A few hours after I learned that Uruguayan footballer Luis Suarez had injured himself in World Cup training and would possibly miss the global tournament in Brazil, I IMed my friend from Uruguay inquiring about his state of mind. He hadn’t heard the news by that time and wondered to what I referring. Upon receiving further context, he said something to the effect of “Of course. I should have known.”

I attributed his response to the universal belief that all football fans — indeed most sports fans — hold; that one’s own individual team was doomed beyond all salvation. Of course our best player got injured.

I too had the same response to the Suarez injury (“Of course. I should have known.”) But for different reasons. Suarez had just finished a transcendent season that started on August 17 and ended on May 11 where he outhustled, outmaneuvered and out punished the opposition. He injured his knee in Uruguayan training camp on May 22, 11 days after the completion of a grueling nine-month season. Of course, he got injured. His body was breaking down.

As World Cup training reached its final days, the fear was that other overtaxed footballers will succumb to that same fate: the list of players knocked out of the World Cup due to injury grew more depressing by the day:

Rafael van der Vaart, Holland, out, calf

Franck Ribery, France, out, back

Radamel Falcao, Colombia, out, torn ACL

Marco Reus, Germany, out, torn ankle ligament

Luis Montes, Mexico, out, broken leg

Riccardo Montolivo, Italy, out, broken leg
(and many more)

Suarez and Spanish footballer Diego Costa who initially injured his hamstring a month ago, and re-tweaked it when he tried to play a crucial match just one week later may eventually suit up, but questions will remain how much they have left in the tank.

The pile-up of injuries underscored a thought I have been wrestling with for some time — that football needs a serious restructuring.

A quick note

This piece will refer to what Americans call soccer as football, which is what it is called virtually everywhere else. It was written with football novices in mind, so it may over-explain obvious football terminology to active fans. It leans heavily on the European club experience, as it is the most popular globally. Proceed at your own risk.

Too much cake

We just finished one of the most satisfying seasons of European football in recent memory.

In the English Premier League, Liverpool and Manchester City were neck and neck until the final match when Manchester City’s victory assured them their second championship in three years. Historic Liverpool was on the verge of its first top-flight title in 25 years (and first in the Premier League (which started in 1992)). They came up just short thanks to a 3-3 tie towards the end of the season against an inferior opponent after being up 3-0 with 11 minutes remaining.

Joining Manchester City at the top of the table was Chelsea, a team whose obdurate commitment to winning regardless of how people think about their style of play is endearing; and Everton and Arsenal, both of whom were capable of playing breathtaking football during any given match.

Elsewhere, the Spanish league had three amazing teams contending for the domestic title and the Champions League, and France’s Paris St. Germain and Germany’s Bayern Munich always provided an exciting match.

And — today, the World Cup — the most watched sporting event in the world, begins, exposing new fans to world-class players like Argentinian Leo Messi, Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo, Dutch Arjen Robben, and Brazilian Neymar Jr. And let’s not forget the United States team, which has a tough task in front of it, but continues to grow its support back home.

It is, simply put, a gorgeously fat time to be a football fan.

But, yet, this one man’s opinion is that football as a whole is broken. There seems to be little appetite or mandate to make the structural improvements to the game. There is too much at stake to disrupt the status quo, not to mention too many feuding parties, all protecting their turf to even come to a consensus over even incremental improvements.

Before we get to the solution, here are some universal truths about football

• Club and international football (national competitions like the World Cup) both are thrilling in their different ways, and any system will have to account for a mixture of both types. And professional teams are always loath to let their players go to play for International squads because while the players are insured, insurance money has failed to score even one point the history of organized sports. A tension between national and international duties will always remain.

• European teams — both countries and club — have dominated the sport for the past 20 years with South America an increasingly distant second. Only countries or teams from Europe or South America have ever won a “international championship” and only eight countries (five European, three South American) have won the 19 World Cups — none further West than Italy.

• Within Europe, on the club level, there is an incredibly stark imbalance of power. There were 52 participating domestic leagues in this year’s UEFA Champions’s League. Without doing accurate math, that’s somewhat close to 1,000 teams who could conceivably win the next Champions League before the season starts. However, in the last 18 years, only one team (Portugal’s Porto) from a non-top-four league (England, Italy, Spain Germany) has won the Champions League, and only teams from ten different domestic leagues have won it in the history of the competition. This year’s semifinalists are from England, Spain and Germany; the quarterfinals were (England: 3; Spain: 3; Germany 2). Look at the (admittedly imperfect coefficient rankings and there is a strong argument that it’s a top three and Italy) It shall continue this way for some time.

