You’ve watched our favorite team brutalize the competition, you expressed your joy in an entirely un-hooligan like manner and now you are wondering how you are supposed to pass the time until the next game. Here are my suggestions for feeding the urge in the off time. Play the game. I am being completely serious. Get some mates together, find a space and kick the ball. What’s simpler than that? Not only is it a great form of exercise and bonding time but it gives you a real appreciation for the pain and determination that the players have to go as far as they do and play as hard as they do. Go to the pub and step up to the foosball tables. It’s not quite the same but I find foosball to be one of the best pub games. Sure you can play billiards if you want to look classy but who wants to look classy?

Throw on your colors and prove our dominance on the cheap foosball tables. Not only will you show the riffraff that your team is the best but the pub owner will appreciate the lack of overturned tables and broken pint glasses.

Find an indoor match and local team. The seasons were based on the weather from the start and with the advent of modern technology, some people play year round. Find teams you like and let them know. You don’t need to devote your life to the local team but it’s one heck of a way to spend an evening and show some support for fellow fans of the game. You may even find yourself joining the team.

Whether you’re joining a team and getting down in the muck yourself or just saddling up to the Harvard foosball tables, there are lots of ways to stave off the football cravings in the off season.

Robin van Persie has refused to commit his future to Arsenal and raised further fears that he could follow the example of Cesc Fábergas and Samir Nasi by forcing the club to sell him rather than let his contract run down. The Dutch striker, who scored two goals for Arsenal on Saturday to underline his value, would not be short of offers from Europe’s top clubs and said: “I still have almost two years left, so for the moment that’s fine. I’m happy with my contract. I can’t look into the future. I can’t see us talking now because we are so busy.”

Manchester City, who bought Nasri and Gaël Clichy from the Gunners this summer, are thought to be one of the clubs interested in the 28-year-old Arsenal captain. “Maybe we will leave it until the end of next season,” Van Persie said.

Van Persie’s immediate task is to become more talisman than totem. For all his skill and goals the Dutchman has tended to personify the brittleness that has dogged Arsenal in recent seasons. He has been a symbol of their frustrated potential rather than a trigger for trophy-gathering. Arsène Wenger hopes that entrusting him with the captain’s armband, following Fábregas’s move to Barcelona, will galvanise player and club.

“It’s true that we had a meeting during the summer,” Wenger said. “It is understandable that he would want that when you lose players such as Fábregas and Nasri. I don’t think we will lose him.”

Critics argue that Van Persie is not a natural leader, that he is too quiet and individualistic to inspire those around him and, therefore, that awarding him the armband is merely a sop to his ego and counterproductive to the team. Wenger suggests this is bilge and says the Dutchman is no longer the “emotionally impulsive” 21‑year‑old whom he signed for £2.75m from Feyenoord in 2004.

“He has leadership on the pitch,” Wenger said, “because technically he is super‑talented so he gains the respect of the others for that, and then the second part that he has added is that he speaks his mind in the dressing room. And people listen to him.”

Van Persie may still not be the most vocal of captains on the pitch but there is no doubt he can express himself in goals. Last season he had the best goals‑per‑minute ratio of any player in the Premier League. But for his fitness troubles he would surely have scored 100 goals for Arsenal long before Saturday, when he reached that milestone thanks to a well‑taken brace against Bolton Wanderers, which was topped off with an 89th‑minute goal that gave Arsenal a conclusive win and some relief from the negativity that has surrounded the club.

The fact that Van Persie has struck a century of goals despite not playing as an orthodox centre-forward shows that he has the same intelligence as the last two players to reach that tally for Arsenal, Dennis Bergkamp and Thierry Henry. Wenger sees another comparison. “He is like Lionel Messi in the positional sense,” he said. “He doesn’t play like a real centre-forward but if you look at his movement he is very intelligent. because of his diagonal runs. And his first touch is so good that in tight spaces he can make a difference, also because he has a very short back-lift for a big guy.”

Theo Walcott also wants to play centre-forward and it is perhaps because he is not quite so flexible in tight spaces that he has yet to do so regularly. Moreover, his finishing skills are still not honed enough, though they are improving. Against Bolton he and Gervinho squandered one-on-one chances but both were useful as suppliers, especially Walcott who created Van Persie’s second with a splendid run and cross from the right.

