2011 was a strange year in the Champions League's history. After Barcelona raised the bar once again in May's Wembley showpiece, the current season's group stage ripped up the rulebook again, producing the most tense and keenly-contested opening stanza of world soccer’s premier club competition in many a year.
Yet the question remains – can we necessarily define a tweaking of the accepted order of things as a sign of progress?
It is without doubt that the failures of Manchester United, Manchester City, Valencia and even Villarreal have disappointed fans beyond the bounds of their individual domestic reaches. Just as when the established wealth and reputations of Bayern Munich, Lyon and Anderlecht fail to get their hands on their domestic titles, there lingers a nagging suspicion that standards have dropped.
Many will justifiably argue that United badly underachieved, though its exit was at least partly attributable to the largely unexpected quality of its opposition. If this season's group stage is eventually to be seen as the jolt to rid some of the European elite of its complacency, Sir Alex Ferguson's team selections might be looked back upon as the symptom of that malaise.
It is difficult to blame Sir Alex, even outside the context of his exceptional career achievements. While English fans blew out their cheeks at the danger inherent in Arsenal's group stage draw, equally as many scoffed at United's good fortune in what seemed a gift of a safe passage.
Yet Benfica and Basel were simply more positive. Jorge Jesus' side showed the dash and élan to match its illustrious history via Nicolas Gaitan and Pablo Aimar, and the Swiss champion continued to believe, even after the considerable setback of losing its revered coach, Thorsten Fink, to Hamburg mid-campaign. Fink's former assistant Heiko Vogel saw the job through with a laudable blend of youth, notably Xherdan Shaqiri, and the experience of Alexander Frei and Marco Streller.
Even maiden Romanian champion, Otelul Galati, avoided becoming stereotypical cannon fodder in its first Champions League appearance. Despite losing all matches, Otelul was never humiliated, and made life very uncomfortable for all of Benfica (twice), Basel (with a storming comeback from 3-0 down on Matchday 5) and United (which stumbled through its game at the National Stadium in Bucharest).
Even some of the competition's regulars that did eventually flourish hardly did so with the swagger that should be associated with European behemoths. Both Arsenal and Inter have used the competition as a crutch to prop up, and then reinvigorate, collapsing domestic campaigns. Genuinely threatened by an emerging Dortmund, a battle-hardened Marseille and an accomplished Olympiakos, Arsene Wenger's men eased through in a group that proved to be a mere sparkler rather than the promised Catherine wheel.
Domestic doubts were put to one side as Arsenal kept its cool, led by a metronomic Mikel Arteta and an exemplary captain in Robin van Persie. It was rarely spectacular, but Arsenal's ability to dig in, traverse difficult periods in matches and pluck results from unpromising situations - most notably at Marseille - showed a hitherto unsuspected fortitude.
We looked to Dortmund to fire the imagination, but Jürgen Klopp's side was undone simply by its greenness. Germany may produce talent prolifically, but the value of experience was never better portrayed than in Dortmund's two matches against Marseille. Domination couldn’t prevent heavy defeat in France as Marseille unpicked a casual defense before Didier Deschamps' team gave Dortmund a lesson in stamina and desire when snatching qualification at the Westfalenstadion in the group's closing moments.
Inter relied on similar knowhow as Arsenal, with the Nerazzurri bouncing back from a shock home defeat at the hands of Trabzonspor to take advantage of the relative naivety of Lille, perhaps the Italian's biggest rival on paper. The juxtaposition was clear in the sides' Matchday Three meeting in northern France, when a dominant Lille uncharacteristically lacked the wit to break Claudio Ranieri's rearguard organization. Coach Rudi Garcia's go-to attacking conduit Eden Hazard, who is surely destined for the very apex of the world game, may well look back on this as a pivotal lesson.
The flip side of this was perhaps in Group A, where the riches of Manchester City were ultimately insufficient to halt Bayern Munich and Napoli.
This season's Bayern is a more polished one than the oft-thrilling side that ramshackled its way to the Madrid final in 2010, with the experienced Jupp Heynckes shoring its defense and coaxing the best from the intermittently-brilliant Franck Ribery.
Napoli's progression was a victory for the ingenuity of its coach Walter Mazzari, with the collective verve and organization of his side (besides the individual exploits of star man Edinson Cavani) underpinning the group's destiny.
Mazzari’s men were not the only revelation, with APOEL besting the wealthy Zenit St Petersburg, Porto and Shakhtar Donetsk to top Group G and make history as the first Cypriot club to reach the knockout stage.
APOEL's triumph is one of stability, with coach Ivan Jovanovic given the opportunity to build on the foundations of a promising group stage performance in 2009/10 (notably the away draws at Chelsea and Atletico Madrid) to create something even more tangible in this campaign.
The current German and French champions have the right to be more ambitious in the medium term, with Dortmund pulling 80,000 fans for every Bundesliga home match and Lille set to step into the same stratosphere, with the 50,000-capacity, state-of-the-art Grand Stade Lille Métropole awaiting its opening next summer. Yet as prudent housekeepers, Klopp and Garcia are canny enough to know that APOEL’s steady approach points the way to the possibility of future success on the biggest stage.
The subject of considerable doubt this season, it is André Villas-Boas' Chelsea that has perhaps given the biggest indication of how greater uncertainty might actually raise overall standards. The London club was required to pull a performance out of the bag against Valencia in its final qualification match and did so in style.
Villas-Boas reprised his Porto recipe for success, fusing tigerish new blood such as Oriol Romeu with the reliably explosive Didier Drogba. Evolution, rather than revolution, should be the way for the Premier League’s biggest sides in moments of rare self-doubt.
Only time will tell whether 2011 was an epochal marker for the Champions League or rather a mere blip. For now, it is enough that those who dismiss the group stage as a procession have something to chew on.