• Football seasons are woefully long. The Premier League starts in August and ends in May. Players good enough to play internationally will have a full slate of International games this summer, and will start league exhibition matches in July. There is literally no offseason for Lionel Messi. This can be improved, but there are many commitments and they need to be fulfilled. Travel, too, is unavoidable.

• Clubs and nations are currently aligned in six confederations aligned mostly by continent that have some autonomy over their participating countries. Those confederations are North & Central America & Caribbean (CONCACAF), South America (CONEMBOL), Europe (UEFA), Africa (CAF), Asia (AFC) and Oceania (OFC).

• Not all domestic leagues play during the same time. Some of this is weather-based, but mostly it is a result of the lack of a centralized organizing committee. We will be able to do better.

Among the most pressing issues:

1) The season is too long

2) There are too many competitions of varying importance

3) There is too much confusion for new fans

4) Not enough smart promotion

5) Corruption

Save for the fourth and fifth problem, the root of all the issues is — to put it simply — that there is too much going on in football.

Corruption is a serious problem, but one not easily remedied in an article and — to be fair — the part that is the most joyless about which to write. But if you’re curious, by all means watch this:

Let’s first elaborate on the issues one-by-one.

1) The season is too long

Let’s consider the length of offseason for major sports (offseason being considered as the time between the championship game and the next time a team plays in front of a crowd)

NFL: (2014 Super Bowl) February 2 — (Hall of Fame game) August 3: six months

MLB: (2013 World Series, Game 6) October 30 — (Grapefruit League starts) February 25: almost 4 months

NHL: June 24 (2013 Stanley Cup, Game 6) — (first preseason match) September 14: 2.5 months

NBA: June 20 (2013 NBA Finals, Game 7) — (first preseason match) October 5: 3.5 months

This year, the last match of the European club season took place on May 24th. The members of the two teams in that final who also play for their national team will have anywhere from two to three weeks before they start up the friendly matches in anticipation for the World Cup. That is their off-season.

Each club plays in a domestic league, which has a league title and a single elimination cup, and the best from that league play in one of two European leagues — the Champions League (akin to NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship) or the Europa League (akin to the NIT). The winners of each of these leagues will square off in a one-off Super Cup the following year because, well, I have no idea (Tradition is usually the culprit when something inexplicable is happening). Likewise the winner of the domestic league and the domestic cup in each country will face off the next year in a one-off match (the Brits call it a community shield) because why not?

While it’s true that teams in American sports leagues can win multiple titles by winning their division or conference before winning the league, they are in succession to the ultimate one (Stanley Cup, Lombardi Trophy, Larry O’Brien Trophy, World Series Trophy). While each European football league is different, here are the titles that a player like Manchester United’s Wayne Rooney could technically win in one year: a league title, two cups (England actually has two single-elimination tournaments!), a European championship, a World Club Championship, a community shield, and a Super Cup, all which are only tenuously attached to each other.

Let’s take each of these one-by-one to view their relatively worthiness.

Domestic League
Number of matches (for most leagues): 38
Importance: Extremely High

Each team plays every other team twice (home & away) and for most leagues the team with the most points at the end wins the championship (i.e. there are no playoffs).

Domestic Cup
Number of matches for Champion: usually 6-7
Importance: High

It is a single-elimination tournament, completely separate from the league, of all of the teams in the country (imagine if there was a Basketball Cup that included teams from the NBA, the NBDL, the CBA and your team from the local YMCA League. It makes for very compelling football, and the finals tend to be held in a large, neutral stadium.

League Cup
Importance: As little as possible
Number of matches for Champion: usually 6-7

In England, France and a number of other leagues, there is a secondary cup restricted to teams that are in the official league system (In England, it’s the 92 teams that play in the top four leagues). League cups are extremely far from the importance of the domestic cups, much so that managers often rest their best players during this competition.

Remember the controversy when San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich rested his three starters the first time they played the Miami Heat in the regular season? The NBA fined Popovich for doing what football coaches are lauded for doing — smart management of his squad’s limited, tiring resources. The football life is slog, and coaches often approach each game with the mentality of getting a win with the weakest squad they can muster.

