The climax of the European season comes tomorrow in Athens when Liverpool meets AC Milan in the Champions League final. Talk about déjà-vu, this is déjà-vu-issimo, with knobs on.

We had the same final only two years ago: same clubs, same coaches, many of the same players. Milan coach Carlo Ancelotti messed that one up. With his team leading 3–0 and playing Liverpool off the field, he substituted out key players. Liverpool surged back, tied the game with three goals in six minutes in the second half, and went on to win the trophy in the penalty kick shootout.

So it’s revenge time for Ancelotti. But Liverpool coach Rafael Benitez has proved the wiliest of tacticians. His team was not expected to get to the final, but here they are, having knocked off hot favorites Chelsea along the way.

There are those who feel that Milan is lucky to be in the final too – though the reasoning here has nothing to do with tactics. Milan was involved in the game-fixing scandal that convulsed Italian soccer last year. Milan finished in second place in that tainted season, but was docked 44 points, sending it way down into the bottom half of the league. Teams finishing that low do not get to play in Europe the following year.

Milan then appealed, and it is the result of that appeal that seems fishy to the critics. The Milan penalty was reduced to 30 points, enabling the club to zoom back up the table into fourth place. As it happens, Italy is allowed four Champions League berths, so Milan just squeaked into this season’s competition.

UEFA, which runs the tournament, wasn’t too delighted with the events. It investigated but found that, under its own regulations, it was bound to accept the decision of the Italian soccer federation. UEFA has since modified its rules to give itself more power to act in the future — but in the meantime, Milan has marched on. All the way to Athens.

On soccer-playing merit, it deserves to be there. Its 3–0 demolition of Manchester United in the second leg of the semifinal erased any doubt about the quality of its soccer. But the suspicions raise the wider and thornier question of just how capable soccer is of policing itself.

Like all sports, soccer is much perturbed at the thought of the law interfering in its administration. Yesterday, Michel Platini, the former French soccer great who is the new UEFA president, tackled that theme head-on. His targets were the European Union’s labor laws, which are very specific: They allow unrestricted movement of workers between all E.U. member countries.

Which means that any soccer club within the European Union can sign as many players as it wants, or can afford, from any, or all, of the other E.U. countries. UEFA has a problem with that, as it wants each club to develop players of its own nationality. To do that, it needs to impose limits on foreign players.

E.U. law makes it clear that, within its member countries, there are no foreigners. Hence Platini’s appeal: The E.U. labor laws should not apply to soccer — which, Platini says, is a social activity, not a business: “It is a sport, not a product. It is part of our life. If they say it is a product, it is the end of our sport.”

The argument, which has been heard many times before, has a strong cultural underpinning. But as soccer gets richer and richer, the argument sounds less and less convincing. The sport now operates globally at the multibilliondollar level. To most people, that sounds like big business, not social activity.

Even so, the European Union treads carefully. “We recognize that sport is special, both culturally and legally,” said an E.U. spokesman, while making it clear that E.U.competition rules apply to “the commercial side of the sport.”

But separating the sporting and the commercial sides of soccer is virtually impossible. On Saturday, the final of the venerable English FA Cup tournament (it dates from 1872) was played at Wembley Stadium. This was the new stadium, over five years in the making, at a cost of $1.3 billion.

It is difficult to think of this as a social activity date. Not least because the high ticket prices, ranging from $70 to $180 were hardly tailored to suit the average fan. Neither were the food prices — $10 for a hamburger, $3.50 for bottled water — which prompted the Football Supporters’ Federation to call on fans — there were 89,826 of them — to boycott the in-stadium concessions.

That, of course, is modern professional sports. Very much, whichever way you turn, about money. The contending teams on Saturday were Chelsea and Manchester United — the two richest clubs in England. The winning club — it was Chelsea with a 1–0 victory — was $1.9 million richer at the end of the game.

Twenty-eight players — most of them already millionaires — took part; 12 were English, the remainder coming from seven other European countries, three African countries, and one from Argentina. Plenty of money, and plenty of foreigners. But not much soccer.

The game was, frankly, a bore. With neither team able to score, it tottered into overtime, and with just four minutes remaining before the dreaded penalty kick shootout, Chelsea’s Ivory Coast marksman Didier Drogba settled matters with the only goal of the 120-minute game.

The shootout, so narrowly averted here, is a bothersome presence, disliked by most people in the sport. But it was used last week to decide the UEFA Cup, giving Sevilla FC a win over RCD Espanyol, after a 2–2 tie.

Sevilla’s goalkeeper Andres Palop, who saved three of Espanyol’s kicks, was hailed for his “heroics.” Yet Palop cheated on at least two of the kicks, probably on all three, by moving forward before the kick was taken, something the rules say that goalkeepers must not do. But they get away with it — Liverpool keeper Jerzy Dudek cheated even more flagrantly two years ago — because referees are reluctant to rule that a kick be retaken.

It is not anything that the European Union should be concerned with, I suppose, but it hardly bolsters Platini’s claim of extra-legal standing for the sport when it cannot, or does not care to, enforce its own competition rules.

pgardner@nysun.com