"It all goes to show that less can sometimes be more. This might jar with US thinking about sport, but keeping international competitions so open that the best teams rarely meet — or possibly don't at all — has been football's secret master-stroke. It turns the latter stages into must-view events. The Champions League brand plays heavily on the exclusivity and scarcity of its product."

In episode One Hundred and One we look back on "Dessert Comes at the End by Raphael Honigstein, first published in Issue Zero in MArch 2011. In it, he argues that football's administrators must beware killing the golden goose.

Read the full article here: www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/dessert-comes-end

Issue Zero, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available for £12 plus postage on www.theblizzard.co.uk. Since we’ve relaunched the website, all our articles, including this one, are available to read for free. Non-subscribers get 3 free articles a month, while subscribers have unlimited advert-free browsing, as well as access to digital downloads of all our issues in eBook formats.

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