The UEFA Champions League’s visibility trap: why clubs from small markets waste their biggest moments
Veronica Rozenfeld, Founder & Director, Equinox Sports Solutions
The 2025–26 UEFA Champions League featured thirty-six clubs in its reformed league phase.
Among them were teams from Cyprus, Kazakhstan and other smaller UEFA markets - clubs for whichqualification represented not merely a sporting achievement but the single largest window of international visibility in their institutional history.
For a city like Almaty or Paphos, Champions League football delivers the kind of international exposure that would normally require significant public investment in destination marketing. But this only converts into lasting value if the club is equipped to translate visibility into identity. Most are not.
The investment required to qualify is made. But the investment in what follows - in communication governance,narrative strategy, cultural translation for international audiences, is absent.
The cost is economic as much as reputational: missed sponsorship conversations, tourism potential left unactivated, and partnership opportunities that never materialise.This is not a communication failure. It is a governance failure.
Two clubs from the 2025–26 cycle illustrate this through different failure modes.
Kairat Almaty made history in August 2025 as the easternmost club ever to reach the Champions League league phase, defeating Celtic on penalties.
Founded in 1954 and nicknamed “The Nation’s Team”, Kairat’s 17-year-old striker Dastan Satpayev scored in the competition and earned a transfer to Chelsea FC. The draw handed them fixtures against Real Madrid, Arsenal, Copenhagen, and Inter Milan. For Kazakhstan, this was an unprecedented moment of global visibility.
What followed was not a strategy. It was a reflex.
When Real Madrid arrived in Almaty, the players were received with a degree of ceremony that went well beyond competitive hospitality. In many Eastern and Central Asian cultures, welcoming distinguished guests with visible generosity is a deeply held social norm - a mark of respect, not subservience.
But when this cultural instinct is left unmediated by communication governance, it signals to international audiences that the host sees itself as honoured by the visit rather than competing on equal terms.
The Kazakh media reinforced this framing:TikTok trends emerged in which young Kazakh women joked that Mbappé had come not for football but to meet them, local businesses ran advertisements featuring his likeness, and coverage focused on the spectacle of European football royalty arriving in Central Asia.
The event became Real Madrid’s story, set in Almaty. Not Kairat’s story, featuring Real Madrid.
When a club’s own moment of peak visibility is narrated entirely through the presence of the visitors, the host city becomes a backdrop. The international audience takes away a story about Mbappé in Kazakhstan, not a story about Kazakh football or the city of Almaty.
The raw material for a powerful institutional narrative was there: seven decades of history, a city 6,900 kilometres from Lisbon, at the border of Europe and Asia. But none of this was built into a deliberate strategy.
The attention Kairat received was a function of who they drew, not anything the club constructed. Had the draw delivered less glamorous opponents, the world would have learned nothing about Almaty at all.
Kairat finished 36th out of 36. The sporting result was expected. The reputational result did not have to be.
Pafos FC presents a different case: not the absence of a communication strategy, but the active deployment of one that produced visibility without identity.
Qualifying for the Champions League was the most significant moment in the Cypriot club’s history, and a major visibility event for Paphos itself - a city with UNESCO World Heritage status, deep archaeological significance, and a substantial tourism economy.
Yet a first-time visitor to the club’s social media channels would find almost no trace of Cypriot identity. Content was built around short-form personality-driven formats designed for engagement rather than institutional storytelling. The format could have belonged to any club in any country.
The squad members who had carried the club to its historic qualification were largely invisible in the club’s own storytelling. Decades of local effort and tradition went uncommunicated Community engagement, while not entirely absent, did not convey a deliberate connection to the Cypriot community.
What was missing was not goodwill but strategy: a coherent plan to use the Champions League window to present the club as an authentic representation of its city and culture.Every layer of communication pointed outward rather than inward. The club was operating in Paphos but not visibly for Paphos.
Pafos finished 26th. The reputational outcome - an international audience arriving and departing with no lasting impression of the city was not inevitable. It was the product of governance choices that prioritised short-term engagement over long-term identity.
These are not isolated cases. Across CIS, Eastern European, and Balkan football, clubs invest heavily in qualifying for European competition, and i almost nothing in the communication architecture required to capitalise on it.
The cause is a governance gap: nobody is asking the question that should precede every high-visibility moment: what do we want the world to learn about us?
The clubs that convert these moments successfully do so by design. They define a core institutional narrative before the draw is made. They control who and what carries the story. They align club, city, and commercial messaging into a coherent identity.
And they build content that scales that identity rather than amplifying their opponents’. These are governance fundamentals - and they are almost universally absent in the markets where they are needed most.
Visibility is not an opportunity. It is a governance test.
Author biography
Veronica Rozenfeld is the Founder and Director of Equinox Sports Solutions, a London-based advisory firm specialising in proactive reputation governance for professional athletes, clubs and sports organisations. She has a background in corporate law and has contributed to LawInSport, Lexology, and The Geopolitical Economy of Football (Routledge).