Champions League or World Cup

[Guardian]

WC is waaay ahead
At least a competition where the players are supposed to play for their countries, for honour and flame, the money factor is in the background, at the rearmost seat. In the CL the smell of money sometimes is disgusting.
You can see different cultures, national anthems, different styles, new players, new heroes are born and they can be remembered for years.
Less glory hunters as well
everything is more memorable, from the new fancy stadiums to the scandalous goal that knocked out your team or that goal in the last minute that brought so much happiness in your country .
Having said that I wouldn't trade the memories from 1994 for anything

 

[por supuesto]

the beastman is correct.

He sure is, I agree with every word, still the post has very little to do with quality of football IMO.

I'm guessing Gneg is looking more for the quality of passing, finishing, tactics and so on, looking at those things I think CL got the WC beat. But who cares really? excitement wise it's not even in the same ballpark.

 

[Beast]

Quality of football means for me a new tactic /approach /new stars introduced .i talked about the tactics
i learned about the 3-5-2 watching Dr. Bilardo implementing it in 1986 for example which differed from the 3-5-2 implemented by Big Phil with Brazil in 2002 .
we first learned about Dinho skill globally in 2002
the players fighting for their countries display more quality than on the club level , i mean look @ NZ for example would those same players demonstrate half of it in the CL ?
u look back @ the CL last year and their is very few games that entertain you for example Barca-Arsenal but compare it to Germany destroying England or Argentina ? Uruguay-Ghana drama ?
did anyone anticipate Uruguay to reach the final 4 ? a country not big in footballing terms (i know they won 2 WC 60 +years ago?
a big chunk of the last 8 came from South America with many players are with their local club
will u find a team like Nottingham Forrest nowdays reaching the CL semi -final ?
You have all the big stars in the CL playing in the WC with few exceptions due to country failure to reach that stage (Ibra,Dzeko ) or exclusions (Zanetti,Dinho,Pato ) for each one of those you know have Honda as a household name , Suarez a national hero not a small league destroyer , Ozil is not a promising german player but a super star in the WC , Torres is crap , Muller is suddenly Germany secret weapon not a B Munich youngster with a first good season , Coentaro from a marcelo full back to one of the best if not the best LB in the WC , Annan hero for several games and bad in the last game
u have several zero to hero and hero to zero , when the winners of the last WPOY crash out so early u know the quality of football & Tactics is very strong IMO

 

[por supuesto]

I won't argue semantics with you Gio, mainly coz you probably would own the living hell out of me.

But I think it very much goes both ways, I believe ze Germans would be a very bleak team in the CL after a few rounds, Klose and Podolski aren't really good enough to compete at the absolute top level, but with the right coach, a short window of time and against the right opposition they can be and are proper world beaters. (anyone who watched the U-21 final in Sweden had to know Özil was destined to become a proper superstar)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that for a short period of time a WC can make players and teams over preform and truly raise their quality as individuals or a whole, but that goes both ways.

For me it all comes down to how you define quality

u have several zero to hero and hero to zero , when the winners of the last WPOY crash out so early u know the quality of football & Tactics is very strong IMO

IMO it proves the opposite

 

[Beast]

I see where you are coming from Joel , you have a point about the short burst of quality during the WC that possibly fades away after it .
i guess the likes of Klose/Podolski is a living example for it

 

[Guardian]

I wouldn't watch a match between CSKA moscow and PAO in the CL and I would say that 75% of the games in the CL are crap in terms of quality. Plus there are hundreds of games, any of them means nothing to me.
Every game, every goal could be historic at the world cup.
Slovakia scored their first goal, won their first game, qualified for the KO stages for the first time
Greece scored their first goal at the WC and finally won a game
New Zealand finished their campaign undefeated, won their first points
Paraguay made history too with their QF

I certainly remember more games and goals from the world cup, the spirit of the CL is ruined by the money, glory hunters, just few teams make it to the later stages and so on.
Quality? I wouldn't say the cL offers more in terms of quality when every year you see almost the same teams and styles. It's like a Matrix and everyone is doing it only for the money.

 

[por supuesto]

IMO those are almost exclusively emotional reasons, and I'm with you all the way.

 

[Cesc tastic]

Champions league and its not close imo
If you think about it Barca etc can employ the best 11 players to play a system from any country in the world, International football you are restricted to the best eleven in that country, also at club level you have time to develop and mould, at international you are lucky to get a month together during a major championship

 

[Gnegneri]

IMO those are almost exclusively emotional reasons, and I'm with you all the way.

They are indeed. It's what I said in the start post: the WC is the most epic event. It's emotional, only there every four years, and so on and on. There is absolutely no competition with the Champions League in that department. Im' not interested in how epic it makes a country feel or how it unites people, that has nothing to do with the quality of the football displayed, only with the emotion of the tournament.


But footballwise the Champions League is just a level higher for me ... a lot of club teams would make it past the four semi-finalists now.


But luckily football is emotion so it doesn't really matter in the end, it's emotions that make the event so epic. And because it is worldwide.

 

[antimadritista]

WC, by far.

 

[yusuf]

CL for me, who the hell cares about the retard nationalists and just because the moron mobs take interest does not make it the highest class of football

 

[Fourteen]

I agree that you certainly don't see the highest level of football at the World Cup, but you do, more often than not, see alot of very open games of football where both teams really seem to give it their all inevitably producing some exciting stuff. Alot of players will experience some of their most amazing footballing experiences through representing their nations in what is easily the most watched sporting event in the world. In the Chmapions League you'll see some quality teams and probably an overall better level of football, but that's acheived over seasons of hard work, developing teams and everything becoming a second nature. In the World Cup you have organisation and tactical influences, but above all you just have raw footballing skill. It will always be the peak of football for the excitment and passion it generates, afterall it only comes around once every 4 years.

 

[maz]

Definitely the World Cup. Especially as the knockout games are single ties rather than tactical 2-game ties.

I do think that the sad truth is many players will play harder for their club than for their country, but once you get to the latter stages you definitely begin to see the desire in those teams and it makes the last rounds very exciting.

 

[diegomessi]

wesley sneijder

"both, Bitches!"

 

[JCCR_FCB]

At the beginning, the WC was the most important competition, but in last few years we assist to a completely change and in this moment, CL is the "top of the top"... the clubs have more and more foreigh players and we see that each club is almost a mirror of the football in all continents (specially Europe, South-America and Africa).