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Real Madrid's Cristiano Ronaldo from Portugal, left, duels for the ball with Barcelona's Xavi Hernandez. AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza
“Why would anybody want to buy a club that takes part in a two-team competition?” That was the opening to a question posed by SBS journalist Tony Palumbo on The World Game website yesterday and one might have presumed he was referring to Spain’s increasingly predictable La Liga.
Turns out Palumbo was talking about the Scottish Premier League and the fact a chap named Andrew Ellis is reputedly in talks to buy Old Firm giants Rangers.
Yet SBS’ resident Italian football fanatic could just as easily have been describing Spain’s ‘Primera División’, where either Barcelona or Real Madrid have won the past six championships contested.
Indeed, only Valencia have broken the duopoly in the past ten seasons, winning the 2003-04 title at a time when Deportivo de La Coruña also proved a formidable force up in the windswept wilds of Galicia.
And while Villarreal and Sevilla have been there or thereabouts in recent seasons, neither have looked genuinely capable of knocking Barça or Los Merengues off their gilded perches.
It’s not surprising considering the vast sums of cash spent by both clubs to mould a championship-winning squad, but the reality is that the age-old rivalry has turned Spanish football into a dreary two-horse race.
Now we get to re-live it when the pair meet in an upcoming UEFA Champions League semi-final, which will no doubt send the world’s press into paroxysms of hyperbole about the meeting of these two venerated giants.
That’s all well and good because watching Champions League football is undeniably exciting thanks to the abundance of technique, the star-studded squads and cracking atmospheres beamed into our living rooms from all corners of Europe.
And so far the Champions League has proved surprisingly resilient in terms of being dominated by one team or another, with the trophies historically shared out between a host of Spanish, Italian and English clubs.
But increasingly those clubs are starting to look wearingly familiar.
Barcelona and Manchester United are frequent visitors to the Champions League semi-final stage – in fact, this is Barça’s fourth trip in a row to the final four – although Real Madrid have an embarrasing recent record in club football’s premier tournament.
But surely the odd team out in this year’s equation is Schalke.
The Gelsenkirchen outfit sacked coach Felix Magath less than a month ago, but his successor Ralf Rangnick returned for a second spell at the club and promptly lead the Royal Blues to a 7-3 aggregate thrashing of defending European champions Inter in the quarter-finals.
And with veteran goal poacher Raúl no doubt dreaming of a showdown with former club Real Madrid in the final, the stage could be set for the biggest boilover since Porto stunned everybody by winning the 2003-04 tournament.
No one gave Schalke much of a chance to beat Inter in the quarter-finals, but beat them they did, and the Ruhrpott upstarts are now just one tie away from their biggest game of all.
When Schalke won the UEFA Cup in 1997 they were overshadowed by the fact neighbours Borussia Dortmund lifted the Champions League crown the same year.
There’ll be no such misfortune this year, although the German side invariably go into their semi-final showdown against Manchester United as rank outsiders.
Perhaps they’ll take solace from the fact Dortmund beat United in the Champions League semis en route to winning the title, although a similarly interesting statistic goes against Schalke.
Geographically speaking, the six Champions League titles since Porto’s shock triumph have been decided by clubs from the following countries: England – Spain – Italy – England – Spain – Italy.
So for those who put stock in such statistical patterns, it looks like Manchester United are due.
But for those who put their faith in the spirit of the underdog – even one bankrolled by megarich Russian gas concern Gazprom – the sentimental favourites are surely Schalke.
After all, football gets boring when the same teams win all the time.