Walcott hobbled off in the dying minutes, after suffering a “sharp pain in the knee” and Wenger admitted that he feared the winger was set for another long spell on the sidelines, which would have been a damaging blow to the club two days after learning that Jack Wilshere must undergo surgery on an ankle injury that was initially considered relatively innocuous and so will be ruled out for months. Arsenal now say, however, that his injury is only “minor” and he could return for the Champions League match against Olympiakos.

Bolton’s manager, Owen Coyle, would welcome similar glad tidings. Illness left him without two of his best players, Gary Cahill and Stuart Holden, and he then lost the striker David Ngog to concussion early in the first half. Their chances of avoiding a fifth successive league defeat never looked good after that. Coyle was unhappy that bad defending aggravated those blows but said his side would soon clamber off the bottom of the table.

“I’ll always accept being beaten by a better team but, if you contribute to your own downfall, that’s a horrible feeling,” he said. “I’ve stressed that to the players and we accept that we’ve got to do better but we must also balance that by saying that so far this seasonwe’ve played four of the teams who I expect to be in the top six and next week we’ve got another one with Chelsea.

But we’ll keep working hard and the wins are around the corner.” friv

Arsenal’s inability to tie down players could cause further unrest after their leading striker hinted he is keeping his options open. Robin van Persie looked as if he might have killed with a single glance. The Dutchman’s first home match as the Arsenal captain had ended in defeat by Liverpool and he was hot with rage and frustration. A penny for his thoughts would have been worth the investment yet Van Persie was never going to go public. The 28-year-old knows himself too well.

It was 20 August. Cesc Fábregas had left for Barcelona and Samir Nasri was poised to leave for Manchester City. Arsène Wenger had signed only one established international – the forward Gervinho from Lille – and found himself in the throes of a selection crisis. It felt as though the club had hit rock bottom, although that was to come, at Manchester United the following weekend.

Van Persie bit his lip as he marched out of the Emirates Stadium dressing-room that day because, as more than one club official acknowledged, he can speak only with candour and he realised that the heat of this moment was not the time to vent it. So he stewed, which is something he has done plenty of since the beginning of the summer. But, if Van Persie has given a passable impression of a ticking time-bomb, it was no surprise when he detonated following Saturday’s win over Bolton Wanderers, sparking a trail of banner headlines.

Van Persie’s admission that he was in no hurry to discuss an extension to his contract, which expires in June 2013, and the associated suggestion that it would be better to wait until the end of the season, has caused no little alarm. The striker could have gone further and he doubtless would have done if he had spoken about the club’s direction after the Liverpool or United games. But his words at the weekend sufficed to get the message across and the issue out into the open. As Arsenal labour, Van Persie intends to keep his options open.

The mood of an overseas player in the Premier League can often be judged when he is back with his country on international duty and Van Persie has cut a withdrawn figure with Holland of late, retreating into the company of his close friends Ibrahim Afellay, Khalid Boulahrouz and Nigel de Jong and being unusually reluctant to speak to the Dutch press.

At the end of last season, in the June friendly against Brazil which finished 0-0, he lost his cool at Arjen Robben, after his team-mate ignored the opportunity to play him in. When he was substituted by the manager, Bert van Marwijk, Van Persie stormed straight down the tunnel and he clashed with Robben in the dressing-room after the game. His crankiness was reflected in a post-match statement that was critical of Robben. “Everybody hashis own character,” he said. “I would always have played that ball … I think most players would but I shouldn’t have walked away [to the dressing-room] like that.”

During the most recent international break, when Holland beat San Marino and Finland, Van Persie declined to speak to the press for fear of any comments about Arsenal rebounding in England. Van Persie would not normally have such concerns and the general impression is that he has become anxious and uncomfortable.

Fábregas displayed similar traits last season, when he kept his own counsel apart from the controversial interview that he gave to Don Balón, the Spanish magazine. When Fábregas finally completed his transfer to Barcelona, there was the view that he might not get into the team but he has thrived in the early weeks of his second spell at Camp Nou. Van Persie, who would back his ability anywhere in the world, would surely have taken note.

Wenger added five players in the final 48 hours of the summer transfer window and he said that he wanted all of his business to reassure the club’s existing stars. It is unclear, though, whether it has done so with Van Persie, who had called in early July for “statement” signings to be made.

