A few weeks ago I was sitting down to eat the neighbour’s cat (it’s OK, I’m an immigrant) when I saw something even more off-putting – The Uefa Champions League’s X (Twitter) video entitled The dawn of a new era. This 30-second clip was an attempt to soft-launch the European Cup format which starts next week.
They’d hired a good set of ex-pros: Luís Figo, Gianluigi Buffon, Robbie Keane (who presumably has supported the new 36-team league system since he was a small boy) are there looking confused. It culminates with Zlatan Ibrahimovic ready to conduct an orchestra. “Who wrote this?” he asks. In walks Uefa’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, in impossibly shiny shoes. “I did,” he says, arms outstretched, before folding them and smiling.
Why is he front and centre of this advert? It is true that some – not all – younger fans support the player over the team but is there some realm of the internet I am yet to discover where people just want to see football’s biggest administrators in shiny, tapered suits? Who wore it best? Gianni or Aleksander?
It is healthy to be sceptical of those who run football: their track record isn’t great over the years. And now Ceferin wants to write the theme tune and sing the theme tune. Perhaps he will decide to stay on for one (or two) more cycles after all.
As a human I’m open-minded, but as a football fan I obviously hate change, so I wasn’t disappointed to be able to conclude that this terrible advert meant the whole format was a disaster even before a ball has been kicked.
And there are reasons to be concerned. More games in an already bloated fixture list – player welfare, football’s increasing carbon footprint. A sop to the big clubs in an attempt to fend off the European Super League. No guarantees of the promised fewer dead rubbers. A league where you don’t play everyone else. A league table with 36 teams – whose screen is big enough for that?
I found myself becoming some kind of Champions League group stage ultra, despite spending much of the past 20 years being at best indifferent to it. Like all football, sometimes it was good, sometimes it was boring.
I had closed my mind. Fortunately the Guardian Football Weekly contributor Mark Langdon from the Racing Post was on hand to pry it open again.
Playing eight teams rather than three is more interesting. Fans get more fun away trips. Teams will play two opponents from the same seeded pot, which means more “big” games but also more winnable games for the smaller sides. A lot of fancied teams may only make the playoff round, which could make it pretty exciting.
Before this compelling intervention, my reaction was the perfect example of the generational conflict all fans experience. We find any new development jarring with the game we fell in love with when we were 10 years old – proud to tell people younger than us that those were the best years, simpler times. But simultaneously we roll our eyes at the people who came before us who claim football was better before we fell in love with it.
Clearly it’s an oversimplification, but those fans who want to embrace nostalgia but not totally dismiss anything new can find themselves in an uncomfortable no-man’s land between the dinosaurs and the hipsters. It’s a musical waiting to happen. Richard Keys and Andy Gray stomping around the stage laughing at xG while Opta Joe tries to repel them with an iPad, some analytics and some very long Athletic articles.
From a broadcaster’s point of view, a healthy scepticism to new things is a good thing. You have to be true to yourself but also bear in mind that you have a vested interest in being employed for the next 30 years or so. Moving with the times matters. XG took me a while – it’s clearly imperfect but it can be useful.
In a very dry moment while looking ahead to this weekend’s games, I was drawn to a Jérémy Doku stat about “ball carries” – a phrase that doesn’t naturally roll off my tongue. The BBC Sport website tells me that the Belgian winger has “progressed the ball upfield 747.8 metres via ball carries in the Premier League this season, almost 300m more than any other player”. Brighton’s Jan Paul van Hecke is second with 457.3m.
Is this interesting? It probably is. He’s running with the ball a considerable amount more than anyone else. What does it mean? He’s good at dribbling. It’s easier to do that playing for Manchester City. Notable perhaps that he has licence from Pep Guardiola to do it significantly more than any of his teammates. And yet there is a sense that football may not need someone to count how many metres Van Hecke is progressing the ball each game.
It isn’t a conclusion that will go viral, but the reality is that different people want different things from the game. Marvel at Van Hecke’s ball carries or don’t. Both are fine. And it is totally acceptable to view your vintage through rose-coloured specs.
Interestingly, when it comes to the Champions League, there is a small group of us born in the late 70s/early 80s whose seminal years of learning the game coincided with the European ban for English clubs. The European Cup wasn’t even a thing. You didn’t see it, Saint and Greavesie didn’t talk about it. It didn’t exist. If anyone is going to be open-minded about next week, it should be us. Time to open my mind, even if I want the players to upstage the suits when the games start, however controversial that may be.