Inter-league challenge (many names, such as Charity Shield, Supercopa de Espana)

Importance: Medium
Number of matches: 1

The winner of the domestic league plays the winner of the domestic cup (not the league cup). It’s only one game, and happens early in the season, but doesn’t really need to exist

Champions League
Importance: Extremely High
Number of matches for Champion: 13

This is where the best teams in each domestic league face off for the rights to be called Europe’s best squad. It takes its name from previous iterations of the tournament (there are too many to list) that only allowed in champions from each league. Now, the Champions League features a fair amount of pre-qualifying and ultimately 32 teams in a 8 groups of four teams round-robin-style (each team plays the other team home and away). While at the beginning, there are 52 leagues represented in the tournament (including pre-qualifying), the major leagues (Spain, Italy, England and Germany that have anywhere from 3-4 teams that enter into the tournament) dominate the latter stages. No country outside of those top four has had a Champions League winner in the last 10 years, and only two in the last 20 years.

Europa League
Importance: Extremely Low
Usual number of matches for Champion: 15

Due to the complicated history of multiple European tournaments, there is a secondary tournament that serves as the NIT to the Champions League’s March Madness. For the major leagues, this often means midweek journeys to Turkey, Russia and the Ukraine, draining trips that fans consider to be more nuisances than anything else. This year’s Europa final was considered by many to be one of the dullest matches ever, compared to the electric Champions League final.

UEFA Super Cup
Importance: The lowest
Number of matches for Champion: 1

Like the intra-league challenge, this pits the winner of the previous year’s Champions League and Europa League. Worse, it’s closer to the middle of a season, and just a complete waste of time. Both teams have recently won a trophy from a very grueling tournament! They do not need to go travel to a neutral site to get another one.

FIFA Club World Cup
Importance: Nil
Usual number of matches for Champion: 2-3

Held every year since 2005, this six-team mini tournament features the winners of the previous year’s continental Champions Leagues (Europe, Africa, North and Central America, South America, and two from Asia. It should be the most important tournament in the world — but it is an afterthought because of a couple of reasons:

1) It is in the middle of the season

2) For the European squad that wins the UEFA Champions League, every team — save perhaps for the South American squad — is significantly inferior to the competition they see in Europe and the top teams they face domestically

3) No one is paying attention to the tournament, especially because it is hosted in Asia or the Middle East

It’s as if the Miami Heat has to play the winning team of the Argentinian basketball league three months after the NBA championship in order to be crown champion of the world. Technically, it makes sense, but is it really sensible?

As you can hopefully see, the number of matches adds up, putting many of the players at greater risk for injury towards the end of the season.

Consider the Con Cup, which is held by the country hosting the subsequent year’s World Cup. It is basically a very expensive, very demanding dress rehearsal. Eight international squads — and their very tired club players — play as little as 3 games and as much as 5 mere weeks after their club season “ends”.

The 2013 version, held in Brazil, featured the previous World Cup winner (Spain), the previous European Championship winner (also Spain, so duties get kicked down to the runner-up Italy), the Africa Cup of Nation’s Winner (Nigeria), the Gold Cup (North and Central America) winner Mexico, the Copa America (South America) winner Uruguay, the Asian Cup winner (Japan) and the Oceania Cup Winner (Tahiti) and the host country Brazil.

For the good teams, this tournament only means something if you play poorly. To whit, Brazil has won the last two Confederations Cup, but those victories have come during times of disappointing play in the tournaments that do matter (World Cup and Copa America). For the lesser squads, it may be a meaningless salve for the dismal showing elsewhere.

To put it bluntly, the Confederates Cup features some of the best squads in the world being put on at a considerable expense will feature a winner. And the supporters of that winner will do no more than shrug their shoulders.

Australia used to be in the Oceania Confederation, which it treated as its plaything, but winning became so boring that it moved into the Asia Confederation. Put mildly, Tahiti winning the Oceania Cup is like being the best Nickelback cover band in Williamsburg.

2) Too much confusion

You may already be very confused. But now that you hopefully better understand the competitions, good luck in trying to figure out who gets to play in them. Here is just a smattering of complexities:

The Champions League explains their tournament as the following: “The UEFA Champions League comprises three qualifying rounds, a play-off round, a group stage and four knockout rounds.”

