Real Madrid Win

Real Madrid Win Hints at Growing Imbalance in Champions League

Ronaldo

SAN SIRO, MILAN — The financial structures of modern football have led to many paradoxes, but none perhaps is quite so strange as the one that makes the UEFA Champions League easier to win for certain clubs than their own domestic league.

There are a collection of perhaps half-a-dozen sides that are habitual Champions League quarter-finalists. Once you’re at that stage, it only takes a bit of luck or a couple of good performances to win the competition. There is a far greater element of randomness there than over a league season, when only sustained excellence will bring success.

That’s why no side has retained the trophy since the switch to the group format in 1992-93, and it’s also why Real Madrid have been able to win the Champions League twice in the last three years but have won only one league title in eight seasons.

It used to be that the European Cup was a grail only to be attained after a lengthy quest, the consecration of a great team. This success was avowedly not that. It may be the start of a glorious era under Zinedine Zidane, whose 27 games in charge have yielded 21 victories, but there is no sense this Madrid are the defining team of their era. Not yet, at least.

Rather, there remains a sense there is a wealth of untapped potential in this team. While there has been an improvement under Zidane, while the midfield looks far better balanced now than it has for a couple of season, with Casemiro liberating Luka Modric, while Madrid’s willingness to set off and allow Atletico Madrid the ball showed an encouraging tactical flexibility, this is still a side that seems like less than the sum of its parts.

Its grand strategy for success has essentially been to sign a lot of stars and hope they can find a way of playing together.

Up to a point, that has always been part of the Madrid way. Their glamour has always stemmed from their capacity to sign the biggest stars, from Ferenc Puskas to Hugo Sanchez to Zidane, but the financial imbalances have changed the nature of the competition.

Immediately after Cristiano Ronaldo had converted the winning penalty, Andrew Orsatti, a director and spokesperson for players union FIFPro tweeted: “Take nothing away from Real Madrid, great club, but at what point will football acknowledge the growing competitive imbalance is unhealthy?”

Leicester City’s success in the Premier League has perhaps demonstrated the shop is not as closed as it was, but the Champions League increasingly feels like a game of pass the parcel between a tiny elite.

Hang around long enough—and this was the sixth consecutive season in which Madrid reached the semi-finals, which is either evidence of impressive consistency or of the flawed repetitive nature of the Champions League, depending how you look at it—and the music will eventually stop for you.

Chelsea’s success in 2012 with arguably its weakest side since the Roman Abramovich takeover in 2003 is further evidence of the same phenomenon.

The sense of familiarity has been emphasised by three repeat finals in the past 11 years. Barcelona have been in seven semi-finals in the past nine years. Bayern Munich have been in the semi-finals in each of the last five seasons.

Perhaps in time we will look back and regard the three giants as nothing more than exceptional teams—and it’s not insignificant that six of the last nine Champions League winners have featured either Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo. But the economics of the situation also help. When the elite clubs suggested there was need for a shake-up in how the tournament and its revenues are structured, they were right; the problem is their proposals were aimed at increasing their revenues and thus exacerbating those financial imbalances.

Alongside the story of Leicester, there was something prosaic about the Champions League this season. Had Atletico won, having beaten Barcelona and Bayern in the previous two rounds, it would have been one of the great underdog success stories—yet Forbes recently reported they are the 15th most valuable club in the world. Last season, Juventus, the most successful side in Italian history, were widely—and not inaccurately—portrayed as minnows against the might of Barcelona. That suggests the extent to which the big three have come to dominate.

Real Madrid Win 

It didn’t help the feeling that Madrid’s run was underwhelming because the draw was so kind. Perhaps the comeback against Wolfsburg in the quarter-finals will come to be seen as a defining game, but the fact is Madrid should never have lost the first leg 2-0. Their record of not conceding at the Santiago Bernabeu in this season's competition looks rather better than it was—both Roma and Wolfsburg had chances.

Even the semi-final felt anticlimactic, largely because Manchester City turned in such an insipid performance. Winning a final on penalties after your opponent has missed a penalty in normal time is about as far as it’s possible to get from the 7-3 win over Eintracht Frankfurt in 1960 or Zidane’s volley against Bayer Leverkusen in 2002.

It’s not Madrid’s fault—they can hardly help the draw or City’s underperformance—and it’s not to say they were in some way an undeserving winner. It’s just their run lacked an epic quality, and it's begun to feel as though that’s a function of the structure of the Champions League.

It may be that, in time, history comes to look back on this success as the start of the Zidane primacy. It may be that, despite the pending transfer ban, he crafts one of the great Madrid teams over the next three or four years and they dominate Spain and Europe with the same blend of cleverness, creativity and toughness that marked him out as a player.

But they are not even close to being there yet, and two Champions League triumphs in three seasons does not change that. Rather, it hints at how the nature of the competition has changed.

source: www.bleacherreport.com