The Champions League and a richness a Super League could never achieve

All the riches in the world couldn’t buy the culmination of almost seven decades of history that Europe’s premier competition already has, writes Miguel Delaney

General view during the warm up before the match of a Champions League t-shirt (Pool via REUTERS)

Some of the Chelsea players sat watching the Anfield Champions League quarter-final last week as intently as anyone else, and were almost gleeful at the end. That wasn’t anything to do with Liverpool. It was because some had never played Real Madrid in a competitive game before. The club had never drawn Real Madrid in the competition before.

That is one of the curiosities of the modern Champions League, given both are almost ever-presents, but also one of its beauties.

It still has that energising unpredictability, that element of chance that charges the significance of any game. There’s that sense that it finally falls on you, a moment in time.

This is what the Super League threatened to obliterate, as well as the wider football pyramid. It would have brought a never-ending present of the same clubs and fixtures, with that also affecting the sport’s future and history.

That is something worth reflecting on, as we finally reach the stage of the Champions League that most captures the imagination, after the most extraordinary week.

When we watch these vaunted European fixtures, we are not just watching two modern super-clubs, a product of the present that the Super League we would have been.

We are watching a culmination of almost seven decades of history, that imbues every moment with more gravitas, more prestige - more emotion.

The teams involved aren’t just striving to win this season. They are striving to become a part of football history.

There’s a richness that the Super League’s financial wealth could never hope to achieve.

This is why coaches like Thomas Tuchel and Pep Guardiola talk of it as a “dream”.

It is a competition that has inspired people since childhood. That’s the magic of the games, the magic of that anthem. That theme was only introduced in 1992, but the fact it is based on a classical piece of Handel music reflects the sense of history to the Champions League - that it goes way beyond what it is.

When Manchester United play a European fixture, for example, it is not just a wealthy super club taking part in a big event. It is part of an arresting wider story, with all the real-life emotion that involves, and on which clubs’ identities are really built. United's has involved true tragedy, and glory, a sense of quest that means it is about so much more than that trophy.

Sir Alex Ferguson articulated this perfectly in the first rebuke to what his club’s owners were trying to do.

Real Madrid have often encapsulated this, as the club more associated with the trophy than any other. It was why there was something so sacrilegious about them being the club to lead its potential destruction. It is why a fixture against them carries such prestige.

Chelsea have of course gone through their own search for the grail in this competition.

That is now what Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain - for all the debates about their ownerships - are enduring. Mauricio Pochettino and Guardiola so badly want this. They illustrate the human sporting dimension to the economic political discussions, and it is the same with the competition itself.

The modern Champions League has many problems, some of them - like the gross inequality of prize money distribution - directly leading to the plot for the Super League.

But at its core is something pure, something that represents what the playing of sport is really about: the emotion, the peril, the sense of jeopardy, the sense of glory.

That is worth remembering. It is certainly worth playing for.