Ian Hawkey takes a look back across Europe’s top five leagues.
Season of consolidators
As a lesson in consolidation, the 2015/16 season across most of the major leagues of continental Europe might become part of an educational textbook. Juventus, champions of Italy. Again. Bayern Munich, on top of the Bundesliga. Again. Paris Saint-Germain, soaring away, peerless in France’s Ligue 1. No change there.
And then there was a Spanish season going down to the wire, with a club from Madrid aiming to wrest the title from Barcelona, just like in 2014, amid some smug Spanish boasting that the sort of cliffhanger finish that the Primera Liga produced was proof that, for all the heavily one-sided scorelines that pepper its calendar, it still has the highest standards at its summit.
For the second time in three seasons, two Spanish clubs will contest the Uefa Champions League final.
In fact, they are the same pair, Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid, who fought it out in Lisbon for the European Cup final in 2014, a year when Sevilla, just as in May 2015 and May 2016, were in the Europa League final, and yes, when Juventus won their league, Bayern theirs and PSG theirs.
If you want alterations in the hierarchy, you have to be more patient than ever, it seems, at the elite level of European club football, which is partly why such an abundance of interest has focused on the really odd men out, Leicester City, shock champions of the wealthiest domestic league there is, England’s Premier League.
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Mostly, refreshment or novelty, is rarer than ever. Championships can apparently be ordered à la carte. The danger for a sport that is sustained by public interest and the willingness of its devotees to keep watching and attending and paying, is that defeatism slips into the attitude and planning of the challengers. It is hard not to feel sympathy for Borussia Dortmund right now.
In 2016, they actually made Bayern’s grip in the Bundesliga a little less firm than it was in each of the preceding two seasons, by taking the chase right up to the penultimate match day.
But they never went close enough to leapfrog the defending champions at a stage in the season where it might have hurt, and they suffered a dispiriting 5-1 defeat against Bayern early in the reign of new Dortmund coach, Thomas Tuchel.
Still, until last week Dortmund, who had finished outside the top four in 2014/15, could have felt they had a momentum, might be battling against the behemoths of Bavaria with the same weapons and tools from now on.
Yet Dortmund will not feel that. No sooner had first and second position been filled in Germany than the best German central defender in that league jumped ship.
Mats Hummels will no longer play for the Dortmund where he won two Bundesligas and a silver medal in the European Cup in his eight years there, he will play for Bayern, lining up with three fellow members of the defence that won Germany the last World Cup: Manuel Neuer, Philipp Lahm and Jerome Boateng.
From Dortmund’s perspective Bayern look not just like predators, but parasites. Since 2013, they have lured Mario Gotze, Robert Lewandowski and now Hummels to the Allianz Arena from the Westfalen stadium.
If Hummels is as influential as Lewandowski – top scorer in the German top flight - has been, the champions will look even more like champions. Were he to be as marginal as Gotze has – he played in fewer than half Bayern’s matches this term – he will still be contributing nothing to Dortmund’s prospects.
In France, PSG hardly need to weaken their rivals, given how far back their nearest ones are, but they still raided Monaco, top-three finishers the past three seasons, last summer taking the promising left-back Layvin Kurzawa and making him not first-choice but backup in their richly assembled squad.
Where are Europe’s other Leicesters?
Meanwhile, Juventus's strategies for long-term dominance – they have just won their fifth successive scudetto – are not so vengeful.
But in a Serie A in general decline, at least compared with its standards of a decade or so ago, perhaps they do not need to be. Inter Milan and AC Milan are both quite capable of weakening themselves, Inter having slumped from an autumn where they looked in good, if unentertaining shape to have a crack at the title, and Milan simply inconsistent and mediocre.
Italy at least was a gripping race. Juve started improbably poorly, even with the alibi that they had lost senior men such as Andrea Pirlo, Arturo Vidal and Carlos Tevez last summer.
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Their resurgence was stirring and admirable, but it also obliges the clubs they caught up with and overtook during their comeback from deep mid-table at the end of October to look at their own failings.
