Undaunted by the annual snore-fest which the Champions’ League group stages have become, Uefa are contemplating a third European competition to add to that and the second-rate Europa league.
As football fans snoozed through the tedious midweek games, I suspect the last thing many of them were dreaming about was another collection of mind-numbing matches, where the sole object seems to be to extract as much television cash as possible for Uefa.
The Champions League has become a playground for Europe’s super rich and is in danger of turning off a generation of football fans, scunnered by its gilded exclusivity.
With a few exceptions it has become a private members’ club with the sole object of generating industrial sums of cash and prestige for those with the wealth to be invited to the party.
The very name is a misnomer.
How can a Champions Leaguefeature teams who have not wontheir league?
Yet, in a headlong rush for riches, Uefa embarked on this deeply flawed concept without regard for the integrity of football.
In England in a week when both Manchester clubs and Arsenal proved to be boys among men, with only Chelsea managing a win against Israeli opposition there was more concern over the possibility of losing their fourth Champions League place than any genuine concern over the continuing distress of the quality of their domestic league football.
In Scotland we have long since given up any realistic hope of making an impression in the world of football’s super rich.
Celtic’s regular failure to qualify for the group stages is a recognition that it really is all about the money at that rarefied level.
The Europa League is actually more entertaining in many ways than its more illustrious brother, yet, it has been a graveyard for Scottish club ambitions.
With recent outlandish journeys like Aberdeen’s near 7,000-mile round trip to Kazakhstan and St Johnstone’s 5,000-mile round trip to Armenia, a cup which is a pale shadow of its previously well-respected predecessor, the Uefa Cup, is a miserable consolation prize to the main event.
Now the prospect has been discussed of a third European tournament for teams failing to get through the qualifying rounds of the Champions League or the second-tier Europa League.
The possibility of the cup being reserved for teams from the smaller countries, like Scotland, Norway or Holland, who do not make the group stages of the Champions League, is also under consideration.
It is a dubious double consolation prize without any merit and fails to address the increasingly unbridgeable gap between football’s mega rich and the rest.
The days when clubs of modest means, such as Aberdeen and Dundee United, could make an impression on European football are long gone.
With Uefa’s headlong rush to ensure that the wealthy clubs are kept content and well fed, those days will never return unless there is a football revolution from the game’s proletariat.
That, though, won’t happen. Football sold its soul a long time ago, but the wealthy clubs think the price was worth paying.