He could not contain his exasperation with Gervinho in the defeat at Blackburn Rovers, when the Ivorian ignored him in an excellent position to go for goal himself – Van Persie hates selfish players – while, in his eyes, most midfielders would struggle to measure up to Fábregas. Mikel Arteta has big boots to fill.

Van Persie is not the only Arsenal player who stands to become a free agent in the summer after next – Thomas Vermaelen, Theo Walcott, Andrey Arshavin and Johan Djourou are in the same position. But the sense of unease is most acute with Van Persie, who is arguably the club’s one remaining world-class talent.

The conspiracy theorists worry about his close links to Darren Dein, the agent who helped to move Fábregas out of the club, although Van Persie’s Fifa-registered representative is the Amsterdam-based Kees Vos. Van Persie, however, is his own man and one with no shortage of potential suitors. Yet another Arsenal contract saga is set to run.

Sir Alex Ferguson has accused football of selling its soul to television and claimed that broadcasters do not pay enough money given the amount of control they exert over the game. The Manchester United manager used his first in-depth BBC interview for almost a decade to berate the corrosive influence of television on the fixture list, despite the hundreds of millions of pounds it contributes to Manchester United’s bottom line and its centrality to the business plan of the club’s controversial owners.

“When you shake hands with the devil you have to pay the price. Television is God at the moment,” said Ferguson, who agreed that broadcasters had “too much power”. “It shows itself quite clearly because when you see the fixture lists come out now, they can pick and choose whenever they want the top teams on television,” he added.

“You get some ridiculous situations when you’re playing on Wednesday night in Europe and then at lunchtime the following Saturday. You ask any manager if they would pick that themselves and there’d be absolutely no chance.”

Ferguson also said that broadcasters should pay more for the rights to live football, given the Premier League sold its product to more than 200 countries. “When you think of that I don’t think we get enough money,” he said.

The Premier League secured around £3.5bn from its most recent round of television deals, which run until the end of next season. About £2.1bn was generated from domestic rights sales, including about £1.8bn for live rights from BSkyB and ESPN, and £1.4bn from overseas broadcasters.

BSkyB refused to comment on Ferguson’s observations but sports broadcasting insiders pointed out that Ferguson’s views did not reflect the fact that each club must be shown live a minimum of 10 times and a maximum of 26, nor that other factors affected the scheduling of matches. They include policing issues and the ongoing tussle over the fixture calendar between domestic football bodies, Uefa and Fifa.

“Sir Alex’s comments always have to be taken seriously – he is a very wise and experienced football man,” Brian Barwick, a former FA chief executive and controller of sport at ITV, told the BBC.

“But on this one, I do think Manchester United have almost had a lion’s share of TV revenue over a period of time and it has helped build a fantastic stadium in Old Trafford and helped build Sir Alex’s teams with star players.” Others pointed to the explosion in broadcasting income over the past two decades and the degree to which it drives Manchester United’s commercial strategy, which relies on international TV exposure to drive its global sponsorship strategy.

Under the Premier League’s distribution formula, which includes an equal share plus a merit payment and facility fees depending on the number of times each club is shown, Manchester United earned £60.4m from domestic TV last season.

The club’s most recent financial results, to the year ending June 2011, showed that media income amounted to the club’s biggest revenue stream, bringing in £119.4m. Commercial income, increasingly driven by overseas exposure on TV, rose to £103.4m from £81.4m the previous year.

The global reach afforded to the club by TV has been claimed as a major driver behind the plan to float a minority stake in Manchester United on the Singapore stock exchange.

The Football Supporters’ Federation backed Ferguson’s stance, albeit for different reasons. “The contract with Sky and ESPN ought to leave more control with the Premier League over the fixture calendar,” said its chairman, Malcolm Clarke. “They should try and minimise the disruption to the number of matches being played on Saturday at 3pm. And they should be trying to minimise the number of long journeys for supporters on a Monday night.

“If you gave the Premier League more control, it might reduce the value of the rights in the marketplace but that should be a price football is prepared to pay.”

Despite Ferguson’s comments, there is no suggestion that the Glazers are planning to try to break away from the Premier League’s collective selling model in order to maximise revenues.

In contrast to Spain, where the big two clubs do their own deals with television companies, the Premier League’s income is shared out on a more equitable basis. Real Madrid recorded £129.9m in media revenues and Barcelona £145.8m, according to to the 2011 Deloitte Money League. United were the Premier League’s highest earners last year, with and Blackpool the lowest with £39.1m.