Napoli thrilled but fell short, Roma once again whizzed off the starting blocks and then got a stitch.
Italian clubs were absent, too, from the later stages of the continental competitions, part of a longer trend only briefly interrupted by Juve’s silver medal in the Champions League in 2015.
What Italy still does do well is produce good coaches. Claudio Ranieri was the alchemist who made Leicester better than Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United.
Maurizio Sarri, unsung and relatively unknown, guided Napoli’s excellent two-thirds of a campaign, while Luciano Spalletti returned to Roma and restored pride there.
And where have Bayern turned for further consolidation, to make themselves better in Europe? To Carlo Ancelotti, the eminence grise of Reggio-Emilia.
The managerial master builders
When league titles are concentrated among fewer clubs, another phenomenon emerges: fewer coaches with fresh titles on their CVs.
None of the long uninterrupted runs of successive league wins by Bayern (4), PSG (4), and Juventus (5) have been achieved without a managerial change but those 13 titles have been shared around six men.
It so happens that three of them are taking up new jobs this summer: Ancelotti, who won a Ligue 1 title with PSG in 2013; Antonio Conte, who won three scudetti with Juve between 2012 and 2014 and is joining Chelsea in July after he has guided the Italy national team through Euro 2016; and Pep Guardiola, who joins Manchester City after three seasons with Bayern.
So look out Ranieri. The clubs ambushed by Leicester in the Premier League are turning to correct their status to coaches who know how to consolidate success.
City and Chelsea were the last two winners of the Premier League before Ranieri’s mavericks from the Midlands, and have flexed their financial muscle to pay the steep salaries Guardiola and Conte demand. Liverpool did the same to bring Jurgen Klopp, who won back-to-back Bundesliga titles juts before Bayern embarked on their period as immovable top dogs of Germany.
And that’s just the beginning. Leicester’s coup has unsettled the Premier League hierarchy at just the time when all its clubs are about to benefit from a new broadcast deal that makes their incomes dwarve those of clubs in other leagues. It is safe to presume that Premier League spending on players will break all previous records in the forthcoming transfer window.
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Thanks for the memories
Zlatan Ibrahimovic, perhaps John Terry, maybe Francesco Totti, possible Fernando Torres, certainly Luca Toni. Some legends of the European landscape have reached a crossroads in their long careers and may be saying goodbye to elite level football after this season.
The options for those who want to continue, but at a level where the intensity may be lower, the physical demands gentler, have never been more numerous or lucrative, with Chinese clubs paying vast fees and wages, and Major League Soccer providing more space on its rosters and more money for overseas recruits.
Ibrahimovic will be missed in France, where he has towered over Ligue 1 since he took on the role of figurehead for PSG’s rebranding under Qatari ownership.
In four years he has scored more goals for the club than anybody else ever has: more than 150 across competitions. His record as serial collector of league titles is unmatched by any individual or indeed modern club.
In only one season since 2003 has “Ibra” not played for the team that finished top of the league he was employed in. He has never won a Champions League but he is the ultimate consolidator of domestic titles: His four French Ligue 1 crowns go with his titles from Italy, from Spain, and from the Netherlands.
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Ibrahimovic turns 35 in October. A month before that, Totti will turn 40. He has just one league title on an otherwise remarkable career of achievements, and that is because, unlike the itinerant Ibrahimovic, he has stuck with one club all his life ... so far.
But a tricky last few months with Roma raised the possibility of Totti seeing out his playing days somewhere else. He ended the season with a blitz of form in the role of impact substitute that certainly reminded Roma, and other suitors, of his evergreen class.
Italy, the land of the Peter Pan performer, will say goodbye to enduring scorers Toni, and Antonio Di Natale.
Chelsea supporters may wave off Terry, their captain and totem through the most decorated period in their club's history. No thoughts of a soft afterlife, yet, though for the likes of Juventus captain Gigi Buffon, while Torres, whose last six months have been a stirring story of personal renaissance will in two weeks' time do something he dreamed of as a child but rarely imagined might happen: he will play for the club he grew up with, Atletico Madrid, in a European Cup final.
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