How Blanket Champions League Coverage Spoils the Show

It's 7 April 1999, and in Kiev it's just gone 10pm. On the banks of the Dnipro in the Olympic Stadium, 81,000 people see Valentin Bialkevich collect a loose ball in the centre circle and find space. Bialkevich in turn spots 21-year-old Andriy Shevchenko peeling off the shoulder of Markus Babbel, and attempts the improbable: a wickedly spinning pass with the outside of his right foot, which Shevchenko has seen coming, such is the kismet that animates this Dynamo Kiev team.

The Ukrainian wonderkid swivels and loses Babbel with all the guile of a Cirque du Soleil master contortionist and in a flash is bearing down on Oliver Khan in the Bayern Munich goal. The finish is gentle but electric. 81,000 people come alive.

That goal came in the first leg of a Champions League semi-final, one which saw Bayern battle back from 2-0 and 3-1 down to bag a 3-3 draw and place one foot in the final. It was an exquisite, breathless game, between the finest Bayern side in a generation and the last truly great team to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain, yet it was screened in just two countries: Germany and the Ukraine.

One of the best European Cup semi-finals of all time was available live to a potential audience of just 125 million. Context, remember, is everything: the 2017 final was shown in over 200 countries, with 360 million viewers tuning in.

I think about that game a handful of times a season, whenever I watch the Champions League. Thanks to an early-hours re-run of the match on ITV one night later that week in 1999, I have a VHS recording of the full 90 minutes. I don't know if ITV keep hold of these things so long after the fact, but there is a good chance that my battered TDK cassette of Dynamo Kiev 3 Bayern Munich 3 is the only surviving document in Britain that still bears witness to what happened that night in the Olympic Stadium.

16 years later I've never seen another game like it.

Central to the art of seduction is leaving something to the imagination. Around the same time that Shevchenko was announcing himself to the world with his masterclass against Bayern, the ink was drying on a new deal between ITV and UEFA that would radically augment the average fan's access to live European football.

For the 1999-2000 season, every Champions League match involving an English team would be available live on one of ITV's terrestrial or digital platforms, plus a selection of choice matches from around Europe. In 2003 Sky Sports joined the party, and made every game available live to subscribers through their interactive facility. European football was putting out; legs akimbo, back arched.

Before this, back in an age of relative chastity, the 1998-99 Champions League was recorded in another format. UEFA published an official review in print of the tournament, featuring all the statistical detail (which can now be found at the push of a button) plus some brief copy reviewing each round, but with the charming advantage that it was both tangible and permanent.

To that end it followed me around in my child-size backpack throughout the summer of '99, and lent colour to the lengthy car journeys, family excursions and rainy days that pockmarked my final pre-pubescent summer. The power of a child's mind to create whole worlds when confronted with 75 pages of foreign-sounding names, numbers and three-line match reports is, I promise, tremendous.

For example, reading that Scott Minto – ironically now one of the most recognisable faces of Sky Sports' European football coverage – once scored a calamitous own-goal to put Finnish champions HJK Helsinki within 12 minutes of a famous victory at Benfica's Esatdio de Luz in a group stage game in 1998 is fuel for the imagination in a way that ubiquitous live access to every game being played in Europe could never be.

It wasn't until years later that I learned Minto had headed bizarrely and spectacularly into his own net from somewhere near the edge of the box; even this, somehow, was a disappointment.

There were other changes in Europe as the millennium prepared to tick over. 1998-99 was the last season in which 24 teams competed at the Champions League group stage, rather than the now familiar 32. This meant that only the first-place team in each group was guaranteed to progress, while those in second looked nervously around Europe and tried to calculate which two among them had the best records; and there was certainly no parachuting into the UEFA Cup for those who didn't make the cut.

Less coverage and fewer matches, plus more at stake in each one; somewhere at this temporal watershed has to lie the foundation stone of European football's slide into worn-out repetitiveness and sallow predictability.

This was also the final season in which UK broadcasters had to make a straight choice between which of the competing domestic sides to feature live. In the autumn of 1998 this meant either double-winners and Champions League debutants Arsenal or a Manchester United side who, after a series of near misses, remained unable to crack the code on the continent.

In this, the treble-winning year, live European football on TV in Britain meant Manchester United. The champions-elect shared 18 goals across four stunning draws with Bayern and Barcelona during September-December, including two unforgettable 3-3 epics against Barca; rarely has there been such quality concentrated among so few playing-minutes in the history of English involvement in Europe.

On five of the six group-stage match days ITV plumped for United, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the stellar line-up of their group compared with Arsenal's rather less appealing schedule of Kiev, RC Lens and Panathinaikos. The result was that while the nation was watching United make history, absolutely no-one was watching the Gunners crash out of Europe with barely a whimper.

Had they been then they would have seen Arsene Wenger's side being taught a footballing lesson in the Olympic Stadium on match day four, as a blistering Shevchenko free-kick helped Dynamo on their way to a 3-1 win in the freezing cold mud of late-November Kiev. The home side's performance that night received rave reviews from those fortunate enough to be present, but not even viewers living in N5 backing onto Highbury Stadium caught the game live.

It could be that a reliance on the imagination contributed greatly to the legend of the Dynamo Kiev class of '99 in my young mind; 90 minutes of semi-final perfection in the Olympic Stadium simply filled in the gaps.

Certainly there was nothing special about the 1-1 draw with the Gunners at Wembley in October, when a stoppage-time goal from Sergei Rebrov, springing a one-man Lee Dixon offside trap, rescued a point at the end of a heavy showing. It was the only time either side appeared live on UK television that season.

16 years later my own experience of the Champions League is that no other season stands out as vividly in the memory as this final year of the millennium, relying on late night news bulletins, local bookshops, VCRs and schoolyard hearsay to keep up with events.

Even the footage that did find its way in real time into my quiet suburban life did so seemingly in higher-definition and was more starkly coloured than the never-ending stream of Goals! Goals! Goals! that flows on all platforms today, presumably all the more precious for its rarity.

Today European football coverage amounts to something far greater than it once was. In 2015 head of BT Sport's consumer division John Petter accused Sky Sports' managing director Barry Francis of gamesmanship after the latter 'sabotaged' BT's Champions League branding launch by claiming the competition has turned into a ratings flop for Sky, despite the £897 million contract that the two have just battled over.

All this politicking over the same competition that wasn't deemed worth the investment that night in '99 when Shevchenko left Babbel on his backside and electrified the world – or at least the small portion of it that was watching.