La Liga has provided 30 of the 84 Champions League semi-finalists this century and the Premier League 22, but English and Spanish teams are nowhere to be seen in Lisbon this week, all packed off home before the final four of this year’s competition.
In times like these, hand-wringing obituaries are never too far away.
Everyone knows how easy and fun it is to get wrapped up in arguments about the definitive strength of one league over another off the back of a few tight results. What makes the Champions League so exciting — and even more so with this season’s one-legged ties rather than the traditional two — is not its inevitability but its messy contingency.
There have been plenty of games in the last few weeks that have been decided by moments that could have gone either way.
Liverpool battered Atletico Madrid in their last-16 second leg at Anfield only for goalkeeper Adrian to gift them a crucial away goal his defending champions could not recover from. Atalanta were 1-0 up against Paris Saint-Germain in the 89th minute of their quarter-final before their resistance was finally broken. If Tyler Adams’ shot had not deflected off Stefan Savic’s foot, RB Leipzig might not have beaten Atletico in theirs. And if Raheem Sterling had scored that close-range open goal against Lyon on Saturday at the same stage, who knows what would have happened in extra-time.
Only marginally different circumstances, then, could have thrown up a different set of semi-finalists.
Just like Tottenham’s famous run to the final last year relied on a lot of spirit but plenty of contingent details — against Manchester City: Sergio Aguero’s first-leg penalty miss, Fernando Llorente’s second-leg goal being given while Raheem Sterling’s was not. Against Ajax, Hakim Ziyech’s shot hitting the post at 2-2 and Lisandro Magallan slipping to let Dele Alli win Llorente’s knockdown.
Spurs were one of the luckier finalists of recent years. Nobody was arguing last May that this combination of events made them one of the best two teams in Europe.
So now is not the right time to proclaim the strange death of the Premier League, or the new power of Ligue 1, or the dominance of the Franco-German axis over the competition for the next decade. All football journalism relies, to some extent, on reverse-engineering great trends and patterns — the rise of this, the decline of that — out of random bounces of the ball. But we should at least be open-eyed about what we are doing.
Watching the Champions League in the last few weeks, however, has felt as if we are entering into a new stage of the competition’s modern history.
You can call it the second phase of the superclub era, when the leading pack has started to separate between the sides who have grown lazy with success and the ones still pushing to improve.
Ever since the middle of the last decade, the number one story in the European game has been a small number of clubs — you know the names by now — assuming a hegemonic position in their domestic leagues. They have accumulated all of the money, the power, the best players, the best managers, the public attention and also the trophies themselves. The Champions League is intrinsic to this, both as a symptom of their dominance and a cause of its continuation.
That, in a very abbreviated form, is what has happened to European football in the last 15 years. It is why the final rounds of the Champions League have been so predictable for so long. (Yes, the games themselves are often entertaining, but only as entertaining as the hundredth iteration of one particular fixture can ever be). And it explains why the knockout stage in the last few years has often felt like you were watching the same horses go round on the carousel over and over again.
Bayern Munich, who eased past Lyon last night, have got to the semi-finals in seven of the last nine years. Real Madrid, absent the last two years, made eight consecutive semi-finals from 2011 to 2018, winning it four times, three of those on the spin, something nobody had done since the mid-1970s. Barcelona made six straight semis from 2008 to 2013, Manchester United four out of five (2007-11), Chelsea five out of six (2004-09). No wonder a competition that used to be all about exoticism and adventure has started to resemble a long-running soap opera with a core cast of characters.
So, what’s changed this year?
Clearly, we are still in the era of the superclub. Yes, Lyon and RB Leipzig did very well to get to the semi-finals, making the most of their opportunities, but like any team who makes it through enough knockout rounds, they had luck on their side too. And with Lyon finishing seventh in France, 28 points behind PSG, and Leipzig third in Germany, 16 points behind Bayern, it would be a surprise if those two are back in the final four next year.
This is still an elitist competition, there is no other way to read the final pairing, even though Bayern are regulars in the fixture — this is their sixth final since 1998-99 — and it is PSG’s debut.
Of course, their models are not quite the same. Bayern are the ultimate ‘traditional’ superclub, with the weight of history behind them, a magnet for local sponsorship and investment, a team who can happily be both an example of the German model while also playing a different game to everyone else in the Bundesliga.
The source of PSG’s wealth is obviously different. They were formed by 1970, and bought by Qatar in 2011, who in the last nine years have spent even more aggressively in the transfer market than Abu Dhabi have at Manchester City. Three years ago, they signed Neymar for £198 million and Kylian Mbappe in a £165 million deal, investments that only this week have delivered a meaningful return.
What links them is the unhealthy dominance each club enjoys over its domestic competition. PSG have won seven French league titles in the last eight years, and Bayern eight out of eight in Germany. Whatever conclusions you might draw about the strength of these leagues in delivering these finalists, strength is not the same thing as health.
