Returning from Barcelona with a number of Manchester United fans last week, the talk was of the trickiest opponent the club have faced in Europe. Clue: begins with the letter M. No, not Lionel Messi, for he is just a footballer. This opponent is considerably more dangerous and really can hurt you, not least in the wallet. That’s right, Moscow.

The Champions League final is a game away and reality is starting to bite. Previously, to speak of a trip to Russia’s capital felt too much like tempting fate. Yet with Uefa insisting that the semi-final clubs begin selling tickets for a match that does not exist at present, the practicalities of the trip east are high on the agenda.

Liverpool have been told that within 48 hours of the semi-final, second leg against Chelsea on Wednesday, Uefa requires a list of all 21,500 supporters intending to travel, so one presumes that the other semi-finalists are under the same instruction.

European football’s governing body would have us believe that this is like any other final, but it is not. Previous events have not been shadowed by the threat of bureaucratic gridlock and chaos.

This is the first Champions League final for which all travelling supporters will require a visa to be bought in advance and public holidays have cut the available processing time to a maximum of nine days after the semi-final results are known. If two English teams qualify, as is possible, a minimum of 43,000 applications will be sent through the same embassy and issue conditions require confirmed flights and hotel rooms, which are increasingly hard to come by and could cause further delays.

This mess is unfortunate but was hardly unforeseeable. There were three Barclays Premier League teams in the semi-finals last season as well and two of the previous eight finals have involved teams from the same country (Real Madrid 3 Valencia 0 in 2000 and AC Milan’s penalty shoot-out victory over Juventus in 2003). The difference is, those finals were in Paris and Manchester, accessible venues for supporters in Western Europe and relatively straightforward in terms of organisation. Yet, increasingly, final locations have been picked with no thought for the ordinary supporter, with vast, expensive treks across the Continent to Istanbul, Athens and now Moscow, the capital cities of countries that between them have produced one finalist in 52 years (Panathinaikos in 1971).

Uefa behaves as if its money-fixated competition belongs to the people, but that is a lie. It is dominated by the elite clubs of Western Europe and since it was rebranded as the Champions League in 1992-93 that grip is firmer than ever. There are 53 nations under the umbrella of Uefa, but only seven have produced a Champions League finalist: Italy (ten), Spain (seven), Germany and England (four each), France and the Netherlands (two apiece) and Portugal (one). When Uefa sent the final to Moscow, it knew that it would probably be constructing the away day from hell but did not care enough to reject this selfishness.

It does not matter to Michel Platini, the Uefa president, you see. He will travel in comfort, stay in comfort. His journey to and from the stadium will be made in the heights of luxury. If there was any justice, he should be made to do it from scratch on Thursday, like the fans, in the same way Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One supremo, once got dropped off at the wrong car park at Silverstone without his pass, had to make his way to the British Grand Prix as an ordinary punter and has been threatening to have it cancelled ever since. It is called karma, Bernie. Every now and then, life works as it should.

In an ideal world, a mix-up at the travel agents would find Platini scrabbling around to secure a circuitous route to Moscow via the extreme points of Eastern Europe because all direct flights are fully booked, and he would be charged the equivalent of a deposit on a small house for two nights at a two-star fleapit in the middle of nowhere.

On the way to the Luzhniki Stadium he would be mugged, or nabbed by two bent coppers, frogmarched to the nearest cash machine and made to pay an on-the-spot $200 fine for a trumped-up charge of jaywalking. While moving around the city he would be forced to commute everywhere via Moscow’s iconic metro, which is staggeringly beautiful and very efficient but unplayable during rush hour, when numbers converge on the main stations like nothing most visitors will have seen before and signs in Cyrillic script make each journey a voyage into the unknown.

Sadly, it will not happen. Only the supporters will be exposed to the delights of Moscow in the raw. Those familiar with the city and not isolated from its shortcomings by money already know it as the rip-off capital of the world; those who did not will be aware if they have tried to book a hotel in the past fortnight.

A guy told me he was quoted £5,000 for a three-night stay at an ordinary chain hotel last week. Flights are through the roof. The in-and-out day trips organised by the clubs are coming in at close to £1,000, including ticket, and nearer to £1,200 for an overnight stay, while independent itineraries avoiding expensive flights often involve 15-hour internal train journeys and two days of travelling each way.

And all this would have been known by Uefa in advance. There is nothing about the unsuitability of Moscow as host city that would cause a raised eyebrow among anyone who travels or has an ounce of intelligence. The city has only 35,000 hotel rooms and a cost-of-living survey has rated it the most expensive in the world two years running.

The guys I spoke to had followed Manchester United all over the world, but many were having serious doubts about this one. It comes to something when even the loyalists are thinking of watching it on the box. “In all that we do we care about football,” Uefa’s mission statement says. No, it doesn’t. If it did, the retreat from Moscow would have been sounded long ago.

Audition off the wall

No sooner had Fabio Capello, the England manager, slipped a hint that Rio Ferdinand is leader in the clubhouse in the race for the England captaincy than the Manchester United defender was issuing a statement apologising for kicking a female steward after his team’s 2-1 defeat away to Chelsea. He had, he said, been aiming for a wall.

Leaving aside the fact that an England player could miss such a giant target from that range – it hardly bodes well for a penalty shoot-out - this illustrates the danger of setting a moral agenda, as happened with John Terry, the previous England captain. Let he who is without sin and all that.

By introducing a crusading element to the selection process, Capello has ensured that every little misdemeanour will land at his door. Not for the first time, one wonders whether this was his doing, or whether his FA employers have again dropped him in it.

Gold medal for scandal

And now to an occasional series entitled “Imagine If That Were Football” in which we look at an underplayed news story and speculate how much coverage the same event would get had it taken place in the national sport. This week: the London Olympic budget.

Can you conceive the outcry if the FA came up with a costing of £4 billion for a project and the final bill was closer to £10 billion? And what if that was taxpayers’ money, too? It would be front page, back page and all pages in between. There would be resignations and recriminations. No survivors at Soho Square, from Brian Barwick, the chief executive, to Doris, the tea lady.

Imagine also that one of the senior executives admitted that he knew that the figures were vastly underestimated and kept quiet about it, just to get the money in, as Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, has said. He would be branded a liar and hounded out of office. What if one aspect of the budget was estimated at £16 million and ended up running to £570 million, as happened with the costs for the Olympic Delivery Authority? The person responsible would be lucky to get a job selling hot dogs for Crewe Alexandra.

Yet Peter Ridsdale has taken more criticism than Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister, and all he did was screw up Leeds United. He did not spend any of your money, as these fools have, did not waste a penny that could have built a hospital or school.

The Olympics budget is the biggest financial scandal in the history of British sport and should be dominating the news agenda. The liars and incompetents responsible should be sacked. The fact that it is casually relegated to the inside pages is perhaps the most troubling aspect of all.

Arsenal's Jack the lad

The word is that with his left side of midfield either injured or suspended, Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal manager, seriously considered giving a debut to 16-year-old Jack Wilshere away to Derby County tonight. His turns for the reserve team have drawn comparisons with a young Lionel Messi. And, yes, with a name like that he most certainly is English.