Each league gets a different amount of teams that get to qualify for the Champions League and Europa League

When the Champions League gets to “group phase”, there are eight groups of four who play each team in that group home and away. The team that finishes third in that group gets dropped into the Europa league while the fourth place team goes home (TO REST!)

And each confederation’s “Champions League” has its own qualifying and playoff system. The difference in confederations becomes even more apparent when you consider International competitions. In a four-year span, a country’s team can win a World Cup, a Continental Cup, and if you win one of those, a Confederations Cup.

Internationally, there is the World Cup (which everyone should known), individual continental cups (basically a World Cup but only for teams in that continent) and something called the Confederations Cup.

Each confederation has a different qualifying method for their Continental Cups and the World Cup (the Confederates Cup is a bit different). North and Central Americas’ World Cup qualifying culminates in something called the Hexagon. THE HEX! South America has a home and away series. Europe is organized into groups with the top teams progressing and the second team going into an intra-Europe playoff. Africa recently did this:

Round One: 12 home-and-away series. Played November 11-15, 2011.

Round Two: Ten groups of four teams. Played June 1, 2012 to September 10, 2013. The group winners advance to Round Three.

Round Three: Five two-legged ties. Played October 11-15 and November 15-19, 2013. Winners qualify for the finals.

Each confederation has its own system because while FIFA imposes a number of important global rules, the confederations have a lot of autonomy. See why that’s a bad idea with this CONCACAF example.

3) Too many matches

As you can tell from above, the world’s best players quite literally play year round. They star for both club and country in multiple competitions. Both squads depend on them to play consistently and squabble with each other if one of them is causes an injury that negatively impacts the other.

The club team holds the upper hand — they pay the big money and dominate any player’s schedule. But when International “break” occurs, the stars are called up by their official countries to go fly somewhere (usually somewhere far) for days of practice and then multiple games (friendlies, qualifiers for tournaments and — if you qualify — the actual tournaments) and then start the club cycle all over again.

But most players do not play for their country. England’s World Cup squad, for instance, will feature 23 players when there are no doubt thousands of English men drawing salaries from professional football squads across the globe. When there are gaps in the club season, those who are not on the international squad actually gets a break. Below is an example of how this disparity manifests.

Lionel Messi, one of the presumed best players in the world (can save that debate for another article), played in 69 games for his club Barcelona and his country Argentina in the calendar year 2012, which is pretty impressive (a game every 5.2 days). Maybe that’s why his body has been breaking down in 2013-2014. While I know all major sports save for the NFL have more games in a season, I’d argue strongly that 90 minutes of a full-field football match takes more out of more parts of the body than others. Remember, teams are only allotted three subs per match, so every game 7/10ths of the outfield players in football play the whole game.

Compare that to someone like Sascha Riether, who was good enough to start virtually every game for his club team Fulham in calendar year 2012 but not good enough to play internationally for his home country, Germany. Since Fulham barely progressed in any of its cup competitions and weren’t good enough to play in the European club competitions, he stepped on the field 36 times in 2012 for Fulham and Cologne (the team from which he was traded). Messi played in 91% more games then him in 2012. By comparison, NBA & NHL champions could at most expect to play 35% more than a team that doesn’t make it to the playoffs, the NFL 25%, and MLB 16%.

Footballers who play for clubs that progress throughout tournaments and are key cogs in their international teams routinely play 50+ matches any calendar year.

It is perhaps not surprising that the best stars on the best teams are called to duty more often, but it should be just as obvious that what happened to Suarez, et al. is often the result.

A Forward-Thinking Framework

Clubs

• Four confederations (renamed associations)

• Fewer teams in each domestic league

• Only two domestic competitions

International

• Four confederations (renamed associations)

• Elimination of stand-alone qualifying

• Elimination of the Confederations Cup

As discussed above, there are currently six confederations, with one clear leader (UEFA), one clear second (CONEMBOL), and four that have never won a major international championship. While we can’t change that immediately, we are going pare them down to four associations.

Combining the Oceania and Asian confederations will make for 57 teams, which is very similar to Europe (53) and Africa (54). While Europe is heads and shoulders above the other two conferences, Africa is always perpetually on the cusp of crashing the party, and Japan and South Korea have had strong showings in recent World Cups.

