Man Utd and Tottenham don't 'deserve' Champions League football next season - but removing qualification carrot would kill the Europa League

Wenger basically argued that this season's Europa League final has exposed a flaw in the way in which UEFA's tournaments are now structured.

"The winners should qualify automatically for the Europa League again, but not necessarily for the Champions League," the Frenchman told beIN Sports. "Especially when you're in the Premier League, where already five teams qualify. I think it's something [for UEFA] to think about and to review."

Wenger's stance was supported by two former United players in Gary Neville and Roy Keane. "Every game we watch at the minute we just talk about the money at stake," Neville lamented on Sky Sports. "No one is talking about winning the Europa League to win a trophy.

"The UEFA Cup and Cup Winners' Cup used to be big trophies that clubs could win. Now, the first thing you hear is 'Yeah, you get the Champions League, it’s a £60 million game.' Really great competitions have become devalued."

Neville's colleague Keane also flagged the absurdity of the Champions League's very name, given so many of the participants are not titleholders, but, just like his former team-mate's complaint about the devaluing of other cups, this is nothing new.

It's now more than 25 years since UEFA started allowing up to four teams from the same country to compete in the Champions League, while money accrued from continental competitions has been the most distortive force in European football for well over a decade at this stage.

Postecoglou has a point, then, when he says it's a bit ridiculous that the Europa League winner qualifying for the Champions League has suddenly become a talking point. It's been this way since the 2015-16 season and it's worth remembering that Sevilla finished 12th in La Liga when they lifted the trophy two seasons ago and nobody was complaining then.

"It's a debate that's been raging for years, or at least the last eight days," Postecoglou quipped earlier this month. "I've never heard it before, but Spurs does crazy things to people. You put that club into any sentence or any issue and invariably they all come out and try to diminish it as much as they can. It's Spurs, mate, they love it.

"But these are the competition rules. Why wasn't it an issue before and is it an issue now? What's the difference?"

The reason it's being discussed is, of course, rooted in the fact that United and Spurs are 16th and 17th in the Premier League table, respectively, and there's no denying that it's strange to see two such struggling sides in a Europa League final.

Both teams have been historically poor this season. Spurs have lost a club-record 25 games in all competitions this season, while they've conceded at least one goal in each of past 12 Premier League outings - making this their longest run without a clean sheet for 15 years. United are in an even worse run of form, having gone eight league games without a win for the first time since 1990, and they haven't lost this many games (18) since 1973-74 (20), when they were relegated.

In that sense, United and Spurs are absolutely blessed that the gulf in quality between the Premier League and the Championship is now so wide that we're starting to see the newly-promoted teams go straight back down every season with depressingly low points hauls.

However, while both United (39) and Spurs (38) have failed to hit the 40-point mark previously considered essential for ensuring safety, Postecoglou is right when he says that their league positions are pretty much irrelevant when it comes to Wednesday's meeting.

Form often goes out the window in cup competitions, where the only thing that counts is reaching the next round, and it's hard to fault two teams that finished in the top four of this season's Europa League league phase, thus making life easier for themselves in the knockout stage.

United, of course, have made hard work of it at times - most notably in their sensational come-from-behind win over Lyon in the quarter-finals - but the 7-1 aggregate win over semi-final opponents Athletic Club was undeniably impressive.

Spurs' progress hasn't been quite as spectacular and the north Londoners were rather lucky to run into surprise package Bodo/Glimt in the last four, but they demonstrated impressive resilience in getting that far by winning away to Eintracht Frankfurt - who finished third in this season's Bundesliga - in the quarters.

"We understand our league form hasn't been great," Postecoglou said. "We understand the struggles we've had. A lot of them are because of the situation we've been in [with injuries]. But how does that diminish the achievement of getting to a final? I couldn't care less who's struggling and who's not. I think both us and United have earned the right to be there."

Wenger's argument is that they haven't earned a shot at Champions League football - and one can kind of see his point if we look at their Premier League performances in isolation; there are other clubs that finished far higher up the table more deserving of a seat at Europe's top table next season.

United and Spurs have done nothing wrong, though. They've simply beaten the teams placed in front of them, and taking the Champions League berth away from the Europa League just because two underperforming sides made this year's final would hardly be fair. On the contrary, it would only do further damage to a tournament that, as Neville flagged, has already been diluted enough as it is over the past 25 years.

Tellingly, even Wenger himself acknowledged that "a lot of people will tell you that to keep the Europa League focused, interesting and motivated, you need to give them that prize" - and that's the real issue here, because Champions League qualification really has become a "prize" in itself.

In fact, it's now the primary annual objective for most clubs, more valuable than most domestic trophies, and that's not going to change anytime soon.

Wenger wants UEFA to look at a system that can result in six teams from the one league qualifying for the Champions League, with the obvious implication being that it looks like a European Super League in everything but name - but that was the whole point all along. The organisers want as many big teams as possible in the Champions League as it's the only way to keep the most powerful presidents and owners happy and, thus, stave off the threat of another breakaway attempt.

Lest anyone forget, this year's farcical Champions League expansion was all about generating more games because that means more money for the continent's richest clubs. The creation of two 'European Performance Spots' was also just a means of ensuring that England - and most likely Spain - will nearly always have at least five teams in the Champions League.

There's absolutely nothing to suggest, then, that UEFA is going to suddenly perform a U-turn after years of facilitating the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots in European football. The goal all along was to provide the elite with as many safety nets as possible and the Champions League spot allocated to the Europa League winners is one of them. In football's current economic climate, removing it would unfortunately kill the competition, as you can be sure that most top teams would immediately stop taking it so seriously.

At the end of the day, a Spurs-United final is a decent outcome for UEFA from a marketing perspective, given it should be an entertaining scrap between two well-known teams fighting to salvage their respective seasons. However, it should also be a cause for concern, as the all-English affair certainly won't have gone unnoticed by the likes of Real Madrid president Florentino Perez, who has long been envious of the Premier League's financial might and remains one of the driving forces behind the proposed Super League.

Consequently, there may be more turbulence ahead, because while a final between the 16th-and 17th-placed teams in the Premier League could well prove an amusing anomaly, it really will have upset a lot of people - and not because it's Spurs, as Postecoglou claims. Or even much-maligned Manchester United, a club that so many rival fans love to hate. It's more that their weakness represents an ominous demonstration of the strength of the Premier League.

A year after Gasperini said Atalanta had given hope to 'smaller' sides by giving them an example to follow, the United-Spurs showdown suggests that Europe's mid-tier teams are still struggling to compete with even England's worst-run clubs.