Lionel Messi is one of the superstars of the tournament that viewers can only see on TV
Photo: ALBERT GEA / REUTERSAn old and frequently used proverb claims that necessity leads to invention. One can justifiably doubt that Uefa and the top clubs FC Bayern, Barcelona or ManCity that have shaped them would have got into real trouble due to the corona pandemic. At least the Champions League, the fattest cow in the Uefa stable, has had a tight schedule due to the month-long game break - and the idea of mastering this tight schedule with a compact final tournament in one place, a Final Eight, is the best idea, which the European Football Association had for a long time.
He didn't have to be particularly creative for that. After all, the mode with knockout games is the one that has electrified people at World Cup and European Championship tournaments for a long time. Bang or fall, progress or elimination, or as the Dutch football general and philosopher Louis van Gaal put it so permanently: death or gladiolus.
Bayern boss Karl-Heinz Rummenigge raved about the "most exciting Champions League of all time", this formulation is of course also due to the fact that FC Bayern is not only still in the competition, but is also one of the tight favorites. In addition, Rummenigge's "The-greatest-Thrill-for-the-Fan" tone is also part of the strategy inherent in top football of selling everything, but really everything, in a profit-maximizing way. The fan that Rummenigge celebrates is not even allowed into the stadium at this event.
It is clear that without Corona, Uefa would never have come up with the idea of reducing its Champions League goods as much as it is now doing by foregoing the financially lucrative round-trip games in the quarter-finals and semi-finals. It is rather surprising that none of the officials had the idea to market the final as a home and away leg - preferably with reference to the tradition according to which this was common in the Uefa Cup for years.
Hop or top situation
Instead, we now have the hop-or-top situation in every game with the complete abolition of the home advantage and the favorites bonus to be able to reverse a defeat from the first leg. Everything is decided in one evening: Europe's big footballers duel. It doesn't get any better than that. It is almost an anecdote that what is currently probably the best team in Europe, Liverpool FC, only has to watch this showdown in Lisbon because it lost to Atletico Madrid in the round of 16. But the master coach Jürgen Klopp also finds someone who is still superior to him in terms of coaching list and coaching strategy. And that someone is called Diego Simeone.
But even without the English champions, this is a performance show of European football. This year, in which so much broke away, failed, postponed and ghosted, this tournament rose to the high point of the year in terms of football. A club EM in the true sense of the word, even without Fifa boss Gianni Infantino or one of the football waterers and gulls having turned it.
Bavaria, Barcelona, ManCity, PSG
FC Bayern against FC Barcelona, in the event of progress the Munich team may meet their ex-coach Pep Guardiola, and in the event of the final there may be a clash with Paris Saint-Germain. It all smells a bit like the Super League, like the elite group of top clubs, and of course it is, but in this case it's mainly the competition of the best.
The fact that all of this takes place without spectators, that there are clubs that no longer have top players in their ranks due to the circumstances of the transfer business because their contract only ran until June 30th, all of this casts shadows in the Stadium of Light in Lisbon . And no artificial Sky stadium sound will let you forget that a tournament is being played here in a virtual atmosphere to save the Champions League season in order to save TV revenues.
All the more painful to see Bayern crash against Barcelona, to admire Messi and Lewandowski at their skills - and to do all of this only from a distance. Nobody is there to celebrate this game, this event, these summer evenings. This tournament in particular deserves to be celebrated. The greatest artists in football meet and the Saudade spreads in the stadium, this typical kind of sadness, the Portuguese melancholy.
This tournament was not created out of selflessness, for the fun of being happy, it is a crutch of the Uefa to save in profit what can be saved and to get the sheep dry. You can know all this and should say it, and you can still look forward to this Final Eight. Because there is probably no better football to see this year.
If you want, you should enjoy this tournament. Also and especially with the knowledge that it will remain unique. The Champions League marketers will not allow anything else.
Icon: The mirror