The Glazers are believed to be convinced of the merits of the collective model but are determined to better exploit the limited rights that clubs have within their control by signing deals with international telecom and media companies.

In remarks that are likely to come as little surprise to those who have been on the receiving end of the Scot’s famously fiery temper, David Beckham and Paul Ince included, Ferguson also admitted in the same interview: “I’m a confrontational character. I don’t like people arguing back with me. I maybe have a short fuse.”

Fernando Torres’s first few months at Chelsea have been “very difficult” but the Spain striker said the club’s fans had always supported him. The player has struggled badly for goals since leaving Liverpool for a record fee of £50m in January, scoring only three times. “When you are doing great and scoring goals from the first day it is easy for the fans to love you but the first months for me have been very, very difficult,” said Torres. “I have always felt the support of the fans, not just now when things are going right, and it’s nice to start scoring for them,” he said, referring to his two goals in the last two matches.

“It [the support] is something that impressed me from the first day.” Torres has expressed regret over his first sending-off in the Premier League and has also thanked Chelsea’s fans for standing by him during a testing eight months at the club.

Torres experienced a match of extremes for the second successive weekend after he was sent off for a two-foot lunge on Swansea City’s Mark Gower. The striker had just scored only his third goal for Chelsea but he instead made headlines for the wrong reasons, much as he had done by missing an open goal soon after scoring in the defeat at Manchester United six days earlier.

Torres, now suspended for three domestic matches, insisted he did not intend to hurt Gower. “Obviously I didn’t want to do anything bad against the other player,” the Spaniard said. “I tried to take away my legs, but I arrived late to the ball and I kicked him a little bit.

“It’s a pity and I’m really disappointed for that. It’s the first time I have received a red card in the Premier League and I hope it’s the last one. It was really disappointing, especially because the team had to play with 10 men for a long time.”

Torres has now scored two goals in as many matches and said he is grateful to the Chelsea fans for not turning on him while he has struggled to live up to his £50m price tag.

“Obviously, when you are doing great, scoring goals from the first day and doing good performances, it’s easy for the fans to love and support you,” he said. “I have been struggling, but I have always had the support of the fans. From the first day until now, every time I talk with them on the street, the cafe, everywhere, I can feel the support they are giving me so it is nice to start scoring for them.”

The Arsenal and England midfielder Jack Wilshere will be sidelined for a period of between four and five months following surgery to remedy a stress fracture to his right ankle. Wilshere has not featured for the Gunners in a competitive game this season after suffering the injury in a pre-season friendly against the New York Red Bulls at the Emirates Stadium. A statement on the club’s official website on Monday evening read: “Jack Wilshere has this morning undergone ankle surgery at a central London hospital.

“Under the care of two world-renowned surgeons, Jack has had the stress fracture of his right ankle repaired.

“The initial indications are that the surgery has been successful and Jack will now undergo a prolonged period of rehabilitation. It is envisaged that Jack’s rehabilitation will take a period of four to five months.”

Wilshere had initially hoped that the problem would not require surgery but the club confirmed last week that an operation would be necessary.

Wilshere added: “I’ve had my operation this morning and all went well. My ankle is little bit sore, but I’m already looking forward to working hard to get fit and playing again.

“I would also just like to say thanks for the many messages of support I have received from you – the fantastic Arsenal supporters. See you all soon at the Emirates.”

There was no repeat of 1968 Wembley euphoria for Manchester United in their bid to lift a fourth European Cup, just an unwelcome reminder of how it felt to be outplayed in 2009 in Rome. Once again United could not get enough of the ball to do themselves justice, once again their most experienced players were unable to impose themselves, and for a second time in three years Barcelona did almost exactly as they pleased.

It is supposed to be United who do what they want, or so their supporters have taken to singing, though few had the stomach for that particular ditty after seeing their side even more comprehensively taken apart than was the case two years ago. With Lionel Messi dazzling once again, United only had Wayne Rooney’s aggression with which to counter some scintillating passing and movement, and only some erratic, almost casual finishing from the Spanish side prevented the score reflecting what a mismatch this really was. Barcelona could easily have been three goals to the good by half -time, and must have been in double figures for scoring opportunities in the second half by the time David Villa scored their third to kill off any faint United hopes of recovery.

