Champions League spending means the age of the fairytale is over as Liverpool, Bayern & Man City enjoy first leg thrashings

When Thomas Muller prodded home Bayern Munich’s third against Besiktas on Tuesday night it effectively ended the Champions League last 16 clash as a competition. Robert Lewandowski’s two further goals in the last 11 minutes confirmed that.

But it wasn’t the only second round game to be over before it had even started; Manchester City put four past Basel last week while Liverpool went one better and scored five at Porto, both without reply. That’s three of the eight ties over as contests, three meaningly second legs to come, three potentially interesting upsets off the cards.

That is unless Besiktas, Basel or Porto manage a second log comeback of Barcelona vs PSG proportions last season but the odds of that happening are about as long as Pep Guardiola accepting that Fabian Delph’s tackle at Wigan may have been a tad over the top.

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While it’s great to see Europe’s best negotiating games against each other in the final stages of the Champions League, competitions like that miss a certain something when there aren’t underdogs trying their best to upstage the bigs names. Last season reigning Premier League champions Leicester (still weird to say) managed to get out of their group and then beat Sevilla to make the quarter-finals, keeping another fairytale alive.

And let’s face it as much as everyone likes to see Europe’s big boys go head-to-head, sport is nothing without an underdog story, trying their best to not so much upset the apple cart but steal it and drive it straight through Barcelona’s back four.

Even one of the two last 16 first leg thumpings last season in Paris as PSG beat Barcelona 4-0 still maintained some interest as it meant the Catalans had to take the game to the Parisians with all their attacking talent, and it made for one of the most incredible games of Champions League football ever. The prospect of Besiktas, Basel or Porto doing the same doesn’t quite hold the same excitement (no offence, guys).

So why are Europe’s big boys so far ahead of the underdogs this season? Basel have been Swiss Super League champions for the past seven years straight, although sit second behind surprise package Young Boys this season, Porto lead the Portuguese Super Liga while Besiktas have taken the Turkish Super Lig title for the past two seasons but sit fourth this year, five points off İstanbul Başakşehir – the Leicester of Turkey.

All competent teams, although perhaps the strains of more competitive domestic leagues than usual have taken their toll on European performances. Even so, none will have expected to lose their last 16 first legs so heavily, eradicating any chance of progressing.

Are the strong getting stronger or the weak getting weaker? Or is the spending gap between the top and the bottom finally making a difference? Man City, Liverpool and Bayern spent a collective £500million on transfers this season, enough to run Porto, Besiktas and Basel for a year and then some. Those three spent around £16m on transfers, by the way, enough to pay for Virgil van Dijk’s finger nails.

It leaves Sevilla, who lost to Leicester in last season’s second round, and Shakhtar Donetsk with the task of representing the little guys in the competition and keeping the underdogs flag flying into the quarter final. If they lose to Manchester United and Roma heavily on Wednesday night the competition will have already lost any potential fairytales before the quarter-finals have even arrived.