World Cup V UEFA Champions League: Which is better?
With the next World Cup set to kick off in June this year, the debate over whether the UEFA Champions League is better than the World Cup has risen to the occasion.
Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho recently said that the Champions League is now better than the World Cup because the teams taking part are at a higher level than the national teams that cannot buy the best players. Former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson agrees with him.
There is a certain bias in this statement and it is self-serving, as Europeans have long tried to convince the world that Europe plays the best football.
I don’t agree with Mourinho because a comparison between the two competitions and a look at the figures belie his argument.
First: level of play: European clubs have the best players, but also the World Cup. But football is a game and the team with the best players is not necessarily the best team.
The best test we have is the Club World Cup when the winner of the Champions League faces the champions of other confederations and here the Europeans have only won 5 out of 9 tournaments.
The World Cup and Champions League have strong teams and teams with weak squads. But the former has a higher level of football because it has all the best players playing for their respective nations and each country has its own style of play. The teams play with a deep commitment to the flag knowing that the best achievement is winning the trophy and being crowned the best in the world.
On the other hand, in Champions League teams there is a mixture of players from different countries with different styles of play and the players have no connection to the club they represent except for a contract and you can always move to a new club in the next season
For example, with Brazil, Neymar plays in a free-flowing style with the freedom to move around the pitch. But when he plays for Barcelona, he is stuck on the wing and relegated to helping Messi, so he is less effective.
Second, Universal vs City Based: The World Cup spans the globe, including more than 200 countries in Europe, Africa, North and South America, Asia, and Oceania. It showcases the different styles of soccer played around the world, adding to its competitiveness and color.
In addition to this, FIFA now plans to expand the tournament to ensure underrepresented areas such as the Caribbean and Oceana Football Union region a full tournament slot.
In contrast, the Champions League is limited to just 32 cities in Europe and where fan support is largely confined to the city where the club is based.
Third, Popularity: Due to its universality, the World Cup is much more popular. Thus, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa was viewed by every nation and territory in the world, including Antarctica and the Arctic Circle, and was viewed by 3.2 billion people or 46.4% of the world’s population. . The final game was watched by 909.6 million viewers (or more than a billion if those watching away from home in bars and pubs were included).
The Champions League is not even close to those figures. Just 150 million watched the last game of last season (or 360 million if you include those away from home) (Bleacher Report – Why The World Cup Will Always Be Bigger Than the Champions League, by Sam Pilger, February 26 of 2014).
Fourth, more than a game -:
(a) World Cup.
Unlike the Champions League, the World Cup is more than just a game. It is about more than just winning and losing.
It unites countries and cultures (blacks and whites in South Africa, Serbs and Croats in Bosnia) and is for many countries the only chance to give their nation some recognition in the eyes of the world.
The event creates heroes and villains, for example the players who won the World Cup in 1966 are still heroes in England and you don’t get that status by winning the Champions League.
Leave indelible memories like seeing the skills and artistry of the great Pele in 1970, Socrates in 1982 and Maradona in 1986.
The group stage of the World Cup is better than the Champions League because it has more drama as a team must win at least one game and can only lose one to qualify for the next round.
World Cup fever for the upcoming tournament has started to build. A countdown has already started for the day to day. The players fear an injury that will rule them out and feel great pride in wearing the national team shirt as evidenced by the enthusiasm with which some of them sing their anthem before a match. This cannot be matched by the Champions League anthem.
In 1 month every 4 years all peoples and cultures from all over the world converge in one host country where the games are played in a carnival-like atmosphere and the 90 minutes of football is just part of the show.
The World Cup can also confer far-reaching political benefits.
In the case of the 2018 World Cup to be held in Russia, a country caught between the old world of the cold war and the new, the event is expected to welcome Russia and open it to the new world.
Qatar, which will host the 2022 tournament, hopes to use it to optimize its economy for a post-oil and gas world and show that the Middle East is not just a region of instability.
b) Champions League.
It’s about money. An extended tournament that spans 10 months a year to win money; most games are easily forgettable as there are many weak teams like FC Basel or CSKA Moskva.
Every year the same top 10 clubs reach the quarter-finals as the gap between them and the rest is huge and thus comes down to a competition between a richer club against a richer one. In the 2011 final, billionaire Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea were amusingly referred to as the underdogs against mighty Bayern Munich.
CONCLUSION
The World Cup is better than the Champions League because the level of play is higher, it is more popular and it is more than just a game with more to offer.
A 2006 poem preview of a World Cup tournament describes its impact as follows:
close the shops,
close schools,
shut down a city
stop a war
fuels a nation
break the borders
build a hero
crush a dream
answer a prayer
and change the world
(Football Lens: Why the World Cup is better than the Champions League, by Abe Asher, October 24, 2013).
Roy Hodgson, the current England manager, best describes the difference between the two competitions when he said: “I think most players at the end of their careers would say that going to the World Cup was their finest hour. Not many will say that. “. he was playing in the Champions League group stage against Standard Liège on a Wednesday night” (Bleacher Report, Why the World Cup will always be bigger than the Champions League, etc.).
That is why the World Cup is more than a game and is the quintessential football event.
Victor A. Dixon
March 21, 2014