it's no secret that i've often defended and even championed french football against a barrage of often rather unjustified attacks i even made an entire video explaining why this is the case which received let's just say some mixed reviews but even as an admirer of the french game it is impossible to deny that french clubs have been enormous underachievers when it comes to winning major european trophies and by that i mean the champions league and the europa league as well as their predecessors the european cup and the uefa cup teams from france have won the same
number of european cup and champions league crowns as teams from romania scotland and serbia and they have won the same number of uefa cup or europa league titles as teams from footballing powerhouses such as san marino andorra and angola that is to say just one champions league and no europa leagues as you probably gathered from my rather silly comparison with angola in fact nottingham forest a club who have only ever won one top flight league title and haven't even played top flight football in over 20 years have won more major european trophies than every single
football team in france combined despite the fact that france as a national team has achieved far more than england well at least four times as much if we only use the metric of major trophies once again to the untrained eye then this seems rather strange and worthy of some inquiry and a subscriber to the channel either commented or got in touch asking me to make a video doing just that i foolishly didn't take stock of their name and now i can't find that message but if that was you then thank you and thank you all
for watching it is greatly appreciated and i think that you're all wonderful well almost all the exception being the guy who told me how fat i'd got over lockdown in the q a before last alright back on topic i suppose the first point to address is how bad french teams actually are in european competitions clearly we have already established that they haven't won much which you may consider to be the ultimate metric but it certainly isn't the only one atletico madrid and bangor city have won the same number of champions late titles but i don't
think it would be fair to say that both teams have been equally good or bad in the competition given that atletico madrid have reached six semi-finals and two finals meanwhile bangor have only ever played one champions league tie a qualifier against hjk helsinki which they lost 13-0 here the outlook seems slightly less damning for french teams placing them fifth out of all of europe's top flights by most metrics which is the position amongst europe's elite that ligand has typically adopted albeit it recently dropped to sixth below the portuguese premier league as per uefa's league coefficient
rankings based upon recent performance in european competitions french clubs have featured in seven european cup or champions league finals they have reached 17 semi-finals 36 quarter-finals 62 rounds of 16 and finally they have reached the last 32 on 102 occasions the last 32 these days of course just refers to qualifying for the group stage but that was previously a knockout stage and that figure accounts for teams who reach that stage under either format to put that into some context that places french teams fifth slap bang in between portuguese teams and teams from the big four
leagues of england spain italy and germany in terms of every metric except for reaching finals where they trail portuguese and dutch teams and semi-finals where they still rank 5th but dutch teams have more appearances than portuguese ones by every single metric though from the last 32 all the way through to finals french teams appear to be much more comparable to teams from portugal than they are to teams from england spain germany or italy and a strong argument could be made though we should be comparing france with portuguese and dutch teams rather than teams from england
or spain when we assess whether they have under or over-performed and that only the mammoth recent investment at psg along with the increasing prevalence of the phrase big five leagues of which league gun is no longer actually a member of at least per uefa coefficients have distorted this view of course france is a much larger country than either portugal or the netherlands but as you can see in this graph by reddit user dersi mamon there is very little correlation between population size and uefa champions league tribes with the exception of the fact that teams from
extremely small countries seem unlikely to ever win the competition i should point out that desi mamon who i hope won't mind me stealing his graph provided a really excellent insight into the french game in a lengthy reddit post that proved to be a valuable resource when i was researching this video the two largest countries in europe albeit they are transcontinental countries but they are uefa members nonetheless namely russia and turkey are home to zero champions league winning clubs meanwhile scotland with a population less than half the size of moscow has won one and sweden and
belgium countries with populations roughly equivalent to moscow's size but much smaller than istanbul have both reached finals when analyzing why french clubs haven't enjoyed the same degree of continental success as their spanish german or italian neighbours some people point to the delayed development of the french game france was late to adopting professionalism and a nationwide league system and not long after it did so the second world war came along and put everything on hold for roughly half a decade this some people claim is why french clubs are not the established footballing institutions that we see
elsewhere in europe built upon centuries of success which they were able to carry into uefa competitions following the establishment of the european cup in 1955. i'm not saying that there is no truth to that claim but i hardly think that it is the most compelling argument for why french clubs have only won one major european title i mean for a start a french team reached the very first european cup final in 1956 and the same team did so again in 1959. stad durham were undoubtedly among the finest teams in europe during the 1950s and the
