as the footballing world recovers from the seismic shock of a jose mourinho-led team defending a lead (ok maybe it wasn't that seismic), my eyes are already trained on tomorrow night.
that the champions league is the world's premier club competition is not in doubt. the standard is the highest, the audience is the largest, and the prestige is indisputable. but sometimes, it lacks, well, excitement. the hype is better than the event itself. and i'll hold my hands up here- scroll through past posts and you'll read previews which are barely coherent, such is the excitement bursting from them. that's all part of being a fan, and i make no apologies for it.
but on the morning after, as i sit on the train and think about the round of 16, i'm hit by a feeling that all the results (assuming barcelona and bordeaux win through tonight) were fairly easy to call. the same cannot be said for the copa libertadores where economic forces ensure a revolving door of heavyweights, with few clubs maintaining a presence in the upper echelons of the competition for more than a season or so. the result is a lower standard of play, but more excitement.
all of which is leading me, as i ponder these things on my way to work, towards a somewhat controversial conclusion- that the europa league might be the perfect cup competition. pick yourselves back up off the floor, this one is going to take some explaining.
to start with, you'll need to get on board with the ridiculous length of the thing, which this season began in july. this is a bit of a leap for some people, but for a borderline obsessive such as myself, it's fine, good even. you'll need to get beyond the awful branding of the competition, which (it sometimes seems) was spewed out of a drunken friday afternoon marketing meeting somewhere in switzerland. basically, you need to ignore all the terrible things that surround the europa league, and just watch the matches.
there's an urgency, that some would call desperation, to most of the teams. an urgency that has been sadly absent in many champions league matches this season. there's the fallen european giants looking to reassert themselves (benfica, marseille, anderlecht), the nouveau riche of european football (rubin kazan, wolfsburg), unfashionable teams playing some surprisingly sexy football (fulham, standard liege, hamburg, lille), clubs for whom the europa league represents the only chance at salvaging some success from a shocking season (liverpool, sporting clube de portugal, atletico madrid, juventus), and clubs who should be in the champions league but conspired to not qualify (valencia, werder bremen, panathinaikos).
see that? i just categorised all 16 remaining teams, and pinpointed exactly why they are taking this competition seriously. in less than 200 words. that's fucking journalism. in all seriousness, the europa league means a lot to these clubs and their fans, not least because all but 2 or 3 (sorry fulham) still have a pretty good shout of winning the thing. compare that to the better-loved champions league. there is a lot to admire about barcelona (they are, by my reckoning, the best club side the world has seen since arrigo sacchi's ac milan in 1989), but their dominance (note that i wrote their dominance, not their play itself, which is breathtaking) is only exciting in the jumping off the sofa when messi does something amazing kind of way. admittedly that is still pretty exciting, but in a purely competitive sense, the champions league ain't got shit on its supposedly poorer relation. in my opinion anyway.
update, 8.25pm thursday- once again, sorry fulham. for a different reason this time.
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