When I was a teenager, I used to go around saying that on my wedding day I would enter the ceremony with the Champions League anthem. I even said this to Fran, my boyfriend from my teenage years, who looked like he was going to ask for a restraining order. So you can imagine my genuine emotion the night the Champions League anthem was played for the first – and last – time in Balaídos, in that legendary season of 2004. Fortunately, and given that I had already had my moment of intimacy with the footballing psalm, I soon abandoned my wedding plan. But the Champions League anthem has never ceased to seem to me to be a beautiful thing, almost an aspirational epiphany.
UEFA has introduced changes to the anthem this year, in line with the changes to the format of the competition. The new version has more harmonic density, is more relaxing and melodic, but sounds less epic, epic and forceful. In general, it inspires less respect. Why modify something that worked? Wasn’t it enough to take away 15 minutes of sleep by putting the Champions League matches at nine at night? Wasn’t it enough to introduce VAR?
This is an irrefutable truth: football fans tend to be against any change, no matter how small. The novelty brigade, those people who constantly call for us to leave our comfortable zones, will say that we are obtuse and boring. But football is a simple sport and its charm lies in its simplicity. The size of a football goal was fixed in a pub in Holborn in 1863 and we are happy to keep it the same. It is not perfect, but that is how we like it, simple. And yet, there is always someone willing to tweak it, adapt it, modernise it, superligize it. There is always someone willing to short-circuit your identity.
Back to VAR. Football’s strength was its purity and spontaneity, but the VAR era has made it so confusing that you can barely celebrate a goal any more for fear of it being disallowed. VAR involves delays and often anticlimaxes. It has abandoned the original premise of correcting clear and obvious errors and now examines everything, even your tax return. Games accumulate, almost by default, eight, nine, even ten minutes of injury time with such deliberation. You need a PhD in architecture to understand how offside lines are drawn. The VAR room shown to us on television looks like the place you would take a war criminal to confess his crimes, the place you would like an enemy to spend his last hours of life. Multiple camera angles, 3D recreation of parts of the footballer’s body, limb tracking to detect all 29 of players’ body points – it’s all added an extra layer of complexity to a game built on its simplicity.
Maybe I’ve been too excessive. Yes, it happens to us fans, we get excessive in our criticism, we are easily controlled by routine. Football always has its perfect reflection in life. And, as in life, over the years we tend to immerse ourselves in rumination and hesitation at any small change. There is a special kind of glue that keeps us attached to habit: it’s called comfort, sometimes it’s called fear. But, and this always ends up happening, one day fate, circumstances, luck, or in this case UEFA, puts us in a completely new direction. And maybe, in the long run, we end up liking it.
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