Onto the Americas, which separates South America (CONEMBOL) from North and Central America (CONCACAF), which is incredibly top heavy. There are now 45 participating nations.

This will also inform our club structure as well.

Each participating domestic league will now have exactly 16 teams. The remaining professional teams can be placed into lower domestic groups as the governing body sees fit. To the fans of those teams instantaneously demoted: quit complaining and start working to get back to the top flight.

Every club team has two domestic competitions: a 30 game league schedule (home and away) and a domestic cup.

For continental tournaments, there are now four groupings of countries for clubs: Asia-Pacific (combination of Asia and Oceania), Europe, Americas (combination of North, Central and South America) and Africa. No longer confederations, they are now known as associations (for clarity sake as you’ll see below)

Each association has its own competition (previously Champions Leagues (which has always been misnamed since non-Champions can enter and have won it). Each Association League will feature 64 teams that are a mixture of domestic league winners (52) and at-large teams picked March Madness style.

Judges will use FIFA coefficients as guiding data, but also use the eye test (for example, England’s recently relegated Fulham was ranked 47th in Europe). They would not make it to this year’s UEFA Association League.

For them, the top 16 league champions based on league rankings are guaranteed spots and top 4 seeds.

The bottom 36 leagues will have a home & home playoff for 18 additional spots.

The remaining 30-teams are selected by football experts from an at-large pot.

The tournament will run at the completion of the domestic seasons, and that just finished season will be the determinant for who participates.

More top-country-league teams are a good thing. Only two of the last five winners had won their previous year’s domestic league (Inter in 2010 and Barcelona in 2011).

But — you say, how can those judges truly know how a team will perform in an Association League if they don’t get international exposure in the previous season? Well, interspersed through the season will be four “competitive inter-league matches” between the different countries.

What if Manchester United, which would currently be on the bubble based on their domestic and FA Cup performance, went to Camp Nou and held Barcelona to a draw? How would the seeding committee respond to that come selection time? What if Italian teams took 11 of its 16 matches against Germany’s league — should their bubble teams get a little more respect?

The association organizing committee would work to schedule the inter-league challenges so there is a healthy range of competitiveness for each league.

Here’s a Spain-England matchup generated at random (featuring the top 16 teams at the end of this season)

Back to the UEFA Association League. Once the 64 teams are selected, we begin a 4-week tournament.

Rounds 1-4 are home to the higher seeded team. Rounds 5 & 6 are home and away with the higher seeded team decided whether they’d prefer to be home or away first.

Round 1: Tuesday Wk 1
Round 2: Saturday Wk 1
Round 3: Tuesday Wk 2
Round 4: Saturday Wk 2
Round 5: Tuesday & Saturday Wk 3
Round 6: Tuesday & Saturday Wk 4

World Club Association Challenge

Every two years, the eight semifinalists of the past two Association Leagues meet at the World Association Championships. If some teams make it two semifinals, then the first tiebreaker would be aggregate finishing place from the last two Association Club Leagues and then a tiebreaker of goal differential). If the World Association’s Challenge were played this year, these would be the finalists

* Africa Champions League hasn’t wrapped up yet, so these are QF from 2013

# Same as Africa — also I did not bother including anyone from Oceania. Sorry

& Combination of semifinalists from this year’s CONCACAF Champions League and last year’s Copa Libertadores (CONEMBOL’s Champions League)

You would expect Europe to dominate, but maybe someone from Africa or Asia sneaks into the quarterfinals if the matches actually mean something. And this sustained competition can only help the other associations improve.

This will be held in the off years between the International Association Cup and World Cups. They will replace the old, pointless Confederations Cup (see below) and serve as a meaningful tune-up for the host countries of either a association cups or the World Cup. It will be a single elimination tournament with judges seeding teams.

International Tournaments

International Associations Cup

Here is where we take another major chunk out of the schedule. Each Association will have their own international tournament as usual (though there are only four now instead of six). However, these tournaments (held two years before the World Cup) also serve as qualifying for the World Cup. You’ve just eliminated the stand-alone World Cup qualifying, often a foregone conclusion for many of the teams, save for the fringe squads competing for the last spots.

Each official associations tournament will feature 40 teams, determined by a revised ranking system, which means they will have to have play-in competitions for the remaining teams (team 41-on). How they do that is completely up to them, the new global organizing body only cares who the 40 “finalists” are.

