Now that this whole international break silliness is out of theway, it's Champions League time again. You have to give Uefa credit.They "get" timing. By drawing out the competition's Round of 16 overfour weeks, rather than the usual two, they guaranteed maximumexposure for every club.
Then, they give us a three-week break to whet the appetite beforehitting us with Champions League football in four of the next fiveweeks. (Oh, and what happens in the midweek, April 19 and 20, withno Champions League games? Why, only Spurs v Arsenal in the PremierLeague and Real Madrid v Barcelona in the Copa del Rey.)
The scheduling gods evidently got this one right. Because afterthe semi-final stage, you get three and a half weeks off to wrap upthe various leagues and build hype before the final at Wembley onMay 28.
Sounds good to me. The purists, of course, continue to grumbleabout how great things were in the days of the old European Cup: nogroup stages, straight knockout all the way through. Was it thatgood? Well, it certainly was fraught with controversy and violence.Think back 20 years. One quarter-final, between Red Star Belgradeand Dynamo Dresden, was abandoned following rioting by the EastGerman fans.
Another, the now-infamous "floodlight" game between Marseille andAC Milan, was abandoned after the Rossoneri refused to take thepitch.
Back then, all European football was crammed on a singleWednesday night. Which meant that, even with the best of intentions,you weren't going to see more than one or two games, usually withjingoistic commentators who knew little about the foreign oppositionand managers who generally knew even less. (Yes, it was the pre-internet era). Sure, it was exotic, in the way that watching Spanishtelly while on holiday on the Costa del Sol might have been exotic.
But while you may have caught the occasional gem, usually whensome superstar did something special against a British side, much ofit was incomprehensible to all but the most extreme anorak.
Today, for all the Premier League hype, it's a safe bet thatfootball fans in England can name more of Barcelona's starting XIthan those of Wolves or Blackpool. We rarely "discover" playerswatching the Champions League, at least not by the time the knockoutphases roll around. In the same way that the continent is no longeras weird or as scary a place for people from these shores as it wasa few decades ago, the Champions League stands as a successfulexample of European integration and globalisation.
The one flaw this year - if you want to nitpick - is that the twobest sides in Europe won't meet in the final. In what has been anoff-season for English clubs, you'd have to be pretty flag-waving toargue that Barcelona and Real Madrid don't rank first and second onthe continental scale. But that's fine. We can live with that.Drawing rather than seeding has its benefits too, though it might befun to wonder what the quarter-finals would have looked like if Uefahad used their club coefficient ranking to seed the teams. We couldhave had Manchester United v Schalke and Inter v Real Madrid in onehalf of the draw, and Barcelona v Tottenham and Chelsea v ShaktarDonetsk in the other. Not perfect, but at least it might have servedup a "Clasico" in the final at Wembley.
American ownership in the Premier League has been something of amixed bag. The less said about Tom Hicks and George Gillett atLiverpool, the better. The Glazer family maintained success butpiled heaps of debt on Manchester United. Derby County's owner tookover a relegated club and, three years later, they're still there,in the Championship. Randy Lerner took over Aston Villa, spent bigin the Martin O'Neill era and now has relegation worries with GerardHoullier.
Yet Roma is decidedly tickled pink at the prospect of its veryown US owner. Thomas Di Benedetto is on the verge of buying the cash-strapped club and he's been saying all the right things, sometimeswith a poetic twist: "Roma is a princess... I will make her myqueen."
Di Benedetto has plenty of experience in sport via hisinvolvement in New England Sports Ventures, the group which owns theBoston Red Sox and Liverpool (though he divested his shares in thelatter to comply with Uefa regulations). He views Roma as theproverbial sleeping giant and, in terms of fan base, catchment areaand media interest, they undoubtedly are. (Few clubs could mustermore than a million fans on a hot summer day the way Roma did whenit last won the Scudetto a decade ago.)
The question is whether he can get the fan base to buy into hisplan, beginning with what is sure to be a traumatic move away fromthe Stadio Olimpico (whose only saving grace is that it's big,central and looks good from a distance; in every other sense it'swholly inadequate in the modern era) to a yet-to-be-built groundsomewhere else.
In recent years, the Bundesliga model has overtaken the PremierLeague version in the eyes of many in terms of how a league shouldbe run. Balanced budgets, no single investor with more than 49%, lowticket prices, drinking in your seat or, if you prefer to stand,that's cool too. And, of all the German clubs, few are revered asmuch as St Pauli, with their skull and crossbones emblem and lefty,artsy fans who are both noisy and non-violent; they are the ultimatetwo fingers up to corporate sports entertainment. (Until last seasonthey even had a flamboyantly gay chairman named Corny Littmann.) OnFriday night, however, during their 2-0 home loss to Schalke, a StPauli fan hurled a full cup of beer at the referee's assistant,striking him on the head. The match was abandoned and furtherpunishment is sure to come. One incident is not enough to call intoquestion the "German model" (or, indeed, the St Pauli model). Butyou do get the sense that there is a certain loss of innocence afterFriday's events.
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