Champions League is certainly the most exciting football tournament in the world for both the neutral fans and the ones whose favorite team is in the battle for the most valuable trophy in the football world. If we have to be honest, every single fan of this sport awaits the Tuesday and Wednesday match day nights with a tremendous eagerness. And the reason is that this competition brings together the best teams and players from all over Europe and always produces great battles with many goals.
However, after seeing the semifinals this week, one can honestly tell that they did not seem to be matches from this stage of the tournament. What was missing were the goals. And while for the match between Atletico and Bayern this may be justified with the two bars hit by Alaba and Torres and the many opportunities for goal, the match between Man City and Real produced nothing but boredom for the fans. The totals from the first leg of the semifinals are only one scored goal, and three clean sheets. This may just satisfy those teams, but for the fans it was a great disappointment. If you compare this season's semifinals to the last season, you'll probably not be surprised that then were scored as much as 6 goals in the two first leg matches. And for the 2012/13 season this number was even bigger, 9.
In relation to these semifinals, Sports News&Analysis conducted a research about the number of goals scored in the previous editions of CL this decade which you may do as well by clicking here. And it turns that this season is threatening to become the season with the least number of goals for the last 6 years (even more if we counted the past decade). The results were the following:
- 2014/15 - 361 goals (2.89 per match)
- 2013/14 - 362 goals (2.89 per match)
- 2012/13 - 368 goals (2.95 per match)
- 2011/12 - 345 goals (2.76 per match)
- 2010/11 - 355 goals (2.84 per match)
With only 3 matches left, in this season's edition have been scored a total of 341 goals. This, it seems, is very likely to remain lower than 2011/12 season.
This may be temporary and maybe we are going to see more goals being scored in the upcoming seasons, BUT there IS a BIGGER threat for the tournament which does not seem to have any solution. This is as I may call it the BBR problem. If you look at the past 6 seasons in CL, you are going to see that there are 3 teams that appear in every single quarterfinal and most of the semifinals. These three teams (apart from Chelsea in 2012) were the only winners of the tournament for this decade!!! Those are Barcelona, Bayern, and Real. For the last 6 seasons Barca has 6 quarterfinals, 4 semifinals and two titles; Real has 6 quarterfinals, 6 semifinals, and 1 title; Bayern has 5 quarterfinals, 5 semifinals, and 2 finals (1 title). That is basically destroying all the suspension of the tournament since one knows who the champions will be at the beginning of the season. We are lucky to have teams like Man City and Atletico this season who have the potential to change that, but most probably next season will not be any different in terms of this problem.
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