First impressions tend to linger. For example, I’ve always liked Paul Merson as a pundit despite the fact he might not be the most knowledgable or the most coherent and may sometimes appear not to have realised he’s on television at all, to have just found himself talking for a really long time with smartly dressed people about Arsène Wenger while, for reasons that escape him, sitting in a brightly lit room behind a cardboard desk. The moment I first realised I was going along with pretty much whatever Merse said was the aftermath of Michael Owen’s goal against Argentina at France 98. Never mind the finish or the way the pre-injury Owen is able to move his feet at a strange, scurrying triple-speed, operating within his own distinct bubble of time and space. The best bit of that goal is the way the TV feed cuts to the touchline just as Owen runs off to celebrate, capturing Merson out on the pitch jumping up and down, turning to the rest of the England bench with a huge gaping grin on his face yelling: “What a farkin’ goal!” The other subs are all out there looking generically pleased. Further along Glenn Hoddle is already doing the classic temple-tapping think-about-it gesture. Only Merse looks completely lost in the moment, utterly consumed by the spectacle of a goal that arguably gave him greater joy than it did Owen himself. As a pundit Merson’s range of response is essentially the same, variations on this scale, with the same ability to identify and communicate a basic joy in his sport. He was right too. For all the white noise about dashed hopes and geopolitical rivalries, all that really remains now of that painstakingly constructed moment is the thrill, the indivisible truth of what a farkin’ goal. The reason for going on about this at such length here is my own slightly unusual experience over the last six days spent watching six of the top 12 richest football clubs in the world, and by extension ever, play in the flesh. In a frustrating twist it turns out I don’t have anything profound, or indeed particularly interesting to share about this experience, as regular readers will no doubt already be aware. But one thing has stood out from City and Chelsea, PSG and Real to the gripping end notes of Spurs and Juventus on Wednesday night. Everybody knows there is a loss of scale around these institutions now. Our super-clubs have become features of the corporate landscape, no longer human-shaped, hard to grasp in outline. At this level of football even the word “player” can seem like a hangover from some more frivolous age. Probably it should be replaced now with something more apt, like human sport unit or elite level ball-tactic cog. And yet whatever we throw at it, no matter how we blind it with greed or dilute its competitive edges, football retains its power, remains an utterly addictive, engaging, consoling source of human interest. Again this comes back to that basic pleasure principle. The game does work best, indeed only really works at all, when we get a sense of play and of joy. Not that this is news in itself. We know this about the best footballers, just as again the really striking thing about Real Madrid and Cristiano Ronaldo on Tuesday night was the sense of pleasure. Ronaldo is often portrayed as a kind of android-warrior, a muscle dummy filled with hair-gel and topped with a sneering robot head-thump engine. But this is of course to deny the basic beauty of his story, the skinny kid from Madeira who just loved kicking a ball and now in his mature splendour communicates that same enduring pleasure. In Paris Ronaldo spent the opening minutes of an epically serious football match wheeling out his zingiest flicks and twirls, enjoying the ping of the ball, a sense of basic enjoyment that also made victory feel somehow inevitable. I hadn’t meant to spend so long going on about star players, but then they do tend to hog the stage. The point of this ramble about pleasure was to linger on the other aspect, indeed the basic point of all team sport. This is, of course, team play, human chemistry, the joy of seeing even a collection of hastily assembled stars blend into the human poetry of a functioning team. With this in mind the most captivating spectacle of the week came at Wembley where Juventus produced a show of genuinely stirring collectivism. At the final whistle at Wembley one travelling Italian of pensionable age could be seen haring up and down the aisle waving his fists and yodelling with pure pleasure at this effort of shared will. And he was right. It was utterly absorbing, just as this kind of fine-margins performance, a 0-1 wrestled back into a 2-1, is probably more rare now. Football will continue to have stars. If anything is in danger of being lost it is this other form of pleasure. The wider unhappiness at a flaccid performance by the stars of Paris Saint-Germain; the howling at Arsenal’s periodic collapses: there is something profound at the root of this, a basic dismay at seeing such shared dysfunction. The joy of sport has always lain in the idea of a miniature society, a harmony that takes us beyond even what a farkin’ goal into deeper levels of play and pleasure; and a joy that will, while it remains, keep us coming back for more whatever the surrounding noise. The Guardian Sport