One week from now, most eyes of the football world will turn to Lisbon for the UEFA Champions League final between city rivals Real Madrid, gunning for La Decima and Atletico Madrid, hoping to win their first.It is, without a doubt, a mouth-watering matchup thats eagerly awaited by fans of the two sides and neutrals alike. But once the match is over, you wont even have people waiting for the dust to settle in the Stadium of Light in Lisbon, as the focus will shift to theevent of the year the World Cup.For a period of one month (and more!) starting June 12th, the World Cup will dominate the headlines and the chatter on the street, classrooms, offices and pubs all around the planet.Talk about the quality of the Champions League all you want, but the World Cup trumps it all. The quadrennial World Cup has always maintained the upper hand over the annual Champions League.Here are five reasons why this is so.
#1 The difficulty of reaching it
Let’s face it, making it to a World Cup is a hugely daunting task.
There are loads of players out there who have toiled hard in between strenuous club duties, racking up frequent flyer miles playing qualifiers, all while dreaming of lining up to listen to their national anthem play out in great stadiums in a World Cup match – only to slip at the final hurdle and fail to make it.
There is much more than agony in the hearts of these players when this happens, because they know and are trying hard to digest the enormity of the moment. An opportunity to play at the greatest stage of football only comes once every four years, and one may have just missed their last one.
Ask the Japanese players who missed out on the 1994 World Cup after conceding a 90th minute goal, they’ll tell. It would have been their country’s first World Cup. Only two members of the team would go on to make it to France ‘98.At a club fighting for a Champions League place, things are different. Of course, missing out on the best club tournament of all will be tough on the team; but for a player, if he’s good enough, he could just move to a Champions League club. It’s as simple as that. We hear of many cases where players demand a move to a bigger club to test themselves against the best players on those ‘European nights.’
Sometimes, a player whose club just got relegated could find himself playing in the Champions League a few months later with a different club. Like Alan Smith, for example. He was in tears when his team Leeds United went down in May 2004, but three months later, he was scoring goals for Manchester United in the Champions League.
Even if a player stays with a team which just missed out on a Champions League spot, he has next season to look forward to – the team could get the spot in the matter of a year.
It’s not so simple at the international level. There are no transfer windows or protracted multi-million pound deals. As far as FIFA rules go, a player who has already played a competitive match at senior level for one country cannot change his allegiance to another. Whether you get to the World Cup or not, you stick to your team.
Like Ryan Giggs, who fought it out over many World Cup qualifying campaigns for Wales, yet could never qualify. He couldn’t jump over to England, even after having played there since the age of 12.And because it is so difficult to make it to a World Cup, players play their hearts out when they reach it. They never know if they’ll get another crack at it.
#2 It\'s not about the money
In club football, fortunes change fast if you have the dough. If you have money like Monaco’s Dmitry Rybolovlev or Manchester City’s Sheikh Mansour, you can just spend your way to the Champions League; it doesn’t really matter if you have just been promoted or have been perennial mid-table lovers.But whoever you may be, you can’t walk into East Timor’s FA headquarters and announce your world record signings of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi as new East Timorese players ready to take the national team to Russia for the 2018 World Cup. Nope, it simply doesn’t work that way. You’ve to make do with what you have.
And so, when a national team qualifies for the World Cup, it is an indicator of how well footballing talent is located and developed in the country. Consequently, it becomes a matter of national pride. India may be richer than Ivory Coast but we sure know the difference in standing between the two when it comes to the World Cup.
#3 The shorter, the better
When it comes to duration, the World Cup may seem too short, winding up in one month compared to the Champions League’s nine. But that’s what adds to its allure, especially for many occasional football viewers who only turn to football once every four years.
For them, that one month of action-packed fast-paced drama represents the best of football and transforms each of them overnight into experts of the game. They’d be too disinterested to sit around following a tournament that takes the course of a whole season to finish. In one month, lives of people around the world come to a standstill as they witness the battle to be the best at the temple of world football. Football is suddenly in vogue everywhere and everyone discusses the World Cup throughout the month. All this excitement would not be there if the duration was longer. This does not happen for the Champions League.
The shorter duration of the World Cup and the consequent one-legged ties also mean that players face make-or-break ties on every matchday. Even group stage matches are knockout matches. Excitement increases further.
#4 Legends are made at the World Cup
Before the advent of satellite TV and the internet, the World Cup was the only place where footballing legends were made. Pele and Maradona would not have acheived the status they have today had it not been for their performances at the World Cup. Neither of them won the Champions League (Pele never even played in Europe).
And although Franz Beckenbauer and Johan Cruyff both won the Champions League, it was the World Cup which put them on the world map. The World Cup has made legends out of Zico, Paolo Rossi, Roger Milla, Gheorghe Hagi, Ronaldo and Zinedine Zidane. It is hard to think of the Champions League having an impact of a similar magnitude on the status of players worldwide.
Today, of course, many fans would point to Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Zlatan Ibrahimovic – none of them have made a genuine impression on a World Cup. The fact is, most pundits today rate them a rung lower that the likes of Pele and Maradona because of that very reason!
#5 The sheer spectacle of it!
In the realm of pure drama, the World Cup wins hands down. The Champions League fails to get close – things are just incomparable, to be brutally honest. Over the years the World Cup has given us more unforgettable moments than the Champions League can ever muster.
Now don’t get me wrong, we have seen some great European matches but putting things into perspective, for every Liverpool-Milan (2005) and United–Bayern (1999) the World Cup offers a mix of the Maracanazo (1950), the Miracle of Bern (1954), the Eusebio blitz against North Korea (1966), the Match of the Century (1970) and of course, the Maradona show against the English (1986).
For every Zidane volley (CL 2002), the World Cup has a ‘perfect’ Carlos Alberto goal (1970), a sublime strike from a teenage Pele (1958), Maradona’s Goal of the Century (1986), Dennis Bergkamp’s glorious touch and finish (1998) and Esteban Cambiasso’s 25-pass magical goal (2006). There are just way too many to recount.
The treasure chest of great World Cup moments opens up to reveal incidents that evoke different emotions for different people (depending on who you support!). From the admirably heroic to the utterly tragic, the World Cup has seen moments that have made heroes and villains out of people who are in the pursuit of national glory.
These players seem to acquire an uncanny knack for the unexpected and the impossible when they put on their national jerseys for a World Cup. It is because they push themselves to the limit. They know the value of the World Cup – what it can do for them and their countries. This is why we see such drama.
This is why Luis Suarez risks a red card to clear the ball off the line with his hands. This is also why the likes of Marco Materazzi and Diego Simeone provoke Zinedine Zidane and David Beckham to get them sent off. You may or may not be in favour of everything that happens, but fact is, the unexpected always happen at a World Cup.
Off the pitch, the World Cup generates a kind of excitement that is unparalleled in sport. It is not just the host nation that revels in the spirit of the World Cup. It is a global phenomenon. The excitement starts once it’s World Cup year – Panini stickers, the score prediction contests, the endless debates over who should go to the World Cup and who should not, the official song – it seems that the World Cup is everywhere.
The countries who are in the tournament will undoubtedly be watching with bated breath, but even those who haven’t qualified get to participate in the fun.
In Kerala, die-hard fans of Brazil and Argentina start their preparation well before the start of the Cup, with flex boards glorifying one team and taunting the other. Things often get heated and even break into fights! In Bangladesh, there are fierce protests against powercuts that disrupt World Cup telecast.
Can you compare this to the Champions League?
There may be a lot of people who haven’t even heard of the Champions League, but everyone knows what the World Cup is. It’s the greatest show on earth, that’s what it is.