Barcelona were unable to name quite their strongest team, with their influential captain, Carles Puyol, fit enough only for a place on the bench and Javier Mascherano having to continue as an emergency centre-half. The United line-up was the one everyone had guessed in advance, though Sir Alex Ferguson too sprang a surprise among the substitutes, with Michael Owen’s selection nudging Dimitar Berbatov out of the squad.

United began like a team with a well-drilled plan, with Park Ji-sung quickly closing down Dani Alves and Wayne Rooney enjoying some success in the air against Mascherano. For almost 10 minutes Barcelona were penned in their own half, though not uncomfortably so.

The closest United came to an early breakthrough was a raking pass from Ryan Giggs that almost found Javier Hernández in space, but Gerard Piqué just got away with a risky interception.

Lionel Messi had been content in these early stages to alternate between positioning himself high up the pitch and dropping back into his own half in search of the ball, and United sensibly declined to get dragged out of position by following him. He did not remain isolated or idle for long, and by the midpoint of the first half Barcelona were building attacks in the familiar waves around the edge of United’s penalty area, with Xavi, Andrés Iniesta and David Villa always involved but Messi never far from the ball or the point of danger. Rio Ferdinand was obliged to block a shot from Villa after Messi’s pass created the opening,

Pedro Rodríguez missed the game’s first clear opportunity in front of goal, Villa put a shot narrowly wide and Nemanja Vidic pulled off a superbly timed tackle to stop Messi in full flight in the area before the United fans at the end Barcelona were attacking had a chance to catch their breath.

When a Giggs mistake offered Messi a chance he was surprisingly slow to accept, allowing Ferdinand to dispossess him, Ferguson’s furious reaction showed the strain United were under. A couple of minutes later, almost inevitably, the first goal arrived. Xavi ghosted across the edge of the United area, biding his time, keeping the defence guessing, until releasing Rodríguez on the right with a flick of the outside of his boot. United realised a fraction too late that here was an option they did not have covered, and Edwin van der Sar was beaten by a low shot into his bottom‑left corner.

What United had to do was find a better reaction than they managed in Rome two years ago, when their self-belief and organisation began to wilt as soon as Barcelona took the lead, and remarkably they found it within seven minutes. When Michael Carrick and Fábio da Silva won the ball following a Barcelona throw on the right Rooney set off on a determined diagonal run, exchanged passes with Giggs and hit a confident drive beyond Víctor Valdés as soon as he had a clear sight of goal.

Barcelona protested with some justification that Giggs was standing in an offside position, though he never touched the ball and was not in the goalkeeper’s way. Encouraged as United were by the equaliser, they should still have been a goal down at the interval. Messi carved them open once more, yet somehow failed to apply the finishing touch when Villa declined to shoot and rolled the ball invitingly across the face of goal. It was a bit like Arsenal – over-elaboration in front of goal when a more direct approach might have paid off, but not so much like Arsenal that United could kid themselves their opponents would fall to pieces in the second half.

From the moment Mascherano began the second half with a buccaneering run from his own half into the United penalty area to the 54th minute shot from Messi that restored Barcelona’s lead, United were hardly able to get a touch of the ball. Barcelona were not stroking it around in their own half, or moving sideways and backwards in the way they sometimes do. They were creating clear openings, and if anything wasting them through being over-ambitious. Alves had already hit a post and Patrice Evra cleared off his line before Messi claimed his first goal in England.

By that stage he could reasonably have had a hat-trick, but perhaps tired of over-complication, he settled for banging the ball past a possibly unsighted Van der Sar after Iniesta had found him on the edge of the area.

With the game being played at one end to an almost embarrassing degree, Barcelona were literally queuing up to take shots at Van der Sar before Villa scored. The goalkeeper made notable stops from Messi, then Xavi, then Iniesta, before Villa gave him no chance with an exquisite curler, after Nani had come on for Fábio and was immediately let down by his first touch. He probably should not reproach himself too much. Standing next to Messi, almost anyone in the world would look clumsy.

Barcelona produced a sublime performance to beat Manchester United 3-1 in the Champions League final at Wembley. Goals from Pedro, Lionel Messi and David Villa punctuated a mesmeric team display as the Catalan side lifted club football’s biggest prize for the fourth time. Wayne Rooney fired a superb first-half equaliser for United, cancelling out Pedro’s opener, but the Premier League champions were eventually blown away by superior opponents.