But watching the Champions League over the last few years, it has felt as if some of the old superclub certainties have started to fragment as if membership of that group alone — which has been sufficient to buy Real Madrid and Barcelona passage to the semi-finals in the last few years — is no longer enough.
Increasingly, it feels as if the superclubs themselves are divided between the smart ones and the lazy ones; the clubs who are still trying to challenge themselves to be the best team they can be, with a genuine playing identity, and the ones who have given up.
How else can you explain the dramatic collapse of some of Europe’s biggest clubs in the last few years? There has been no bigger story this month than Barcelona and their 8-2 defeat by Bayern in their quarter-final last Friday. When Philippe Coutinho, a player Barcelona paid Liverpool £142 million for less than two years ago, scored loan club Bayern’s last two goals the whole thing felt difficult to watch, as if you were intruding on another family’s private tragedy.
But as The Athletic’s Dermot Corrigan has explained here, Barcelona’s humiliation was the product of years of mismanagement.
Since the summer of 2014, their last successful transfer window, they have spent €800 million on more than 30 new players, while the first team has got worse and worse. They have moved between managers and directors almost every year, but never with a plan. The playing identity has eroded season after season, washed away by the comings and goings, and, worst of all, they have wasted the prime years of the greatest player of all time.
In short, Barcelona have forgotten what it means to be a team. And their response to this, when the whole club is crying out for a full reset, is to appoint yet another glamorous deckchair-rearranger in Ronald Koeman. It is the lazy thinking of a club who have grown so big and popular they have forgotten how to compete.
Real Madrid are in a better state than Barcelona, but not by much. Lifted by the return of Zinedine Zidane as coach last year, they won La Liga this past season. But, like Barcelona, they have grown too reliant on a group of players who are past their peak. Their big-name signings, such as Luka Jovic and Eden Hazard, have not worked out yet. And they look increasingly unbalanced and fragile, nothing like the winning machine from the middle of the 2010s. When Manchester City blew on them in their last-16 second leg two weeks ago, their house of cards collapsed.
Take the two together and this was the first Champions League season with neither Real Madrid nor Barcelona in the semi-finals since 2006-07.
For one more example, look to Juventus. They lost the Champions League final in 2015 and 2017, and back then were a perfectly balanced team, disciplined and hard-working but with plenty of star quality. Over the years since, though, they have slid down the same slope as Real Madrid and Barcelona, piling on more individual quality, sacrificing their ethos, making themselves worse. Since they bought a 33-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo for €100 million two years ago they have gone out to Ajax in the quarter-finals and now Lyon a round earlier. Like Barcelona, they needed a club-wide reset this summer but have gone for
making a popular ex-player, and total managerial novice, their coach instead.
That is one path superclubs can go down and it is surprising more have not followed. But it means that the clubs who still run themselves properly have a chance to break away from the pack.
Just look at Bayern, who have played this summer like Europe’s only big club who know how to manage their squad. While Barcelona and Real Madrid are far too dependent on their veterans, Bayern have supplemented their old core with a new generation of younger players. Josh Kimmich, Leon Goretzka and Serge Gnabry are all 25.
Alphonso Davies is still just 19. The fact that Thiago Alcantara might go this summer shows Bayern are not totally beholden to their experienced players.
Even though Liverpool had a disappointing European season, knocked out by Atletico months ago, they are still the reigning champions until Sunday night and they lost in the final the year before that. And if their success tells us anything, it is the value of putting the team over the individuals, backing your manager and recruiting only when you need to — lessons that Europe’s richest clubs seem to have ignored.
Manchester City are still finding increasingly unlikely ways to get knocked out of the Champions League before it gets to the serious end, and have not reached its semi-finals in four years under Pep Guardiola. But the way they recruit to their manager’s philosophy, rather than just going for names, puts them closer to the Liverpool way of doing things, as their recent domestic record suggests. Money and intelligence are not mutually exclusive.
The curious case here are PSG. Nine days ago, you might have argued they are more like Barcelona and Real Madrid than anyone else. Star quality before team ethos, an unbalanced squad, routine revamps from different managers. And yet they will be there in Lisbon on Sunday with a chance to win the tournament for the first time.
Does that make them one of the smart ones, with a dynamic young manager finally imposing a tactical structure on his famous players? Or are they just another dumb club playing the game on easy mode? Their run to the final was not exactly difficult, although they did well to beat Borussia Dortmund over two legs, and they were minutes away from losing to Atalanta in the last eight.
Sunday will tell us more, whether PSG are in fact closer to Bayern and Liverpool, or to Barcelona and Real Madrid.
Ultimately, having the best players can still get you very far. But in this new superclub era, where some teams have kept improving and others have let it all go to their heads, nobody knows yet quite where PSG should sit.
Buy on AliExpress.com
