Surreal, dreamlike, confusing: a night watching 18 Champions League ties

The Guardian

30-01-2025

Raspberry Beret by Prince, Stayin' Alive by the Bee Gees, American Pie by Don McLean, All I Want is You by U2, the theme tune to Sesame Street: these are all in their different ways excellent pieces of music. But as part of playlists broadcast without end and at high volume, all have been used by the US army in psychological warfare – demonstrating that too much of a good thing is not just possible but, at extreme levels, absolutely excruciating. Watching the manic conclusion to the Champions League group stage on Wednesday brought those playlists to mind, as I debated whether I was being entertained or encouraged to run screaming from my house.
The trend in sport for many years has been to make competitions bigger, longer, more drawn out, and at first the new 36-team Champions League format felt like another step on this tiresome journey. But the widely acknowledged need for the final games of a group stage to be played at the same time forced tournament organisers into a temporary swerve in a very different direction. If you watched the final round of fixtures traditionally, soberly, one game at a time, even without breaks or pauses it would take you one entire day and five additional hours, including stoppage time.
I tried to watch it as Uefa intended, crammed into two hours on a Wednesday evening. And it was very compelling, in a Lynchian way: dreamlike, surreal, at times extremely confusing. I consumed it with a creeping sense of dread that this might actually be seen as a success. If others run with the idea it is only a matter of time before the FA Cup third-round draw involves a single ball being drawn on each of 64 television stations at the same time, followed by a pause of several days while everyone tries to make sense of it.
Some fans at PSV Eindhoven's Philips Stadion are forced to watch games from behind a clear Perspex screen, and as Liverpool prepared to take the penalty that opened the scoring there, just under half an hour into the game, they were shown beating their hands against it. I very strongly sympathised, my own screens saved from similar violence only by the fact I was by then experiencing some kind of catatonic reaction to extreme substance abuse, the substance involved being football.
Later, early in the second half as Manchester City flirted for a while with elimination, every time the camera cut to Pep Guardiola he seemed to be displaying symptoms of extreme distress: on one occasion he was pacing about, head in hands, muttering to himself; on another he was viciously assaulting an icebox. Again, I sympathised. Watching a dozen games, monitoring another six, I had a vague and sketchy idea of what was happening in lots of places without having a genuinely clear idea of what was happening anywhere, least of all my own head.
'I hope you've got your popcorn ready, this will be a night like no other,' said Matt Smith as TNT Sports' broadcast commenced an hour before the real action started. 'Eighteen games kicking off at the same time, and the only place to see it all is right here.' Right there was, in fact, the place to see only one of them: seeing the rest would involve accessing a further 17 places while for the exasperated there was a 19th where an attempt was being made to keep abreast of everything.
To cope with this unique challenge it looked a bit like TNT had just spread pundits around a big, shiny house full of cameras. Owen Hargreaves and Martin Keown discussed Arsenal on a sofa while Joe Cole and Peter Crouch sat at a table to talk about Liverpool, Ally McCoist and James Horncastle discussed the night's possibilities while perched around an island on bar stools and Rio Ferdinand and Joleon Lescott stood outside to opine about City. You half expected a disembodied Geordie voice to tell you that Michael Owen was in the diary room.
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I ranked the games in likely order of interest and positioned them around my various screens on that basis, with a key so I could find them when I needed them: Inter v Monaco was in the top right of one screen, Barcelona v Atalanta on the bottom left of another, Stuttgart v PSG on my phone, Aston Villa v Celtic on a tablet. Desperately trying not to miss anything important my eyes skimmed across the scene in a constant state of fear and panic. Inevitably I missed a lot of important things: I didn't see City fall behind on the stroke of half-time, but immediately promoted them from the bottom left of screen three to the top left of screen two and relegated Liverpool in their place, as a result of which I also didn't see Liverpool falling behind on the stroke of half-time.
Gradually the situation simplified. With 15 minutes to go I reached a state of sweet, sweet clarity: only four games were still competitive and potentially crucial, at City, Sporting, Dinamo Zagreb and Barcelona. City scored a third and it was down to three. Final whistles started to sound. Soon it was all on Dinamo and how many goals they could score in the closing minutes against 10-man Milan, which turned out to be none. They finished outside the playoffs on goal difference, and at the Etihad Brugge, one place above them, finally celebrated. Mateo Kovacic, player of the match in that game, was asked about City's task in the playoffs. 'It doesn't matter,' he said. 'Everything in the Champions League is tough.' And don't I know it.