Ultra-processed Champions League is fast-food football with no nutrition or jeopardy

This season's Champions League is proving unexpectedly profound and asking serious philosophical questions about the nature and purpose of top-level sport. It has been, by surface-level measures, tremendously good fun.

After just three matches, are already seven teams into double figures for goals scored, and it's not even just because a bunch of weaker teams are getting their arses handed to them every week. Unless you count two - Lille and Slovan Bratislava, who have zero points and 10+ goals conceded - as a bunch.

And that would be plain nutty. Just over the last two nights, we've had two 4-3s, a couple of 4-2s, a sprinkling of 4-1 and 5-1 paddlings, a 3-2 and a couple of 2-2s.

The week before we got another couple of 4-3s, another 4-2 involving the defending champions, a shock 3-3 draw and some more 3-2s. After 54 games of the tournament, there have been as many games end 4-2 or 4-3 as 0-0 or 1-0.

We're rollocking along at a heady rate of a tick over four goals per game. There have been incredible comebacks and near-misses, there have been big clubs going toe to toe, there have been some enormous thrashings.

It has been, in many ways, the perfect football tournament. The best players in the world serving up spectacularly entertaining games with astonishingly consistent reliability and regularity.

Nobody outside those directly involved raises an eyebrow. Because in far more important ways the new-look Champions League remains the worst football tournament.

Too big, too bloated, but above all else too lacking in meaning and peril. That's the secret sauce that makes the entertainment on offer worth it all.

Sure, Liverpool's comeback against Villarreal was amazing. But imagine if it had actually meant something real to either side's prospects?