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If Madrid wasn’t football mad enough, things have certainly gone into overdrive this week. Yesterday I had barely got off the plane at Madrid’s Barajas airport when I was assaulted by a barrage of advertising for Saturday’s UEFA Champions League Final, and it didn’t stop there.
You quite simply can’t escape the continental final and if you didn’t like football you would not want to be in the Spanish capitol this week.
So while Australia goes into a frenzy ahead of the World Cup, Madrid and most of Europe are going Champions League mad.
It’s had me thinking which is the more important tournament – the Champions League or the World Cup?
The UK version of FourFourTwo magazine had a debate on this very point in their latest edition.
In it, former England international and two-times European Cup-winner Viv Anderson argued that, “To win the World Cup is still the ultimate challenge for any footballer anywhere on the planet. It makes the Champions League pale in comparison.”
Meanwhile Liverpool fan, Gareth Roberts stated the Champions League is more important because fans of England’s biggest clubs feel more of an association with their club sides than their national team.
While that’s an English perspective on this global debate, what about the rest of the world?
For me it is clear that the UEFA Champions League is where the most innovative and advanced football is played. The very nature of club football makes this possible.
So if you want to see the best football on offer, the Champions League is the place to go.
Yet despite all of this, the World Cup still retains its mystique. Sport has a unique ability to unite the masses and there is no tournament where this is truer then at the World Cup.
Where the Champions League, despite its higher quality, tends to only hold the interest of football fans, the World Cup captivates people right across the globe.
The World Cup hype already building weeks out from the tournament in Australia is a great example of that. While for a country like Brazil, as Rio Di Jenero based football journalist Tim Vickery often says, “the World Cup is a matter of national pride.”
I’m not sure if the UEFA Champions League could one day overtake the World Cup in terms of prestige and popularity, but it does seem possible.
Yet for now one thing is clear: when pundits and fans talk about players like Lionel Messi, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo the consensus is thus: they will only be considered truly great players once they really do it at a World Cup.
That might seem a little unfair, but for the time being it settles the debate for me.
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