At 2:30 PM ET ESPN will broadcast the UEFA Champions League Final live. If you don’t know what that is, here’s an explanation from an internal email yesterday:

Tomorrow ESPN will televise live the UEFA Champions League final, the equivalent of the Super Bowl to soccer fans, in more than 100 countries and territories around the world. The match can be seen on ESPN International networks in Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific Rim; ESPN Star Sports networks in Asia; TSN and RDS in Canada, and on ESPN2 and ESPN Deportes in the U.S. The match will be simulcast in high definition for the first time ever on ESPN2 HD.

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This year’s final features FC Barcelona of Spain’s La Liga against Arsenal FC from England’s Premiership. I invite you to tune-in at 2:30 p.m. EST on Wednesday and watch some of the best soccer players in the world battle for Europe’s top prize.

You may not care much about soccer, but if you’re a sports fan and you’re near a TV, you will want to watch this. At about 2:45PM ET, I expect productivity around ESPN to drop significantly as TVs flip on at every desk and office.

European soccer has among the most interesting league setups in professional sports, and I’ve learned a lot since working here. In some leagues, teams can move between the equivalent of our major leagues and the minors depending on performance (in both directions). A bad season could drop a team from one league to another. Can you imagine that in baseball? Do you think that those MLB teams that sit on their revenue sharing dollars would continually field bad teams if they got demoted to triple-A for poor performance? That would be nice.

I’ve been hearing jokes about how no one cares, or that soccer sucks because the scoring so low and I’m a bit surprised. Are Europeans and, well, pretty much all of the other people in the world that much different than us? I find it hard to believe, but the ratings say that’s the case.

I’ll be watching as much as I can today (damn meetings), and I highly recommend it for everyone else.

You can learn more about the UEFA Champions League at Wikipedia or the UEFA league site. As always, you can keep up with the scores and news at ESPN’s Soccernet.