A product thirty years in the making: the Champions League, organisational legitimacy, and the disenfranchisement of Europe’s football supporters

The UEFA Champions League (CL) has tremendously shaped the power alignments in Europe’s top league since its renewed invocation in 1992. Acting both as a counter-balance but also as an amplifier to the competitive imbalance imposed by the English Premier League, UEFA has sought to maintain a link to football supporters in Europe and branding and streamlining one of football’s top products at the same time. This paper embeds these parallel and often ambivalent aspirations in a framework of organisational input and output legitimacy claiming that the CL can serve as a prime example to depict UEFA’s strategy to maintaining the status quo of European football.