Champions League needs to win back its credibility

A deep black cloud of doubt hangs over European football. Last week, Lyon, who had been finding goalscoring very hard, went to Zagreb to play Dynamo needing seven seemingly unattainable goals — and they got them.

True they were assisted by the first half expulsion of an opponent, but to score seven times against a team which had so evidently given up the ghost seemed beyond the realms of fantasy.

So what will happen? What will Fifa do? On the face of it, nothing at all. Its ever more controversial president Michel Platini seems quite satisfied with the fact that there is no evidence of a significant run on the bookmakers. So what? Surely Platini has been in the game long enough to know that there are more ways of killing the cat.

That while, for some time, there have been instances of betting corruption in countries such as Turkey and Germany, past years have thrown up many cases of one club suborning another. I speak with some experience of this, since back in the 1970s my American colleague Keith Botsford and I conducted an exhaustive investigation into what came to be known as the Lobo-Solti case — the attempt by the Juventus hitman Desso Solti to bribe the honest Portuguese referee Francisco Marques Lobo to bend the European Cup semi-final second leg at Derby County.

Revised structure

Juve were, in police parlance, bang to rights, but we established after that fiasco that, through a non-investigative committee in Zurich, Uefa had exonerated them!

Pursuing our investigations we found evidence that Internazionale had for years been trying and twice succeeding to bribe the referee of return semi-finals at the San Siro, succeeding in the case of Borussia Dortmund and Liverpool, but in 1966 failing when it came to Real Madrid and a stout-hearted Hungarian referee in Gyorgy Vadas.

Meanwhile, last week's results showed us clearly that the whole structure of the European so-called Champions League is in vital need of revision. It was only by the grace of good fortune that both Napoli and Marseille were not virtually cheated out of qualification from their respective groups. This because Bayern Munich at Manchester City and Arsenal away to Olympiakos, having already qualified, put out substantially weakened teams and lost.

Such paradoxes are inevitable so long as the European Cup is based on group qualification. Years ago when it began, it was an altogether more straight-forward affair, clubs meeting each other on a two-legged home and away basis.

The point is that you cannot accuse any club, however skeletal a side it puts out, of fielding weak teams as all players are registered.

The author is a football expert based in England