Unpopular opinion: a Liverpool v City final would be boringly predictable, and only Real Madrid can save us from such tedium.
If someone had said, on that famous night in Kyiv when Loris Karius went all Mr Bean and Gareth Bale defied physics to hand Los Blancos a third consecutive Champions League crown, that in less than four years’ time, European football would need a Real Madrid win over English opposition to restore some sense of competitive balance and keep things interesting, that person would have been told clearly and succinctly to keep their views to themselves. “That is a truly terrible opinion,” someone would presumably have replied. “You twat.”
Yet, whilst that’s as maybe, this is – kind of – where we are: needing a Real Madrid win over English opposition to restore some sense of competitive balance and keep things interesting.
Now, there are clearly problems with this statement. Numerous potential objections, and many of them perfectly sage. Real Madrid are, obviously, nobody’s idea of plucky upstarts. They are not a bunch of farmers from some fishing village in the mountains, punching way above their weight and sticking it to the aristocracy, like Villarreal. Rather, playing in their tenth semi-final in 12 seasons, they quite literally are the aristocracy.
Moreover, they are a club whose historic obsession with the commercial revenue generated by Galáctico-level super-stardom, and their maniacally laissez-faire approach to transfer fees, wages and debt, have arguably done more than anyone else to lead us to the point at which we now reside, whereby the finances of the game are so crippled and distorted that the only legitimate way to compete at the pinnacle of European football is with the monstrous private equity that only nation states, oligarchs or vulture capitalists can accrue. They are, of course, run by a tone-deaf nutjob who still insists on the validity of a project that aims to definitively ringfence the top table of…
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