Right. Sit down. I need to talk about this.

ESPN have published a piece asking whether failing to qualify for the Champions League might actually be BETTER for Premier League teams. Not a joke. Not satire. An actual, serious piece of football analysis suggesting that the greatest club competition on planet Earth is basically a nuisance. Like a parking ticket. Like a bit of admin you could do without.

I read it twice. Then I read it a third time because I genuinely thought I was having a stroke.

In my day, the Champions League was the dream. THE dream. You built your entire season around getting there. Managers lived and died by qualification. Boards would sack you for finishing fifth. Players would refuse to sign if you couldn't offer European nights. The whole thing was sacred.

And now? Now we've got people in nice offices with expensive degrees telling us it's actually a headache. An extra fixture burden. A distraction from the league. Too many games. Too much travel. Too much stress on the squad.

Don't get me started.

Too many games? TOO MANY GAMES? These lads play on pitches that look like bowling greens. They fly on private jets. They've got recovery pools and cryotherapy chambers and personal chefs making them quinoa salads at three in the morning. I once managed a team where the centre half drove a taxi until 2am on a Tuesday and then played at Hartlepool on the Wednesday. On a pitch that was 40% mud and 60% violence. Nobody asked if we had too many games.

That's the problem with modern football. Everything is an inconvenience now. Everything is something to be optimised and managed and rotated around. The Champions League anthem plays and instead of the hairs standing up on the back of your neck, some analyst somewhere is calculating the expected fatigue impact on weekend xG output.

Do you know what missing the Champions League used to mean? It meant failure. Full stop. It meant your manager was under pressure, your best players were circling the exits, and your fans were furious. It meant something had gone wrong and you needed to fix it. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, was sitting there going, "Actually this could work in our favour."

I managed Stockport County reserves in a Tuesday night cup tie against Macclesfield in 2004. Horizontal rain. Eleven fans in the ground, and that's counting the dog. And let me tell you, every single one of those players would have given their right arm to play in the Champions League. Every single one. They wouldn't have sat there going, "Hmm, but what about my minutes management?"

The argument, as far as I can tell, is that without European football you can focus on the league. Fewer injuries. Fresher legs. Better results on a Saturday. And yes, fine, there's a grain of logic in there somewhere if you squint hard enough. But since when did we start treating ambition as a problem to be solved?

What's next? "Is winning the league actually bad for you because of the trophy parade fatigue?" "Should clubs deliberately lose cup ties to preserve hamstrings?" Where does it end?

I'll tell you where it ends. It ends with football being run entirely by spreadsheets and sleep scientists, and nobody left who actually cares about glory. About those magical European nights. About beating Real Madrid in the Bernabeu and the whole city going absolutely mental.

You want to know if missing the Champions League is good for you? Ask any fan. Any real fan. Ask them if they'd rather have a "managed schedule" or a Wednesday night under the lights against Bayern Munich.

You already know the answer.

In my day, we didn't optimise football. We just played it. And we were grateful for every single game we got.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need another Bovril. This one's gone cold and so has my will to live.