Bigger than the World Cup?

There was a piece on CNN this morning that highlighted the monolithic status now attached to the Champions league final. Remarkably it was featured on the Business rather than sport section perhaps reflecting football's true place in the modern world. It detailed how one team competing in Rome's Stadio Olimpico would earn $93 million dollars. That would be the losers then.

Regardless of who wins or loses tonight the economic importance of the Champion's League final seems to now outweigh the prestige of World Cup Final; who wants to win an abstract concept when you can win cold hard cash? It is esimated that the winners will gain an extra $70 million dollars each in tourism for their city mainly from Asian football fans who ultimatley pledge their allegiance to the most sucessful teams.

So who will receive this crock of gold? Man United have been flawless after some minor problems at the start of the season and Ronaldo, in all his smarmy, oiled hair glory, is recognised but still despised as one of the two greatest footballers on the planet. Lionel Messi is the other and is perhaps the antithesis of everything Ronaldo represents. As Paul Hayward brilliantly points out here Ronaldo's preening, strutting vanity is in sharp contrast to the shyness of Messi. You get the sense that if Messi could play football bare footed without any cameras or pre and post match build up he would be much happier but for Ronaldo this would be an acute form of torture; after all who would pick up his elaborate winks then? How would audiences see his melodramatic displays of continental gesturing?

It is difficult watching such a talented player that is so difficult to like. Ronaldo isn't exactly troubled by public apathy in exactly the way that Messi seems to be universally liked. His physical stature automatically make him the underdog in any contest of strength, meaning animmediate outpouring of sympathy. But it is perhaps the way he deals with this disparity in physical gifts that most endears him to the public. Messi is a tiny matador buzzing in and around the cumbersome feet of players designed to run and kill all over Europe. His movement seems to be made from a series of complex mathamatical diagrams constantly intersecting at the finest and most acute of angles. He rarley passes the ball more than 20 feet and it his deadly reverse through balls in and around the penalty area that will really scare Manchester United. In comparison Ronaldo is a thoroughbread racehorse running in straight lines and smashing holes in opposition defences often with the same aplomb.

If there is any justice in the world Barca will win. Blessed with the cream of a generation of football talent who play with the abandon of players that know their way is fundamentally right, they typify everything that is good about football. They elect a president in what is a footballing microcosm of a proper democracy and give the space on their shirts away to Unicef's logo for free. Manchester United are run by transatlantic tyrants beholden to no-one, especially not an electorate of paid up members, and sell their sponsership to an insurance company, run on bad debt and bankrupting the American economy, for $56 million dollars a year. Let art triumph over strength and let nobility triumph over profiteering. But mainly- let Barca win.