Edwin van der Sar’s final game before retirement ended in disappointment, with the Dutchman at fault for letting Messi’s low strike scuttle past him early in the second half. And Sir Alex Ferguson was unable to slow the Spanish team’s super-slick passing, suffering a second final defeat to them within three years.

This repeat of the 2009 final, which Barca won 2-0, produced a similarly one-sided outcome and cemented Pep Guardiola’s team’s place among the great club sides. Messi took his goal tally to 100 in the last two seasons, and produced yet another demonstration of skill, strength and devastating finishing.

Ferguson fielded the same starting XI that won 2-0 away to Schalke in the semi-final first leg, but sprung a surprise by leaving Dimitar Berbatov out of the squad altogether.

Eric Abidal started at left-back after making a remarkable recovery from surgery on a liver tumour in March – in a wonderful touch, he was handed the captain’s armband to lift the triophy.

However, the Catalans’ captain Carles Puyol – struggling with injury – was consigned to the bench with the diminutive Javier Mascherano playing centre-back.

As they did two years ago, United started positively, passing with intent and closing down. Then, just as in Rome, Barca took control of the game.

Xavi completed his first 40 passes before any United player had reached double figures, and the Liga champions’ tiki-taka started to tell – especially in conjunction with the remarkable pressing job on the rare occasions Barca gave the ball away.

Rio Ferdinand had to slide in accurately on Villa as he prepared to pull the trigger, while his defensive partner Nemanja Vidic was equally precise when nicking the ball off the brilliant Messi.

Pedro might have opened the scoring after a quarter of an hour, and Villa fired two sighters, but there was no reprieve on 27 minutes when Xavi stabbed a majestic pass to Pedro in space on the right, and the finish was low past Van der Sar.

United were on the ropes, but Rooney responded superbly. After a brilliant one-two with Michael Carrick, he raced inside from the right and exchanged passes with Ryan Giggs – who looked marginally offside – before finishing into the top-left corner.

A brilliant goal from a player sometimes accused of going missing on the big occasions – though they hardly deserved it, United were level.

Barcelona do not get fazed easily, and pressed on undeterred – they might have re-taken the lead just before the break when the sliding Messi just failed to meet a Villa centre.

Messi blasted Barca back in front on 54 minutes with a low shot from the edge of the box. Van der Sar was out of position and will be disappointed to have let through a shot that did not find the corner.

By now, United were under siege, struggling to withstand wave after wave of attacks, with Messi absolutely rampant.

The coup de grace came just over 20 minutes from time, when Messi carried the ball into the box. United seemed to have the situation under control, but when recently introduced substitute Nani miscontrolled, Villa curled a beautiful shot into the top right corner.

Barca are so good at keeping the ball, there was no way back. Rooney continued to toil, but with Giggs and Javier Hernandez particularly quiet, they never looked like making their opponents sweat. For a Barcelona side packed with players in their early and mi-20s, immortality beckons. On this form, it could be years before anyone knocks them off their perch.

The masterful Argentinian causes havoc and takes his first goal on an English pitch as Barcelona dispatch Manchester United 3-1. So, Lionel Messi has finally scored for Barcelona on an English pitch. And how typical that it should have been conjured out of nothing. The little man was 30 yards from goal when he picked up an apparently innocuous square pass from Andrés Iniesta.

As usual, contact with the ball seemed to send electricity coursing through his slight frame. With three touches he had made 10 yards, and Manchester United were just waking up to the danger, with Patrice Evra making a belated sprint to meet the Barcelona No10, when the Argentinian master calmly cocked his left leg and sent a shot past Edwin van der Sar.

How gently he created havoc. Drifting into remote areas away from his notional markers, time and again he opened space for others while giving himself scope for those irresistible surges. This was, in sum, the most effective performance by a deep-lying centre-forward since Nandor Hidegkuti scored a hat-trick in Hungary’s 6-3 defeat of England on this same pitch one autumnal afternoon in 1953. The pre-match ceremonies, rather different from the sort of thing expected half a century ago, included the appearance on the pitch of a hundred or so dancers dressed as City gents, in bowler hats and pinstriped suits and umbrellas, until they stripped off to reveal more informal clothing before reassembling to accompany a trio of rappers.

Luckily, such nonsenses are forgotten as soon as the 22 footballers enter the arena, and you have to wonder why anyone bothers.

