Top 10 reasons why ordinary fans hate the Champions League

By Dan Silver in Mirror Football Blog

Published 14:25 14/09/10

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The Champions League wheezes back into action tonight, and everyone seems extremely excited by this turn of events.

Or rather, everyone but me.

In the immortal words of Rhett Butler (a Plymouth fan if memory serves), frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. Here's 10 reasons why:

1) It's an obscene spectacle of self-interest and greed
Let's cut to the chase: the Champions League has very little to do with football and everything to do with money. Huge, telephone number-resembling sums of money that flow almost exclusively between the continent's most capricious sponsors and the already swollen bank accounts of Europe's richest clubs. You might as well spend 90 minutes watching a live feed of the stock market than any of tonight's games.

2) It's horrendously mis-named
Call me a stickler for accuracy, but surely a competition as grandiosely-titled as the Champions League should be just that: a contest between Europe's table toppers. It's actual, you know, champions (younger readers may be intrigued to know that such a fanciful notion once existed: it was called the European Cup, and was really rather good).

What we actually have is the Champions, Runners-up, Also-rans And, In Some Countries, The Fourth Best Teams League. Admittedly, that not-so snappy sobriquet would be a hard-sell even for UEFA's crack marketeers, so how about we just condense it to: The Self-Serving Cartel.

3) It's grossly unfair
Here's another potential new name for the competition: The Vicious Circle. It's pretty self-explanatory, but for the benefits of the hard of thinking (and Sky Sports presenters), here's how it works: 

Clubs that qualify for the Champions League have a huge financial advantage over those that don't, meaning that they, and they alone, can afford the world's best players.

Which is lucky, because the world's best players only really want to play for clubs that have qualified for the Champions League.

Happily for all concerned, this has the knock-on effect of meaning means that those clubs have a near-unassailable advantaged in their domestic league, meaning they've all but booked their place on the millionaires merry-go-round for the rest of the time.

Frankly, you'd have to be the most bungling of football's many club-running idiots to mess that one up (yes, we're looking at you, Liverpool).

4) The early stages are beyond boring
Champions League apologists often justify its existence by citing the sheer spectacle of Europe's top clubs engaging in finely-balanced tactical warfare. And, admittedly, the latter stages of the competition occasionally do offer such delights.

Sadly, by that point we've already somnambulantly sat through six months of mis-matched turkey shoots, cakewalks and dead rubbers that mean even the most ardent football fan has switched over to re-runs of Grand Designs by Match Day Seven.

5) Only a handful of teams stand a chance of winning it
When Marseille won the first ever Champions League final in 1993 it proved the be a dawn so false you could make out the 'Made In Taiwan' sticker stuck to the back of it. Since then, only Porto (and, at a push, Ajax) have interrupted the procession of victorious superclubs - and even they required the genius of Jose Mourinho to do so.

Prior to the competition's re-branding, it was possible for a team like Nottingham Forest to rise from English football's second tier to the very head of Europe's top table in the space of two seasons. Nowadays there's about as much chance of Barcelona getting knocked out in the group stage than anyone even coming close to repeating such a feat.

6) It's destroyed domestic football in England
Let's get one thing straight: finishing fourth is nothing to be celebrated. There's a reason why most other sports stop dishing medals out at the bronze stage. Even the pecuniary procession that is Formula One, less a competition than an advertorial, only has three places on its podiums.

In the good old days you'd be lucky to qualify for the Anglo-Italian Cup by finishing fourth in the top flight of English football. Now chairmen celebrate by lighting Cuban cigars with special UEFA thousand pound notes.

Such is the allure of the Champions League that even the FA Cup has been terminally marginalised. Once routinely hailed as the greatest club knockout competition in the world, it's now viewed as a trifling run-out for the stiffs by most of England's top clubs. Reserve sides that, thanks to UEFA's European player mountain, are still good enough to win the competition on a yearly basis. Cheers, Champions League!

7) It's ruined the global game too
Like some dirty great, Master Card logo-emblazoned black hole, the Champions League has sucked all the surprise and mystique out of football. Gone are the days when sides from even the more fashionable quarters of Europe could arrive on these shores and dazzle and delight with hitherto unknown world class talents. Anyone in Europe even remotely capable of kicking a ball from one side of the pitch to the other is analysed to death on a fortnightly basis.

And it's not just club football: remember those dead-eyed global superstars wandering aimlessly around the pitches of South Africa last summer like so many Nike-clad zombies? That's the Champions League's fault too.

8) It clogs up our fixture lists - and our backpages with moaning managers
I have a solution that will cut in a stroke the fixture congestion that habitually blights the spring months of Messrs Ferguson, Wenger, Ancelotti and - new! for this season! - Redknapp. Nobody wants to hear it, but here it is all the same: reduce the number of English teams that qualify for the Champions League to one and scrap the interminable group stages.

So liberated will at least three of that quartet instantly feel that they might even start taking the Carling Cup seriously again.

Don't worry, you can thank me later.

9) That bloody anthem
When dictionaries become - literally - all-singing multimedia affairs, the OED will be able to dispense with the definition of 'hubris' altogether and replace it with a blast of UEFA's hateful adaptation of Handel's 'Zadok the Priest'. The English portions of its lyrics include such humble exaltations as 'The main event!', 'These are the champions!' and the climactic refrain of 'The Best! The Great Teams! The Champions!'

Just about justifiable for the final, perhaps. Not so apposite for, say, tomorrow night's less than mouth-watering match-up between CFR Cluj-Napoca and Basle. Still, never mind the quality, feel the width!

10) I'm jealous
Alright, I'll admit it. As with anyone who doesn't support one of Europe's top teams, I'm secretly eaten up with envy every Tuesday and Wednesday evening.

After taking my wife on a tour of the Nou Camp while on honeymoon in Barcelona (hey - who said romance is dead?), I remember being consumed both by sadness that I would almost certainly never see my club play a competitive match there and jealousy of those fans who take annual away trips to Europe's great stadia as a given. An inconvenience, even.

Frankly, for most of us, even a trip to MSK Zilina would seem like an access all areas pass to the promised land. That still doesn't make it right, though.

What do you think of the Champions League? Let us know by leaving a comment below...

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