And for all their beauty, Barcelona were beaten comprehensively this week by Inter Milan, as José Mourinho showed how a brilliant coach can bring about the defeat of a brilliant team. The Times’s man, Matt Hughes, said that Mourinho outwitted Barcelona by means of not one but two well-executed game plans.

Arsène Wenger declares that beauty is football’s most effective tactic: “It is pragmatic to make a good pass, not a bad one.” But he’s being disingenuous: beautiful passing isn’t football’s only effective tactic, just the one we like best.

Perhaps Barcelona will show what beauty can do when the sides meet for the second leg on Wednesday. And then most neutrals will become partisans for the team that give them more aesthetic pleasure. Barcelona will be the good guys. They will seem morally superior to Inter because they play prettier football.

That this doesn’t really stack up logically doesn’t matter; it’s only sport, after all. But it’s a starting point that can get people into odd situations. Watford took the old first division by surprise in the 1980s. With slender resources, they used revolutionary levels of fitness, direct tactics and good players such as John Barnes and Luther Blissett. They finished second in the league in 1983 and were FA Cup finalists the next year. And because they weren’t beautiful, because they merely made the best of what little they had, they were villains.

In sport, and especially in football, aesthetics turn rapidly into morality, Wimbledon played the villain better than Watford — a homeless club, haunting the top division for years, tormenting their richer brethren, one season finishing sixth and unforgivably winning the FA Cup in 1988. They weren’t even slightly beautiful.

Their tactics were pure enough — long balls, hard running, aggression. What were they supposed to do, say: “After you, Claude”? They were subject to the same laws as their opponents, were they not? But they were condemned as the ugly face of English football, ugly meaning immoral. They were bad guys because — well, this is sport, and we can always use a bad guy.

In cricket we cherish our rivalries. Pakistan for years had to play the black-hat role. And, of course, when West Indies were dominating the world in the 1980s, we decided they were ugly. After all, our boys weren’t good enough to play their fast bowlers. There has probably never been a purer tactic in sport than West Indies’ four-man pace attack.

In tennis we tend to make Roger Federer, who plays beautiful tennis, the default good guy, unless he plays Andy Murray. In motor racing we have Jenson Button v Lewis Hamilton. Who’s the good guy? The cocky boy racer or the grown-up master craftsman? What is more beautiful, the overtaking manoeuvres of Hamilton or the smooth racing of Button? Either way, it’s a morality play. And if this story runs out of steam, we still have Michael Schumacher.

Sport gives us its unending string of stirring tales and because we are human, we turn its participants into stock characters, often ones for which they are singularly unfitted. But we shoehorn them in anyway, because we want our tales to be moral tales. Wayne Rooney would be a bad guy if he were an Argentinian; it is obvious to everyone that the England cricket team’s South Africans are good guys, while South Africa’s South Africans are villains.

This is all great fun. This is an important part of the way we enjoy sport. But troubles come when we start believing it, start believing that the teams and individuals we like, who please our aesthetic sensibilities more, really are morally superior to the others. And that is why sport is so peculiarly prone to errors and misunderstandings and rows and scandals and shocks: because my good guys are your villains, and our brave boys are somebody else’s bastards. Sport is not just about taking sides, it’s about believing that our side is right, and therefore that the other side is wrong. That’s where the trouble starts.

Rafa Benitez, Liverpool's manager, is a man known for producing stubborn teams - although he attracts criticism for his cautious approach. It has not been a successful season for either Liverpool or Benitez, given that they are not guaranteed a place in the Europe next season. The certain absence of Champions League football has fuelled rumours that their star player Fernando Torres may be set for a move to Manchester City. Daniel Taylor, writing in the Guardian, thinks the transfer may be a goer:

Fernando Torres to Manchester City? On first reflection, the idea seems just that little bit too far-fetched even in a sport where you learn never to be surprised. Torres is royalty at Anfield; he has an affinity with Liverpool, the city and its people, and if he were to leave surely it would be to one of those clubs with a love affair for the European Cup. But then, didn't we think something similar about Carlos Tevez and Manchester United this time a year ago?

How long before football's aristocracy, institutions such as Real Madrid and Milan, reluctantly accept that the club that old agent provocateur Sir Alex Ferguson derided as United's "noisy neighbours" have enough power in the modern game to merit their place on the top table?

City have spent more than £200m on new players since Abu Dhabi's ruling Al-Nahyan family took control 20 months ago (they are believed to have agreed an £11m deal for the Hamburg defender Jérôme Boateng, brother of Portsmouth midfielder Kevin-Prince), and there was something breathtakingly audacious about the way their manager, Roberto Mancini, was willing to pontificate yesterday about the prospects of extracting Torres from Liverpool, as if it should just be expected that, well, of course, City would be trying to sign him ... what else would you expect?

Others will portray it as sticking a sledgehammer through the kind of managerial protocol that leads to all sorts of pettiness and paranoia when someone breaks ranks to talk publicly about a player he covets from another club and it's undeniably true that Rafael Benítez is likely to be unimpressed in the extreme. But that is just a subplot when you consider the main thrust of what Mancini is saying and it is this: Manchester City, once again, are going to spend whatever they see fit this summer to establish themselves as serious title challengers – like it or lump it.

What we now know is that there is sufficient interest in Torres for the club already to have made their first moves behind the scenes, and that it does not particularly matter to the money men in Abu Dhabi whether it would need £50m, £60m or even more to persuade Liverpool to entertain the idea of negotiating the transfer of their most devastating player.