Those 40 teams are arranged into 8 groups of 5 teams, and each plays a home and away against each other (8 games). The top two teams in each group make it to the knockout phase. The last three are out of both the Association Cup and fail to qualify for the World Cup. While every now and then a “deserving” team will suffer from having a poor Association Cup, such is life. While the Europe’s 17th best team is no doubt better than Asia’s 17th best team, at this point you would argue that none of them deserve to be in the final World Cup draw, so that conversation is moot.

With 16 teams left each, the Association League knockout phase begins at a pre-selected country. In this occurrence, the teams that make it to the semifinals automatically qualify for the World Cup two years hence.

The remaining 12 teams that did not make it to the semifinals are put into a pot with the 12 teams from the other three associations. From here, there is a seeded draw and home and home series (24 in all), played during the knockout rounds of the Associations Cup. The winning teams from each of the 24-knockout series join the already qualified 16 for a World Cup group of 40. This qualifying will be played during the remainder of the Association Cup so as to keep schedules as synced as possible.

If the host nation of the World Cup did not make the final four of its Association Cup, then they get the top seed in the home & home qualifying. If they lose, they will get nice seats to watch the tournament in their country. If they even failed to make the knockout phase, they probably shouldn’t have been awarded the tournament in the first place.

The World Cup

The World Cup is now a bit of a monstrosity with 40 teams, but that means 8 more nations are drawn into the fervor. World Cup starts as the Association Cups did: 8 groups of 5.

Let’s examine what the World Cup might look like — for the Americas, I took the finalists from both the Copa America (S. America) and Gold Cup (N. and C. America), and for Asia — I took the top three countries from Asia and the Oceania winner.

We will have to reseed all participants as Burkina Faso, for example, is not a seeded team. After seeding, these are our groups.

The top two teams from each group make it to the knockout phase.

The World Cup champion is champion of the world for the next four years as currently exists.

A restatement

This is how it would look in practice. Imagine John Smith plays for England and Liverpool at the absolute apex of their powers, and he manages in a four-year period to win everything. He’s how his schedule would look.

During this time, he will have won:

Four League Championships
Four Cup Championships
Four European Club Association Championships
Two Club Association World Cups
One European Association Championship
One World Cup

Much simpler, no?

PRE-SEASON

All-Star Challenges

For all of its tournaments and competitions of varied importance, FIFA has done a poor job of truly marketing the stars of the world. Here, with a little American pro sports ingenuity, we can fix that.

Football is wholly deficient in the sort of popcorn competitions deployed by other sports, no doubt due to the crazy schedule I previously pointed out. While the Confederations Cup may not mean MUCH, it is still Italy representing Italy, and therefore is incredibly important to the players on the pitch.

But nowhere to be found are the All-Star defense-optional competitions found in the NBA, NHL, MLB and others. MLS gets it half-right when its team of league-wide All-Stars plays a European squad (this year was against AS Roma). Clubs subject players to a not-insignificant amount of friendlies where though the competition is low, any number of injuries can happen.

Friendlies suck. The below would be awesome.

World All-Star Game

Held once a year in a different continent. Recently retired players would select the squads. Let’s check out how one might look (note — there are sure to be quibbles with any number of these selections).

Skills Competition

Imagine a free kick competition with Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Beckham and Ronaldinho

PK competition with (take your pick) Lampard, Balotelli, Gerrard and Neymar Jr. going up against the keepers above

A through ball accuracy competition between Xavi, Schweinsteiger, Xabi Alonso and Silva

End to end sprint between Bale, Aaron Lennon, Antonio Valencia, Theo Walcott (and maybe Ronaldo again)

And so on and so on.

5-on-5 challenge

If you are an adult football player, you’ve probably enjoyed 5-a-side. With a pitch long enough to operate, this can turn even amateur players into seemingly class footballers with some guile and quick maneuvers. Imagine distilling major clubs and nations to their core best and could produce some of the most beautiful football to man. It also allows you some great tactical choices. Do you have one gamble on midfielders, or do you have a strong core of defenders from which to counter attack? A poacher true #10 or a fleet of attacking midfielders. Just how valuable would David Luiz be in a situation like this?

This could be a pay-per-view event that would attract millions over the world. Enough said.