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.