Chelsea, Barcelona, Arsenal, and Manchester United.

It’s down to four teams in the European Champions League, and, as with the NCAA Basketball tournament, and despite early Cinderella stories, in the end, it’s always the perennially strong teams and leagues at the top.

In the case of Europe, consider: the tournament has been going on since 1956.

That’s 53 final games, contested by 106 teams. But of those 106 slots, 62 were taken by the same ten teams, over and over again. Furthermore, when broken down by country, 74 of the 106 slots (70%) have been filled by representatives of just four national leagues: Italy, Spain, England and Germany. This year of course, the semis are contested by Spanish and English teams.

So despite a fairly open enrollment (every national league in Europe, plus a few others may send at least one team), it’s always the same guys who win: the teams with money, the teams with tradition, the teams whose leagues have built a reservoir of coefficient points.

Competitive leagues generate spectator interest, and the appearance of a cartel will lead to less spectator interest. But maybe the cartel is broad enough to trim that problem.

A few years ago, UEFA head Michel Platini began trying to reform the system to make it a little more open, and has repeatedly run into opposition from the elite teams, who were on the verge of separating from their national leagues to form a lucrative continental league, the G-14.

So the same teams win over and over again. It that even a problem in need of a solution?

My team, by the way, is FC Basel, the big fish in the small pond that is Switzerland. And to my credit, I began supporting them in the mid eighties, when they were division two in that small pond.