french national team were also a really strong side semi-finalists at the 1958 world cup where they lost to eventual winners brazil after playing with only 10 men for more than an hour during the pre-substitution era so whilst france were comparatively slow starters that is undoubtedly true it seems pretty clear to me that it didn't take them that long to catch up and that it was in subsequent decades the french clubs began to peddle back from the level that they had reached during the 1950s at least in relation to their european counterparts now i think a
far better explanation for the plight of french clubs within european competitions or at least an excellent starting point is one of the things that has historically made the french game so exhilarating the lack of a single or even of multiple very dominant clubs every team to have won multiple champions league titles with the sole exception of nottingham forest who are basically a statistical anomaly have enjoyed either brief or more likely sustained long-term domestic success and dominance within their domestic top flights and domestic cup competitions no team has enjoyed sustained long-term success or dominance in france
and therefore no team from france has ever won multiple champions league titles of course it is not that straightforward but it is significant lee gun is absolutely abnormal in relation to not just the four leagues historically ranked as being stronger than it but also almost all of those below it including leagues which have enjoyed more success in european competitions france have had lots of very good clubs over the years perhaps even some great ones but never really a true super club as we might call them now up until probably the last two or three years
with paris saint-germain where for the first time you would look at their squad man for man from top to bottom and say it was as good and as littered with world-class players as just about any squad in england spain germany or italy and as much as psg are criticized for not yet having won the champions league given the scale of their investment their newfound status as a super club has been reflected in their performances in europe psg have reached the knockout stage of the champions league for nine successive seasons they have reached the semi-finals of
the competition in each of the last two seasons something that they had only done once before 2020 within their entire history and they reached the final during the season before last only losing narrowly to buy munich however whilst league gun is often lambasted for being a one-team league these days even though lille won the league title last season but there is certainly enormous financial disparity between the prisons and everyone else this is an extremely recent phenomenon psg as a club were only founded in 1970 a full 15 years after the creation of the european cup
and they had only ever won two league titles before being taken over by a branch of the qatari state sovereign wealth fund before psg leon enjoyed a prolonged period of success throughout the 2000s though they had never won a league title before the decade began saint-etienne who hold the record for the mostly titles one during the professional era of french football were the most dominant force during the 1960s and 70s though even that was heavily disrupted by way of successes and nonce and monaco meanwhile bordeaux began to assert a degree of control over the division
during the 1980s as you can see there has been no real madrid by munich juventus or manchester united equivalent within the top flight of french football marseille are the only club to have won league titles in more than four separate decades but even they have only won the same number of league titles during the professional era as everton have won in england what is clear then is that there has rarely been a genuine prolonged concentration of talent at one or two clubs in france as there has been in other countries and whilst that has made
for some fantastic title races and domestic competition it doesn't exactly lend itself to taking europe by storm every other country with a champions league winning team has enormous disparities between their top teams and the rest even those who like france have only won one title with red star belgrade and serbia star bucharest in romania and celtic in scotland all being the most successful clubs or second most successful clubs from their respective countries each having won at least 26 league titles in the case of stou and as many as 51 in the case of celtic but
not only is the french game historically failed to funnel its best players into one or two clubs for good or bad depending upon the angle you're coming at this from they have also routinely lost their best players to other countries and leagues either because there have been no super clubs in france and these players have wanted to play for super clubs due to the increased exposure and opportunity to win the biggest trophies that playing for such a club brings or because of the most likely explanation to so many questions in life money before psg's takeover
by qatar sports investments legend had never paid the wages that the top four leagues have and france has historically had the highest top rate of tax out of all of these countries particularly for employers it is therefore comparatively extremely expensive to maintain a large wage budget in france from a club's perspective compared to just about any other european league psg who have definitively broken that trend pay more to the french government in social security payments alone than every laliga bundesliga and syria team pay the spanish german and italian governments combined the result has been a
