When historians eventually look back on 1992, they will remember it as the year that professional football lost its soul.
It was the year that the English top flight was rebranded as the Premier League and the European Cup became the Champions League.
For many people who are hard of thinking, this is when football started. They would be well advised to set aside a few hours and educate themselves.
Several prominent media outlets and numerous other clickbait social media accounts made themselves look extremely stupid over the weekend.
They described Desire Doue (19 years and 362 days) as the youngest player to score and assist in UEFA’s showpiece final following his exploits for Paris Saint-Germain in Munich.
However, Brian Kidd achieved the feat for Manchester United on his 19th birthday in the 1967/68 final. Erasing him from the competition’s history is, quite frankly, ludicrous.
The Champions League is the European Cup in a fancy dress. If we’re saying they’re not joined at the hip, then football history needs to be rewritten.
Real Madrid would no longer be 15-time winners. Nottingham Forest? They’d be the two-time winners of a defunct competition. Liverpool’s tally of six titles would be two.
Celtic, AC Milan, Inter Milan, Bayern Munich, Benfica, Ajax, Aston Villa and others? They’d all have a different narrative painted around them.
UEFA do not distinguish between the two competitions. The records from the European Cup were carried forward into the Champions League and rightly so.
Amusingly, several prominent Man United social media fanboys lauded PSG – a club founded in 1970 – as the poster boys for developing young players following their victory over Inter.
According to one clueless ‘United fan’, ‘my club’ have never done what PSG have done with youngsters this season. The Busby Babes and Class of ’92 beg to differ.
The modern football world exists because of the past. Airbrushing previous achievements out of the equation due to a branding change shows a lack of respect for what has gone before.
More regard should be given to the achievements of Kidd and his ilk, as they add far more gravitas to a competition that was founded in 1955, not 1992.
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