The first big shock of the night had come with the arrival of the team sheets, indicating the absence of Carles Puyol, Barcelona’s combative captain and defensive spark plug. A product of the academy at La Masia and a veteran of 12 years in the first team, Puyol had played only three games since his partial recovery from a bad knee injury, and is scheduled to have an operation this week. Evidently Pep Guardiola considered him too great a risk over 90 minutes and assigned him to the bench.

“We are surprised because he is a super-expert at big finals,” a Spanish journalist said before the kick-off. Winner’s medals from one World Cup, one European championship, two European Cups, one European Super Cup and one Club World Cup would provide plenty of evidence for that assessment.

Puyol’s replacement in the starting line-up was Javier Mascherano, expensively acquired from Liverpool last summer but unable to displace Sergio Busquets from his role at the base of midfield. The need to improvise a solution recalled the final in Rome two years ago, when Barcelona confronted United with a defence lacking the injured Rafael Márquez and the suspended Eric Abidal and Dani Alves, requiring Puyol to move over to left-back with Yaya Touré slotting into the unfamiliar role of centre-back alongside Gerard Piqué.

On that occasion the Premier League team came close to capitalising on Barcelona’s early uncertainties at the back, creating five clear chances in the opening exchanges before Samuel Eto’o, with the Catalan side’s first attack, struck the blow in the 10th minute that conclusively knocked the wind out of United’s sails.

Eerily, Saturday night’s match began with a very precise echo of that match 24 months ago. Or perhaps, given the deeply implanted character traits of these two clubs, it should not have been a surprise to see them repeating many lines from the first act of that drama.

With United pressing all over the pitch, Barcelona had to show patience before establishing their rhythm. Alves was robbed by Park Ji-sung in the opening minute, Busquets had his pocket picked by Javier Hernández inside Barcelona’s penalty area, Víctor Valdés put a clearance straight into touch, Messi was dispossessed by Park, Busquets by Antonio Valencia, Pedro by Fábio.

So that was the first nine minutes. And then, just like last time, Barcelona started to play. There was no immediate Eto’o-style bolt from the blue, but gradually they began to find their rhythm with those five-yard exchanges that resemble a game of pass-the-parcel. And as they did so, the difference in styles became more glaringly apparent than ever. The breakdown of a Barcelona move would be followed by the ball whistling back over their heads in a fruitless attempt to find a United attacker, and the whole tiki-taka process would begin again.

All the constructive football was coming from Barcelona, but this time it took them 27 minutes to score. A handful of Messi dribbles and two David Villa shots might have brought earlier rewards, had it not been for desperate defending, before Iniesta prodded the ball straight ahead to Xavi, who squared it to Pedro on the right. Messi had made a decoy run on an inside diagonal, taking Evra with him and leaving Nemanja Vidic helpless to reach Pedro before the forward guided his shot past Van der Sar’s left hand.

Seven minutes later Barcelona’s defensive flaws were exposed as Wayne Rooney combined first with Fábio and then with Ryan Giggs before meeting the Welshman’s delicately weighted return pass with a beautifully judged first-time shot which curled away from the diving Valdés. Giggs appeared to be in an offside position, but Xavi, Iniesta and Messi could only stand and admire the confidence with which Rooney created and finished the move.

Barcelona were quickly back into their pitter-patter stride, with Messi all but irresistible as he dribbled through the middle, turned the ball to Villa on the right, and just failed meet the return as it whistled across the face of Van der Sar’s goal.

The second half was more of the same, with Barcelona making United’s football look rudimentary, approximate, agricultural. A triumph for artistry, patience, imagination. And not a hint of gamesmanship. Magnificent, actually.

Despite displaying the adventurousness of their forbears from 1968, Manchester United cannot resist the dizzying brilliance of Lionel Messi and his Barcelona team-mates. A measure of Barcelona’s brilliance is that many Manchester United supporters left Wembley feeling guilty pleasure. They applauded their own team as their players stepped through the rubble of this defeat but also tucked away the memories of the night they saw Lionel Messi and Xavi Hernández win a European Cup with mesmerising dexterity.

Bitterness was absent, grief inappropriate. There was the odd grumble about the 37-year-old Ryan Giggs being picked in central midfield and a few isolated laments about Darren Fletcher being left on the bench. But on an inspiring night for football United could have been pretty much anyone. No side could have coped with the scintillating rhythms of Barcelona’s passing or the virtuosity of Messi, who is a genre all by himself.

