Clash of champions

Why the Champions League is the best football tournament in the world

To the avid soccer fan today, it is clear that the pinnacle of the game is not the World Cup, but the Champions League. A major reason is that national teams are no longer what they used to be. We would struggle to find contemporary equals of the glorious 1970 World Cup winning Brazil side, or anyone to match the brilliance of the 1974 Holland team’s Total Football.

One of the reasons for this is the growing international composition of the top club sides. Earlier, international football had greater resonance because the best players of each country played in their own domestic league. An international game was more than a mere competition to win the tournament, it was the contest of supremacy between rival football cultures. Thus, the victory of Holland over England was also in a larger sense an assertion of the superior technical skill of the Dutch league.

The overwhelming international composition of the best clubs in Europe means that rivalries of the earlier kind are all but redundant. Arsenal is the most extreme example of this seismic shift over the last two decades. Despite being one of the top English clubs, it has only one English player who can claim to be part of the first team set-up.

It is the case with almost every marquee club side. The majority of South American international players are based in Europe. La Liga and Serie A are their favourite destinations. Messi is the most important player at Barcelona, and Kaka remains indispensable to the cause of AC Milan. Gone are the days when Pele played for Santos in the prime of his career. The Latin domestic leagues only serve as stepping stones to greater riches and glories in Europe.

From all this, it becomes easy to deduce that the 16 clubs that compete in the knockout stage of the Champions League tonight boast of the most dense concentration of footballing talent on the planet. It is why international football cannot match up. It is hard to find an international team that could boast of Ronaldinho, Kaka and Beckham (Milan), Messi, Henry, Xavi, Eto’o, Dani Alves (Barcelona) or Ronaldo, Rooney, Tevez and Berbatov (United). Spain is the only national team at the moment that can match the organisation and fluidity of the best club teams. But it is revealing of the nature of club football that the maximum number of players in the Spanish national team come not from domestic giants Real Madrid or Barcelona, but English club Liverpool.

The decline of the national team is a direct result of the astounding growth of club football, both in terms of revenue and popularity. At any given time, it is likely that you will find more Manchester United fans than supporters of the Selecao. The biggest clubs are no longer bearers of simply regional aspirations, they are international corporate monoliths. The fervent support for Liverpool or Milan in corners of the Far East or other parts of the world is no longer seen as unusual or particularly striking.

With the best of resources and talent, it should not be any surprise that the premier competition between these sides often reaches levels rarely glimpsed in international competitions such as the World Cup. Of course, it also helps that club teams play more regularly than international teams. But the growing chasm between the Champions League and the World Cup is becoming more and more visible. Roy Keane had once said, “The Champions League has better football than the World Cup. The last great World Cup was in 1986, but every year in the Champions League you see better games with intense competition.”

The intense competition of the Champions League that Keane talked about finds evidence in the fact that no team has been able to successfully defend its title since its inception in 1992. Almost two decades on, nobody can really dispute its status as the best football competition in the world.

This appeared as an op-ed in The Daily Word, the paper at the Asian College of Journalism.