos, meanwhile, was anticipating an “amazing night” at Toumba — PAOK’s ramshackle, boisterous stadium, ranked as one of the most intimidating in Europe — for the return leg with Marseille, even though the Greek team entered needing to win by two goals to ensure its place in the semifinals.
It was, he said, a “chance to achieve something monumental in our club’s history.” The fervor of PAOK’s fans, though, could not quite carry the team through: Marseille emerged from Toumba with a 1-0 win.
Nobody involved is worried that the Europa Conference League emerged, fully formed, from UEFA’s imagination just a year or so ago. Nobody sees the games as meaningless exhibitions; how could they be, when they have come to mean so much? Nobody is complaining about the lack of history or glamour, not anymore.
“I am a little bit biased,” Ravenhorst said last week as he prepared for his second journey to Prague this season, “but of course I like the competition now.” His adventure, like Feyenoord’s, shows no sign of ending. He has already booked his plane tickets to Marseille for the semifinal. He still has to persuade his boss.
Source: Soccer - nytimes.com