Rondo, rondo. Round, round. Two words to haunt United as Europe’s elite search for an answer to the crushing problem that is Barcelona, with their relentless circulation of the ball, topped off by the genius of Messi.

Football is a sport with a mangled attention span. Judgments lurch from triumph to disaster and from praise to recrimination. Normally there would be a cascade of analysis questioning United’s 19th English title win and the direction the club is moving in. But to land those cheap shots would be to ignore Barcelona’s quality.

United are probably the second or third best team in Europe, vying with Real Madrid. The gulf between first and second is vast. In this game United looked like workmanlike Premier League champions with a slightly wooden midfield and less firepower than when Cristiano Ronaldo and Carlos Tevez were in the side who lost to Barcelona in Rome two years ago.

United had their limitations exposed, no question, but only in the context of a special phase in the game’s history. Barcelona have engineered an evolutionary leap, adding defensive rigour to the fantasy element first instilled by the dream teams of Johan Cruyff. Like Real Madrid, Milan, Chelsea, Bayern Munich and the rest, United now face the daunting challenge of raising their game somewhere closer to Barcelona levels.

Assuming Dimitar Berbatov’s omission from team and bench was indicative of a permanent rift, United will need a world-class striker to support Wayne Rooney and Javier Hernández, who found this a test too far at the end of his first English campaign. Edwin van der Sar’s retirement is already in hand with the recruitment of David de Gea. Midfield is where weakness is most evident. In a world of fantasy recruitment they would now send a limo to Spurs for Luka Modric and a plane to Internazionale for Wesley Sneijder to solve their creativity deficit.

United soaked up all the eulogies about Barcelona and then responded the way a great club ought to: not with caution, or containment, but with a restatement of the spirit that first lifted them to the European title on this ground in 1968, when Best, Law and Charlton were in their prime. Yet it was a battle for survival all night.

To pick Wayne Rooney and Hernández in the same starting line-up advertised the message that United were not here to cringe behind a wall. Their quest to win a fourth European title would not be shaped by deference.

A top professional would be slow to admit this, but playing against Barcelona can’t be much fun, such is the constant chasing, the anxiety, the impossibility of halting Messi when he is on one of his Velcro-booted runs.

They conceded a goal to Pedro Rodríguez on 26 minutes and looked to be in line for a hiding yet left the field for the interval on level terms after Rooney had finished off a sweet move.

Conservative five-man midfield? No, thank you. Instead Rooney started in his best position, at No10, linking the midfield four with the buzzy, hungry Hernández, who must have seen Javier Mascherano’s name on the Barça team-sheet at centre-back and sniffed blood.

From the first whistle Ferguson’s men were on the hustle, racing in to the contact areas to pester and disrupt. It took two minutes for Sergio Busquets, Barça’s chief thespian, to adopt the prone position and rub part of his head. Even Messi looked momentarily disorientated by United’s macho energy.

Then normal service resumed. Barcelona know how to survive early provocation. Xavi was omnipresent again, popping up in every frame, working his way round midfield areas where Giggs was starting to look his age. From the left, Park Ji-sung did his best to jostle and harry but found the limits of his eagerness as Barça flicked and stroked the ball away from him.

The night brought a brutal reckoning for Berbatov, the team’s leading scorer in the Premier League with 21, but unable here even to earn a place among the replacements. “It’s a heartache, and to make that decision is not easy,” Ferguson said, effectively consigning Berbatov’s Old Trafford career to history. Rooney, 25, and Hernández, 22, are a partnership for the next United era. They are, though, a comparatively new combination.

Hernández did his best to “stretch the play” but most of the action was going on in the golden triangle drawn by Messi, Andrés Iniesta and Xavi. After the interval Ferguson asked Rooney to present more of an attacking threat and work closer to Hernández. Soon, though, we were observing at the home of English football an inescapable truth about this Barcelona side. You can do what you like in your own world but you will not stop Messi on one of his good days.

Eight minutes into the second period Messi collected the ball on the left-hand side of United’s area and began to slip inside. Patrice Evra, the United full-back, spectated, or “got on the carousel”, to use Ferguson’s colourful description of his team’s failings in Rome. Messi lashed a left-foot shot past Van der Sar, then David Villa closed the deal with a curling finish in 69 minutes.

By now England’s representatives were playing relatively characterless Premier League football against a side raised to the sublime by Messi. The only thing United went home with was a target to aim at. A high one, up in the ether.