November 22nd, 2007

9:05am Thursday 22nd November 2007

INTERNATIONAL football, according to the G14 group of leading European clubs, is dying. Manchester United are bigger than England, Barcelona more appealing than Spain. The Champions League is where the money is, so players and spectators will naturally gravitate towards club football and the international game will become more and more of an irrelevance.

Right? Wrong. If the last three or four years have proved anything, it is that international football is currently a far superior product to the club game in terms of both excitement and unpredictability.

Take last weekend as an example.

England came within an inch of missing out on Euro 2008 despite still having a game to play, Scotland came within a minute of claiming a draw with world champions Italy that would have left France staring down the abyss ahead of yesterday's trip to Ukraine, and Northern Ireland's David Healy broke the record for the most goals scored in a single European Championships qualifying campaign. Who would have predicted that when the current round of qualifiers began last September?

And who would have predicted that Greece would have been crowned European champions in 2004? Or that joint-favourites Brazil and Argentina would have failed to reach even the semi-finals of the last World Cup?

Try to write down the likely semi-finalists in next summer's European Championships in Austria and Switzerland. Italy maybe. Probably Germany and France. But what about Holland, one of the first sides to qualify, or Portugal or Spain?

What about the Czech Republic, perennial dark horses, or even Switzerland with the advantage of home soil?

Now, write down the likely top four in this year's Premier League. Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool - probably in that order.

And what about the last four in this season's Champions League? Barcelona, AC Milan and a couple of the English clubs. It might not be perfect, but I bet it's not far off.

The Premier League has become processional and the group stage of this year's Champions League has already become interminably dull. But the worst is still to come. As more and more money is thrown at less and less teams, the club game will become even more uncompetitive.

International football, on the other hand, has rarely been more vibrant. The globalisation of the club game has created a level playing field whereby historically impoverished international sides now boast players in some of the world's biggest leagues.

It's the ultimate cliché, but the adage that there are no easy games in international football is actually becoming a trueism. Just ask Holland, who struggled to a 1-0 home win over Luxembourg last weekend, or Spain, who lost in Northern Ireland.

Smaller nations are keen to embrace international football as an outlet for national pride, while the historical powerhouses of the European game are finding that the rest of the continent has caught up. The result is genuine competition.

THE one downside to last weekend's football programme was the opportunity it provided for simplistic comparisons between supporters of Scotland and England.

If you've read any of the national newspapers or listened to various radio phone-ins this week, you'll know exactly what I mean - Scottish supporters are cuddly patriots hugging anyone standing close to them; England fans are bigoted thugs looking for an opportunity to start throwing chairs.

The contrast is simplistic, offensive and wrong but it hasn't stopped various media outlets, including, unfortunately, this one, making it in the past.

First, Scottish nationalism, as expressed in relation to football, is not a benign force of civic inclusion.

By its very nature, nationalism must be exclusionary. If you belong to a nation, there is something that you are, and something that you are not.

I lived in Scotland for four enjoyable years, and in every other area of life I was welcomed with open arms. When it came to being an England supporter, however, cuddles were in short supply.

Still, there's always the stereotype of an England fan to fall back on isn't there?

Why can't England's aggressive, boorish supporters be more like the Scots?

The stereotype of the average England fan bears little resemblance to the sights I've experienced while travelling around Europe in the latest round of qualifiers.

An element of England supporters cause trouble, but so do an element of fans from every club in the country. So why does the lazy stereotyping persist? Why were there no reports of the England supporters who laid a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier in Moscow to commemorate the thousands of Soviet soldiers who died in the Second World War, or of the England fans who distributed football strips to impoverished Arab children ahead of the national side's game in Tel Aviv?

Why? Because it shatters the cosy consensus developed and perpetuated by commentators who have never set foot in a football ground.

It's far easier to continue to portray England as the bad guys.

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