Man United, Real and Juve brace themselves for another predictably dull season. I’d rather watch MLS

At the tail end of my vacation to Old Europe, I was watching the first leg of a Champions League Third Round Qualification Match between FC Bruges and Borussia Dortmund. "There’s a very, very significant amount of money riding on this game," noted the German TV commentator in a tone that suggested this was really all that mattered about the fixture. Never mind the honor of winning and the chance to progress in Europe’s premier club competition.

Every August a number of Europe’s biggest clubs have to sweat it through a qualification game to make the lucrative, six-match, guaranteed income and prize money "league" phase of the Champions League, which is neither a league (this year there are altogether six knock-out rounds plus the final sandwiching the mini-league fixtures), nor is it always competed for by "champions". The biggest leagues such as Spain, England and Italy enter the top three or four teams from their previous season’s domestic leagues, so it’s really a sort of Champions, Runners-up and Some Others League And Cup-style competition.

A better title would be Same Old Teams Compete For Huge Money Cup, because the odds are now so loaded against a side from a lesser footballing nation making it to the competition’s latter stages that all bets are off on a repeat of the days in the 1970s and 1980s when clubs from Belgium, Romania and the former Yugoslavia would make the final. Meanwhile, Manchester United and Juventus have played each other so often over the past few seasons that the snack bars at Old Trafford have started offering Tagliatelli alla Puttanesca washed down with a double espresso.

It is well documented that Europe’s soccer governing body, UEFA, was forced to bastardise this once great club competition and sell it down the river when the continent’s richest cubs threatened to leave and set up a rebel Super League around a decade ago. As a consequence of this blackmail, and UEFA’s impotence, we can not be absolutely sure that the last eight teams in the competition next spring will stem from Spain, Germany, England and Italy, and that they’ll include Man United, Real Madrid, Juventus and Bayern Munich. But wake me up when the time comes to tell me if I’m wide of the mark.

Europe’s domestic leagues are just as predictable. Six of the seven journalists in Saturday’s edition of the UK daily The Guardian tipped Man United to win the English title. The other, bravely and misguidedly, predicted Liverpool. Chelsea and Arsenal won’t be far behind, while poor Wolves were written off as relegation material before a ball was kicked. In Germany the only question prior to the Bundesliga start two weeks ago was, "Can anyone stop Bayern Munich winning the crown?" The answer was, probably not.

What a thrill it will be to see Real Madrid enjoy another successful season. And over in Italy it could well be close between Juventus and AC Milan blah blah blah. Every year lakeloads of ink, and hours of broadcast time, are devoted to the same excited pre-season analyses about who’s come and gone and whether Alex Ferguson will deploy one forward or two. These brave hacks then put their heads on the block and forecast: Champions: Man United. Runners-Up: Arsenal. Fascinating.

Four weeks of repetitive hype have made it something of a delight to return to the US for the closing stages of MLS 2003. It’s true that the standard of football won’t match some of the top games in Europe this season, but MLS suffers few of the multiple one-sided encounters where the home team barely has to turn up to pocket the points against hapless relegation fodder camped desperately in its own half. And although the league format of MLS is open to much justified criticism, it works fairly well in that all teams harbor a chance of making the play-offs until late in the season, and the jockeying for position to determine play-off opponents becomes interesting in itself.

The equality of wealth (or rather, poverty) and player distribution in MLS provides a far more engaging spectacle over the course of the season than in the European leagues, where cash-heavy giants are irrevocably entrenched at the top, even in smaller countries like Switzerland, Scotland and the Ukraine. The recovery of DC United and Colorado from moribund starts, the relative dominance of San Jose and Chicago in the face of pre-season write-offs, and the stumbling seasons of last year’s finalists, New England and LA, have all made for a campaign that has so far confounded fans and pundits alike, and set us up for a run-in where few would go beyond predicting that the MLS Cup winners are unlikely to be Dallas Burn. But even they’re still in with a shout.

This is not to say that overall the European game is sick and that MLS is healthy. The fundamental roots and structure of the European game are so strong that, even at a time when thousands of smaller clubs are facing a financial struggle to survive (the ‘trickle-down’ effect of having a wealthy elite works as efficiently in soccer economics as it does in any other sector), there are few cities, fans and communities that are prepared to see their soccer team disappear. In most cases, although sadly not all, when a side is threatened with bankruptcy then a rescue package of some sort is re-negotiated with banks and city councils, often with the help and input of fans, to ensure its survival.

The depth of commitment within these clubs when compared with their chances of success is testimony to the importance of soccer as part of a town’s identity. On Friday evening I watched a German third division game between hosts Offenbacher Kickers and FSV Mainz Amateurs. There were just over 7,000 spectators there, yet the atmosphere in the Bieberer Berg stadium, which prevailed through a pulsating if not very pretty ninety minutes, made it feel like the crowd was three or four times larger. And after several months of the anti-curse culture of MLS, it was good to hear the referee being collectively called for his role in failing to secure the home side more than a 1-1 tie.

Offenbacher Kickers have won the German Cup once in their 102-year history, in 1970, and were runners-up twice of the national league in its pre-Bundesliga amateur days, in 1950 and 1959. Many of the fans’ songs are dedicated to denigrating their more successful neighbors Eintracht Frankfurt, whom they haven’t played in almost 20 years (although the two sides will meet in the German Cup in a highly anticipated encounter at the end of next week). Yet despite the meagre trophy cabinet, it is in stadia like these - where the only replica shirts you see belong to the home side, and the only thing that really matters is winning for winning’s sake - that the cultural substance of the European game lives on.

Will Borussia Dortmund make $20 million extra in the Champions’ League again this year? Thankfully, in stadia like the Bieberer Berg and RFK no one much cares.