Is the lack of competition killing the game?

The Champions League Draw yesterday but sadly the draw of City's group aside I simply looked at despair at the predictability about the way the game is going. Lots of people are caught up in the Sky Propaganda bubble about the Premiership and the Champions League but I bet that most of us can predict how 90% of it will turn out. My worry is that if the same teams always win then eventually the game will die.

This isn't just some rant from someone who supports a rubbish team this is about the game in general. What get me is the way in which Football became popular in the first place, if you follow the history of the game you'll realise that the Global appeal of the game grew from the fact that Footbal was a sport which opened up to the World unlike Sports like Cricket and Rugby Union where you had to be part of some form of elite club. Sadly though Football appears to be going backwards in that respect as the rich clubs get richer what people are failing to realise is the competition becomes less and less. UEFA know that if Man Utd win things then 325 million people in China will invest in the game, but if there's no competition then eventually they'll lose interest.

On my way to Saturdays game I went through Manchester City centre and I happened to be surrounded by fans flocking to Old Trafford, from what I saw I'd say very few of them had Mancunian accents infact very few of them even spoke English. You always get this argument between City and Utd fans about who has the most clubs in Manchester etc, the truth is that Utd have a lot of fans in Manchester but I personally feel that these people are have shafted by the Glaziers. They know that the daytrippers are prepared to pay far more for a ticket than the local working class people of Manchester whose ancestors contributed to the success of the club. City fans can mock but if their club carries on winning things their club will go the same way.

But I'm afraid this is what we're dealing with now, the price of success is that Football clubs become multi-national corportations rather that a local sports team representing a community where people would come together for the sake of civic pride. One of my friends who is a City fan said that the reason why winning the title meant so much to him is that the rags to riches factor behind it but the truth is they've had to spend hundreds of millions of pounds to get there. We're losing the imagination, the spirit of the underdog to the greed and if we're not careful we could lose the game for good. This season I'll be paying a lot more attention to the Bundesliga because I feel it is a better league than the Premiership because no-one team has overall power and just hope that somewhere along the line a club will cause shock, well see what happens but I think we've probably already seen it.