You can either try to buy or break your way into Europe's elite - but neither is easy to do

As the last four teams in the Champions League draw help demonstrate, and as Diego Simeone knows only too well, the old order is hard to break.

His substitutions were being blamed for Atletico Madrid’s exit at the hands of Real Madrid. The reality is that he has, at best, three players – Koke, Jan Oblak and Antoine Griezmann – who would get into Real’s starting XI, but he is now paying the price for having set the bar so extraordinarily high last season. When it comes to taking on a more powerful rival, the miracle becomes the expected outcome.

Twenty-four hours earlier Laurent Blanc was also going out of the Champions League. He fielded questions about Paris Saint-Germain’s quarter-final exit with much the same brow-beaten exasperation as Manuel Pellegrini had a month earlier when Manchester City were knocked out at the last-16 stage.

Why, with all the money spent, had he not extracted more from the team? How long would the owner’s patience with him last? “We were playing Barcelona,” was Blanc’s reply.

There are two ways to get into the gala when you have not been invited. You can buy an extortionately priced ticket, as City and PSG have done, or with a mix of charm and brute force, you can gatecrash, as Atletico did. Either way it’s tough.

The similarities between Manchester City and PSG are uncanny. Each has their own massively over-priced central defender – Eliaquim Mangala and David Luiz offering little change from €100m between them. Each has a former Barcelona player, in Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Yaya Touré, who is unrealistically expected to provide the spark that lights the fire in every game.

And at both clubs there is a somewhat crushing reality that too often they have the inferior version of the player who plays for the other side – David Silva is not quite Andres Iniesta and Edinson Cavani is most definitely not Luis Suarez.

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City have spent in the region of €860m (about £620m) since 2008 and PSG have spent around €450m (about £325m) since 2011. Up against clubs whose size and length of time at the top have given them youth systems that support their big transfers, much more money would need to be spent to bring them on a par with the established order but Uefa’s Financial Fair Play system has prevented that.

With a ceiling put on the money they can shell out, the clubs have no choice but to be more patient – if they have to spend less, then it will take longer.

The alternative is to gatecrash, as Atletico did last season, but for that you need to be a little less fussy about the way you achieve success. And even then, as Simeone will have been reminded this week, there are limits to what can be achieved.

Ibrahimovic looks a better fit than Bale for United

Ibrahimovic has now played in 14 straight Champions League campaigns and is still yet to feature in a final. When Manchester United begin throwing money around again this summer they will look to recruit a striker. Much of the talk is of Cavani, but surely his PSG strike partner is the better fit. It’s no secret United want Gareth Bale but he does not want to leave Real Madrid.

Zlatan doesn’t have the decade at the top ahead of him as Bale but he does have that star quality. For another shot at the European Cup with a seventh different team, maybe he could be persuaded.

Uefa jumps on Guardiola as Fifa ignores Lopez tragedy

Jorge Lopez was working as a Fifa-accredited journalist at last summer’s World Cup when he was killed by thieves driving a stolen car away from Brazilian police.

He was on his way back to his hotel in the early hours before Argentina played the Netherlands in the semi-final when the runaway vehicle crashed into the taxi he was travelling in.

The game’s governing body did nothing to help Lopez’s widow, Veronica Brunati, who was also working as a journalist at the tournament. She had to deal with Brazilian authorities claiming on the father-of-three’s death certificate that he was killed in a traffic accident hours earlier and not in an incident involving a police pursuit.

His friends claimed his body was left unattended as the occupants of the stolen vehicle fled the scene with police in chase, and that despite having his Fifa accreditation on him at the time and a card with details of the hotel where his wife was staying, no effort was made by Fifa to contact her.

At the time Argentine journalists Gustavo Lopez and Alejandro Fantino said when they went to the police station to collect their friend’s belongings after the accident, they were stunned to find guns that the car thieves had used in the earlier robbery had been placed in their friend’s rucksack.

The #JusticeforTopo campaign has been trying to bring closure to the case ever since and Pep Guardiola did his part for public awareness in his press conference before Tuesday’s Champions League game between Porto and Bayern by wearing a T-shirt proclaiming “Justicia Para Topo”.

The least Fifa could have done after Lopez’s death was get involved on behalf of his widow. It didn’t. Uefa, however, because Guardiola had broken one of its more ridiculous rules, was on the scene in no time.