This is the nadir of the cosy cartel at the top. Back when Ajax last won the Champions' League, you had to actually be the Champions to get into it. Liverpool and Spurs haven't won a Premier League between them. There's just too much of the money and the prestige concentrated into a couple of leagues. The Ajax team is going to be stripped bare in the coming months as the top 6 Premier League teams, the top 3 La Liga teams (maybe 4 if you include Sevilla, prestige and money wise they belong there) and maybe a couple of big spenders from elsewhere (Juventus? PSG? Bayern?) gut their squad of all of its young talents, because they know Ajax can't afford to keep them. It's been headed that way ever since the implementation of the mini-league system killed off the idea of an underdog upset, but now we've reached the point where teams with glorious European history like Ajax, Anderlecht and Benfica are underdogs against teams that finish 4th in Serie A or the Premier League and haven't won anything, but by finishing 4th get to qualify for the Champions' League. It's pretty unsustainable when you reach a point where four teams from the same league populate both European competition finals. And that doesn't include the team that's actually going to win that league. The standards of so many of the leagues have fallen through the floor because they simply can't keep any talented players, and you have this subset of clubs like PSG, Shakhtar Donetsk, and to an extent maybe Ajax are headed this way too if they can hold on to some of these players, who exist solely for the Champions' League because winning their domestic league is just childs' play, but because they're not playing up to a high enough standard week in week out, can't raise the funds to compete with the juggernauts.
I mean, to an extent this is also the result of the fact that in England the TV money is distributed equitably, rather than team by team on an independent basis, so there's more depth of competition, which has always been an issue in e.g. Spain, where Barcelona and Real Madrid attract more audience, so get on TV in more markets, so charge more for their matches, so make more money, so have more to spend, so perpetuate their domination, and if other leagues want to have a slice of the pie and not just be cannon fodder for the EPL teams, they need to look at doing something similar so that they aren't left with a weakening league thanks to all the talent being concentrated at the very top like in Ligue 1. Not that we aren't seeing a similar runaway situation in the EPL, but doesn't it speak volumes that teams 25 points off the pace in the EPL are filling European finals while the cream of the crop elsewhere can't beat them?
Looks like next season's Champions' League maybe I'll have to cheer on Getafe or Eintracht Frankfurt. At least they're from a big enough league that they'll get seeded for the group stages then inevitably get dumped out by a 'name' club. What the Ajax story has told us is not to dream. There is still room for the occasional miracle, like Chapecoense or Leicester City, but the system is designed to try to make them as rare as possible, because they don't want outsiders ruining the cartel's money spiral. And as Manchester City have shown, the only way to break into that cartel is to have so much money that they are reluctantly forced to accept you. Spurs are in the process of finding their way into it - they're from the right league but they haven't spent that big (well, in comparison to the likes of Ajax and co they have spent plenty over the last few years, but in comparison to the kind of superteams in the CL cartel they haven't) aren't part of the inner circle of the superclubs, I'd say. I think they'd have to win this final to stand a chance of being initiated into that.
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