Watching Barcelona beat Manchester United in Wembley Champions League final is top entry on my football CV

Brilliant Barcelona put in an awesome performance at Wembley last night to beat Manchester United 3-1 and for me it was the best night of my football-watching CV.
Twenty years ago this month I was 16, doing my GCSEs and trying to skip school to watch Manchester United.
Two decades later I found myself in the company of 87,000 other football fans at Saturday’s Champions League final.
I’m not a United fan but, back in May 1991 and through a friend, I had a ticket to watch Manchester United face Tottenham in what turned out to be the final game of the Division One season.
Both sides had taken part in big cup finals in the previous five days – Spurs had beaten Nottingham Forest in the ‘Gazza Final’ while United had beaten Barcelona in the European Cup Winners Cup in Rotterdam.
With a lift to and from Old Trafford sorted the only red tape I had to cross was the fact I had a French Oral exam at 9am on the Tuesday morning.
I got my mum to write a letter to the headmaster of my school appealing for the exam to be moved so I could watch the United game at Old Trafford. The reply was shorter than Wayne Rooney’s temper.
I was told that focussing on football as such a crucial time in my education was wrong and I was advised to re-evaluate my priorities with immediate effect.
You can guess the rest – I yawned and struggled through the French exam just hours after returning from Old Trafford.
Twenty years on I somehow found myself at Saturday’s massive Euro finale and I must admit to some guilt and surprise that I actually was able to go.
I stumbled across a ticket almost by accident. I’ve always loved watching football on the continent and in the last decade have been to more than 40 games. I was actually looking into getting tickets for a Europa League quarter-final earlier this year when I saw a link on the UEFA website for Champions League final tickets.
Of course nobody knew the finalists then, but because it was at Wembley, UEFA made 11,000 tickets available in a ballot for British-based fans.
I applied, ticked the box for a £225 second tier ticket with a staggering £26 booking fee and six weeks later was told I had one.
By that stage it was clear the United/Barcelona final was on the cards and while fans of those two clubs scoured the online planet for tickets, I sat back as a fan of neither club with one in the bag.
UEFA president Michel Platini has since said the process was wrong on two fronts – wrong to charge so much for tickets and wrong to have so many for neutral fans. I totally agree – I shouldn’t really have been able to get a ticket, but hey, it’s a guilt I can live with.
And so to the game.
The atmosphere smacks you in the face as soon as you arrive at Wembley Park tube station; chaos and lots of pushing, loads of Manchester and Spanish accents, everyone drinking cans of beer, a pungent waft of dope in the air, warnings everywhere not to buy and sell tickets from touts, lots of people buying and selling tickets from touts.
With my £225 ticket reportedly worth £8,000 of course I was tempted to sell it, but Wembley cranked up the fear factor ahead of the game with talk of criminal procedures taking place for anyone selling and threats of ID checks on the turnstiles.
As it turned out there were no checks and loads of tickets changing hands for big bundles of euros – I don’t think they were going for anything more than £500 outside the stadium though.
Inside Wembley the atmosphere was already building as I took my seat behind the goal with an hour to kick off. I sat in the United end but while their fans filled the lower and top tiers, the middle tier in front of the large TV screen was a hotchpotch of neutrals and most seemed to be supporting Barcelona.
I got talking to a Chinese fan near me with a United cap on and a Barcelona shirt on. I asked who he supported and the answer was not that surprising given his dress sense – he was an Arsenal fan.
The chap next to me was a Barca nut who sat draped in a Catalan flag and throughout the whole game provided a running commentary. Sometimes if actually felt like I was in Spain, not Middlesex.
Everyone knows the details of the game so I won’t go into those, save to say that the atmosphere among the fans I sat with was great – I must have taken a dozen photos of people with their cameras, I talked to loads of people I wouldn’t normally have talked to and I think we all collectively felt that we were genuinely lucky to have got these tickets.
I was well aware that the action unfolding in front of me was being watched by more than 300 million people around the world and that’s the one thing I will savour.
Barcelona and of course Lionel Messi were superb and I felt sorry for United – as talented as Sir Alex Ferguson’s men are it’s a bit like being Jimmy White in the 1980s when there’s an all-conquering Steve Davis around.
Most United fans walking down Wembley Way after the game agreed that they’d simply been beaten by a better side.
And then, to almost complete the irony of me getting a match ticket, I was asked by a ‘collector’ if he could have my match ticket as a ‘souvenir’.
No thanks mate, just as before the game, I want it as a treasured memory of a huge addition to my football watching CV.