mass exodus of many of france's best players you need only real off the list of them henry zidane platini treasure gay toran desai vieira makaleli deschamps perez ribery cantona pogba benzema griezmann kante i could go on all day all spent significant periods of time and almost all spent their best years playing outside of france this goes way back heck raymond copper who is one of france's greatest ever players was stad derem's star man going into the very first european cup final in 1956 just days before rems took on real madrid in paris los blancos agreed
to sign copper the following summer he still played for rems in the final against his soon to be employers but one finds it tough to imagine it didn't have some impact upon his performance and mindset rems lost the game 4-3 three years later when they reached the final for a second time they once again lost to real madrid 2-0 this time with copper playing a starring role for santiago bernabeu's side the problem of french clubs losing their best players was exacerbated by the implementation of the bosman ruling by a european court of justice in 1995
which allowed players in the eu to move to another club at the end of their contract without a transfer fee being paid this ruling just so happened to coincide with the golden era in terms of french players who went on to win both the 1998 world cup and euro 2000 but many of whom either didn't play their club football in france or soon wouldn't france's conveyor belt of talent has continued almost uninterrupted since the mid-1990s to the point in which they have the greatest depth of any national team on the planet right now and paris
produces more top-class players than any other city or region in the world but still the majority of those players go on to play their club football elsewhere to avoid any confusion just rewinding a little bit here i am not saying that high taxes on very high salaries or that the bosman ruling are bad things i shall pass no moral judgment on either in this video just that they have historically been negative forces purely from the perspective of french teams failing to win major european trophies clearly in almost all of these instances though psg have now
broken ranks and there is clear daylight between themselves and league and orthodoxy in 2021 paris is an enormous city among the most populous in europe and the most visited anywhere in the world but as with national populations the data shows that a city's population is no great determinant of footballing success typically however that is because very large cities whether that be london istanbul moscow or berlin tend to be home to numerous football clubs often in competition with one another thus leading the city's strength in numbers to be divided between multiple clubs historically this has been
the case in paris seven different paris based clubs have been crowned as french champions over the years and psg were the last of them only winning their first league and title in 1986 that is no longer the case paris fc are now the french capital's second highest ranked side competing in league de where they typically attract around two to three thousand fans to their home games there is simply no comparison between them and psg who have rapidly become the harlem globetrotters of world football and now have an extraordinary degree of dominance over market share in
terms of a single club in a city the size of paris psg also have very few reservations about outspending the biggest clubs in england italy or spain unlike france's historic top-ranked clubs vast social security payments mean little when you can rely on the vast resources of an entire oil rich nation yourselves and that investment means psg have not only tended to retain the best french players though next summer may prove one very honorable exception but also sign some of the best players in the world from outside of france again this is a clear break from
the norm whilst france's best players have often played abroad over the years france's best clubs have not routinely managed to recruit the best players from outside of france and when they have done they tended not to keep hold of them for long certainly there is no precedent for a french club signing the likes of thiago silva zlatan ibrahimovic edinson cavani neymar gianluigi donnarumma and lionel messi whilst they were all among the best players on the planet as psg have done over the last decade so psg are perfectly poised to become a genuine super club and
whilst they will not immediately enjoy the support of historic super clubs like real madrid or by munich if they keep spending and even start winning things in europe eventually it will come and the signing of lionel messi certainly won't hurt in that regard right now whilst they are still perceived as perhaps lacking the mental aptitude and discipline to get themselves over the line in the champions league there is a sense of inevitability about psg becoming european champions and france gaining only their second european club crown and the qataris losing interest would seem to the only
thing that could really stop that from happening it is worth adding and this will be my final point that the accusation often leveled against psg in recent years that they are bottle jobs and nerly men is actually one which could be directed at french football in european competitions as a whole to have reached seven european cup or champions league finals and to have won only one until reached five uefa cup or europa league finals and to have lost every single one is a pretty stunningly terrible record in finals it is an 8.3 final success rate
across both competitions compared to a 51 success rate among spanish clubs and a 56 rate among english clubs in the same competitions no other nation at least among those who have won a major european trophy comes close to having such a disastrous record so that is it for today's video but thank you all very much as ever for watching hit the like button if you enjoyed it let me know your thoughts down below in the comments and make sure you're subscribed and have notifications turned on for hitc7s you can also find me on twitter and
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