The G force is too great

The second phase of the competition really is the business end. Only once in the past five years has more than one G14 member club failed to reach the last 16, but elimination at the first group stage is embarrassingly painful.

Consider the plight of poor G14 member Borussia Dortmund, swept aside at Anfield last Tuesday. The first German club to list on the stock exchange announced its annual results last month, showing a turnover of £73m and losses of nearly £6m. They were the biggest spenders in the Bundesliga during the close season and were banking, literally, on getting through to the second stage. Defeat led not to the usual post-match inquests but to an 11 per cent fall in the club's share price. UEFA general secretary Gerhard Aigner has called for reform of the Champions League, bemoaning the fact, as he sees it, that clubs like Ajax and Anderlecht can no longer win club football's mostcoveted prize.

However, any reduction in the competition's size would severely affect the ability of smaller clubs to compete at all.

UEFA is committed to distributing the bulk of its television receipts via the Champions League and so it must try to get as much of this money to 'smaller' clubs as possible. This despite the fact that the current seeding and qualification system tends to militate against this, favouring the larger, richer clubs once more.

Meanwhile, the larger clubs searching hungrily for new sources of revenue are casting an envious eye at the progress of their three Italian cohorts.

The Serie A sides have been in relative-decline since Juventus won the Champions League in 1996, with only three teams making it through to the quarter-final stages or beyond in the next four years. Despite this, we can expect to see more of the Italians following a revamp to their domestic television deal that is already reflected in the accounts of clubs such as AC Milan and Juventus.

Italian clubs can now sell their television rights individually instead of agreeing to one, pooled deal, as is the case with the Premiership. When Juve announced their year-end figures in September, turnover had leapt nearly £22m, to £110m, while AC Milan's turnover has also recently broken the £100m barrier. How could they do this without playing in the latter stages of the Champions League?

More than 80 per cent of Juve's income now comes from television or sponsors, that's how. The big guns in the G14 must be drooling over these figures. For England's representatives in the last 16, such an arrangement would almost certainly double and possibly treble the amount of income they could generate from television.

Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United received a total of £56.3m between them last season in the form of domestic television receipts.

Would the Premiership become just too predictable if these three shared £170m even before they received their cheques from UEFA?

Nobody would want to bet against them trying to organise such a deal when the current television contract comes to an end which, interestingly, is only 12 months after the present Champions League television deal expires.

What price then, that in five years time, this concentration of power has seen the G14 whittled down to an even smaller and more dominant elite?

How the G14 dominate Europe