Is the Premier League starting to gobble up Uefa’s lower-tier competitions? | Nick Ames

That was not the aim of the Conference League, which was created to offer sides outside the modern-day elite a realistic shot at Europe in an age when the Champions League is – with honourable but sparse exceptions – a gated community. It has certainly given plenty more of them a chance to play, even if there is an argument it also has the effect of keeping them at arm’s length. Listening to executives at certain well-known clubs, among them domestic champions, describing regular Conference League football as the realistic height of their ambitions sticks in the craw.

Aston Villa’s Unai Emery could win his fifth Europa League, but his first with an English club. Photograph: Peter Powell/EPA

Olympiakos’s victory felt closer to an intended consequence, but even that has the feel of an anomaly two years on. Palace will fancy their chances this time and a glance at their off-pitch firepower suggests they should: last year’s £200m revenue made them the 26th-richest team in Europe, according to Deloitte’s money league. It is almost four times that of Rayo, mid-table in a La Liga whose rump has been left far behind by Premier League clout.

One hundred and fifty-two games – 188 in the Europa League – and then the English win? The risk is it will soon feel like that. The Europa League has been democratised and weakened since Uefa removed the safety net for some Champions League dropouts to enter its knockouts. That is far better for the competition’s integrity, but has cast the power of its Premier League representatives into stark relief.

It is one thing when, as in 2022-23, Juventus, Sevilla, Roma and Bayer Leverkusen are around to plunder the semi-final spots. This time Villa and Nottingham Forest, neither hitting top gear, cruised through a weak field to face each other in the last four. Freiburg, whose £140m revenue is cast into the shadow by Villa’s £378m haul, would hardly have a prayer in the final if money did all the talking.

Defenders of the status quo point out that cash does not always scream loudest. Even if Arsenal win the Champions League, perhaps creating a first English clean sweep, only two of the Premier League’s preposterous six representatives reached the last eight of that competition. Maybe the margins simply tighten at the top; perhaps, in a suggestion that itself bodes ill, the Premier League is underperforming.

Proposed financial redistribution models for Uefa’s club competitions, including innovative suggestions from the Union of European Clubs, tend to draw short shrift from those running the sport. In any case it is hard, given the bleak outlook for domestic television rights revenues for much of Europe, to see how the Premier League does not continue to pull away. If English clubs continue to trample to the finish line then, for as long as no solutions are found, their victories may be accompanied by an increasingly bitter taste.