Learning To Love The Play-Offs

Crowning a champion used to be so satisfactory. Take 18 or 20 teams, they all play each other home and away, and whoever gets the most points wins.

- Paul Gardner

It is a system that has worked pretty well for decades – but it has always been far from perfect. In particular, those end-of-season games between teams that have nothing to play for and teams fighting to stay up or to get into Europe.

That league system has also lacked a crucial element: glamour. We now live in a world where TV and marketing values rule – and those are values that very much like drama and glamorous occasions.

Yet how much of that does the current league system give?

Consider this past season in Europe. In Italy, Juventus were champions for a seventh consecutive campaign. In Spain, Barcelona were runaway winners with only one game lost. In Germany, Bayern Munich won for the sixth consecutive season. In England, Manchester City claimed a record 100 points.

In England, Germany and Spain the championships were over a month or so before the official season’s end, giving an empty, non-climactic feeling to seasons that already lacked grand finales.