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When for Real Madrid against Bayer Leverkusen I was privileged to be there.

This particular moment made being at a Champions League final even more special but as this year's competition reaches its latter stages and attention drifts towards its culmination at Wembley in late May, is the opportunity to be a spectator at the showpiece being limited by

I confess I drew a sharp intake of breath at the cost of £150 for the cheapest seat and immediately thought is this a further example of football edging away from its working class roots?

Undoubtedly, demand for these tickets will far exceed the capacity meaning from a simple economic perspective the pricing structure is valid but from a sporting and more specifically traditional football fan viewpoint it is excessive.

There is clear evidence that in some ways football is changing or has changed in terms of who is able to pay to watch matches on a regular basis.

But what about those who play the game? Does football still draw its players from working class areas and backgrounds or is the pattern off the park being mirrored by those who are plying their trade on it?

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Every sport has its own field of dreams, the venue where those who love their game of choice aspire to appear at and compete on.

For football in Scotland it is that is the arena where legends are made and cup finals won. But have recent events conspired to show that even our traditional home of Scottish football is not immune to the commercial preferences our game has developed at the expense of the love and romance of our national sport?

I am making reference to the decision to prevent the being held at Hampden, the stadium which has hosted this level of the game's showpiece match for around 100 years.

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Every year it would seem that our weather is becoming ever more changeable and difficult to predict - who would have thought that you could say the same about the starting line-ups at football clubs?

In a post-Bosman era and during times when patience is short it is perhaps unsurprising that we witness such dramatic turnovers of players at clubs in Scotland.

I was working at for Sportsound and only seven of the 22 players starting the match had done so in the corresponding fixture just over a year previously.

Similarly, the had even fewer survivors in personnel, with both matches serving to highlight how quickly a Scottish Premier League starting 11 can change.

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The issue of improving your team's or one of your player's displays has long been a point of discussion for football fans. However, in the present-day football world, the mention of the term performance-enhancing would most likely cause consternation among support, such is its association with the failing of a dope test by a player.

The debate over the relevance, methods and judgements of drug testing in football and the punishments that can follow has heightened significantly in the wake of the past week's events surrounding and .

The headlines created by these respective players' failure to pass a drug test has highlighted both the rarity of such happenings in football and the apparently innocent ignorance most players have with regards to prohibited substances.

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