Champions League clash could be described as sportswashing derby with rich royal family owners going head to head
Sometimes sport can be a stage for the most beautiful dramas. It can thrill, it can inspire, it can move. It can offer the most plangent insights into life, showcase the full potential of the human brain, the human heart, the human body. Who does not feel the lump in the throat, the warm glow of shared experience, the great sense of human potential when they remember Bob Champion winning the National on Aldaniti, Dennis Taylor outlasting Steve Davis, or Ben Stokes at Headingley? Sport is a fairytale land where dreams can be made flesh.
Once upon a time there was a football club from an industrial city in the north of England. They weren’t very good – in fact, they had a comedic tendency to embrace failure, to find ways of losing other clubs couldn’t have imagined – but they were generally quite well liked. Then they were taken over by a politician from overseas, who was very rich, and then by the royal family of another foreign state, who were even richer.
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