Football wins the day

The Champions league Final held between liverpool FC and Real Madrid CF in Kiev, Ukraine was another demonstration of the dominance that Spain’s football clubs have over European football. It was however also a demonstration of how powerful the club game has become in the world, as hundreds of millions of people tuned in for this match across the world. While later-stage World Cup games will boast viewership numbers exceeding a billion, the fact that the UEFA Champions league garners such numbers year after year is slowly but surely eroding the international game. It also highlights how European clubs are gradually spreading out to new markets in Asia, Africa and America. liverpool and Real Madrid have supporters clubs across the world and while young people in many footballing nations know that it is impossible to play or win a world cup, they can dream of playing for one of these clubs. The clubs themselves realise that liverpool and other English Premier league clubs are establishing training academies in India.

However, the game also highlighted that possibly there needs to be more video refereeing in the sport, with the challenge of madrid’s captain Sergio Ramos on liverpool’s talisman Mohamed Salah being dreadful, and broke liverpudlian hearts and could potentially break Egyptian ones too with the striker potentially being ruled out of the World Cup as well. However, the FIFA World Cup will be a major demonstration of how smoothly the Video-Assistant Referee (VAR) system will work in football. Most major sports across the world, including cricket have moved to replays to be the final arbiters. Every major sports event now has tens of cameras, possibly as much as a hundred and almost every bit of action can be analysed from tens of angles, could Ramos’ tackle on Salah been punishedIJ There are so many questions, but as football takes a three week break before restarting in Russia, one can only look forward.