The fact that Madrid are seen as a loser is an appalling measure of our situation, but it is a captivating picture and a shocking clash of contrasts.
After all, it turns out that Pep Guardiola was right. Manchester City’s quest for the double treble will remain “a hypothetical dream”.
That just word from Pep ahead of Wednesday’s second leg against Real Madrid, a formula that suggests even Guardiola’s dreams are full of theory, algebra, hypothesis, like a footballing edition of Professor Silenus by Evelyn Waugh, the modernist architect who doesn’t sleep. However, he spends 8 hours in the dark, eyes closed, performing calculations at full speed, before getting up at dawn to design some other masterpiece of the device age.
And City faced Real Madrid (1-1 in the minute, 4-4 on aggregate, 3-4), a masterpiece in many ways. It was a match that for long periods of time felt like two groups falling asleep with their hands around their throats. But it’s also absolutely captivating, all subtext, all narrative, a game that seemed, even in its most painful repetitions, to tell us something important.
First of all, for neutrals, it’s actually a smart thing for City not to win a second treble in a row. It would be easy to overlook this by pointing out that watching an unprecedented double-triple win would be a tedious and overlapping task. show. But this is doubly true in this case.
It is proof of our scenario that the victory of Real Madrid, in a festival created through money, with money, to obtain in the long term the advantages of money, can one day be considered a victory of the common man. Many City enthusiasts would see their team as the underdog of this undertaking, even if it takes some degree of cognitive dissonance for it to actually be so.
It’s worth remembering what the task is for, City. Il is essentially a public relations exercise organized through a sovereign state with a questionable human rights record, but which has decided to build a post-carbon economy.
City are, by their own standards, the most financially difficult club in world football. Huge sums of money have been poured into this thing, the multi-billion dollar will to force has been applied to the ridiculously inadequate governance of football. It’s about the game as foreign policy, backed up through the ridiculous fiction that, in doing so, Abu Dhabi’s ruling monarchy is breaking a cartel, protecting the little guys, foreigners from the marginalized, and everything in between.
This is a gruesome spectacle on many levels, and it’s not the only one, with all due respect to the exciting new generation of hyper-incompetent coverage owners. But it turns out that’s what it takes to make Real Madrid look like underdogs; Reaching another semifinal for a team worth a billion dollars feels like a game-versus-machine win. Congratulations to everyone involved. It’s very much the people game we’ve created here.
But there is also a tactical and textual aspect to it. Why deserve Real Madrid, running to exhaustion before winning on the last shot, to look like sporting beauty?What is it about the spectacle of City’s brilliantly striated device crashing against its own limits that makes it so greedy?
Lately there has been a discreet and insistent tactical debate, encouraged in part by the general triumph of the Pep model. Coach and tactical theorist Jamie Hamilton called it positionalism (i. e. , betting on inflexible zone systems) and relationism (managed spontaneity, non-zonal attack). ). City are the positional team par excellence, with a taste above all for control, for the players as the linchpins of the system.
Relationism refers to a choice in which players have structured freedom, attacks that rely on improvised combinations, which are therefore more difficult to read, less preformulated, more based on in-the-moment decision-making. That’s how Madrid played. It’s the style of the stars. They are inadvertent PR people.
It is easy to dismiss the dualism of this model. Each formula will be combined to some extent. If you think about it too much, those concepts seem to evaporate a bit. But there was no doubt that City vs Madrid presented a tough and captivating match. On the contrary. Even in defence, Madrid’s players are organised to some extent on the pitch. In attack, they assume their own style, more inventive, spontaneous and based on their personality.
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Jude Bellingham described it as an impromptu game. In the run-up to the match, Carlo Ancelotti even announced that matches like that “belong to the players”, which is not the kind of thing that Pep does, who can be heard in the Netflix City documentary shouting things like “Sport is framework language!Life is frame language! After a Carabao Cup defeat at Southampton, he will most likely come out ahead.
The first half at the Etihad was more evident in an assembly of those systems, with Madrid’s quick and unpredictable counter-attacks and Bellingham’s cold alpha-forward role raising questions about City’s defence.
The second half was like watching positionalism throw itself into the meat grinder, with City attempting to overwhelm that headstrong and skilful ultimate opponent with the sheer weight of repetition, the confidence that the formula will have to triumph in the end if it continues. That was the formula. City controlled 47 shots in the match, but it still looked like most of them were vaguely probing. Kevin De Bruyne crossed the ball into Madrid’s box 21 times on Wednesday night. For what? None of them resulted in notable openings.
By the end, the game had turned into a struggle, with City’s players running to exhaustion in search of the sun. Perhaps what was missing in the finale was something non-formulaic, the more spontaneous creativity of, say, Cole Palmer, who thrived in a damaged Chelsea, freed by the lack of a formula to explore the confines of his talent. By contrast, City have introduced their own version, Jack Grealish, whose creative and risky play in the past has been reduced to the role of a winger who looks after the ball while his team organises, betting on Coldplay football: top-notch, unsurprisingly, with relentless success.
All of this brings us back to substance and style. Guardiola’s style is perfectly suited to the richest teams. Combine that point of the field with a team of incredibly technical players and it’s as close to unbeatable as any team is likely to be. be.
Multi-million dollar football is based on this type of certainty, on the absence of variables, on success as a product to be bought. But why wouldn’t there be another edition of this?The air of mystery of Real Madrid’s elite football has been the closest thing to that in the last decade. That’s why Wednesday night was so captivating, why it felt like a collision between something bigger, why it pushed both groups to the limit; and why it would possibly also involve a core of anything else, a way for the City to get out of here and for others to come forward as well.