Gavin Cooney
ANOTHER NIGHT EXQUISITELY tuned to the operatics of Real Madrid.
Across individual season there are teams who emerge as invincible and indomitable but across the broader sweep of time, Real Madrid are inevitable.
Some teams exist for seasons; Madrid are a team for eras.
Some teams win; Madrid dominate.
There is no doubt now: Real Madrid are the dominant team of football’s petro-wealth, super-club era. If they go on to beat Dortmund at Wembley, Madrid will have won a sixth Champions League title in 11 seasons. Only Liverpool, Bayern, and AC Milan have won as many as that across the entire history of the competition.
It may seem jarring to those of us who know Florentino Perez from his galactico project and his late-night dribblings about Gen-Z attention spans on El Chiringuito, but Madrid are Europe’s best-run club.
How else to explain this dominance of the Champions League across 11 seasons in which they’ve had a lower net spend than Bournemouth?
They built a side to dominate Europe and then they rebuilt it without breaking stride: the phasing out of Casemiro/Kroos/Modric and the integrating of Tchouameni/Camavinga/Valverde/Bellingham has been frictionless.
They’ve also cut out the middle man and bought directly from South America, and look what it has brought them. Rodrygo is a dream support act and Vinicius is a superstar.
Oh, and that’s not all they’ve built: take a look at the Bernabeu tonight.
Madrid have quietly become football’s autocrats without expounding any grand philosophy or ideology. Instead everyone has operated off the unspoken assumption that they are the best, they always deserve to be the best, and winning the Champions League on a routine basis is simply the kind of thing that the best should be doing.
This is why they always find a way. Tonight it came from Joselu, who was signed as a stopgap. He was supposed to be remembered as a kind of small, humpback bridge between Benzema and Mbappe. Now he has scored twice in a Champions League semi-final.
Scott Dann, Rude Gestede, Steven Davis…these are only three of the players to outscore Joselu during his season with Stoke in the Premier League, but these mere facts do not matter on nights like these, when you are endowed with the sorcery of Real Madrid in the Champions League.
Tonight will be sweeter as Madrid were presented with the appalling image of what they have been doing to the rest of Europe, looking like they would be eliminated in spite of being the better team. Tonight they upgraded their steady grip of the first-half to a chokehold in the second, inspired once again by a subtle tactical shift from Carlo Ancelotti.
Vinicius tortured Kim Min-Jae and Bayern from a central position in the first leg, but he went wide to the left touch-line after half-time tonight, and Madrid then did the unusual thing of sending Bellingham and Rodrygo to stand close to him. Ordinarily a team would want to leave their winger alone to isolate him against his full-back, but such was Vinicius’ mood, they calculated it was better to drag everyone over to him: that way he could beat every single one of them.
Vinicius skated by every single Bayern player close to him – poor Joshua Kimmich may never recover – and he would have buried the tie had it not been for the many spoiled heroics of Manuel Neuer.
Alphonso Davies’ extraordinary goal came from nowhere, however, to summon the prospect that Madrid were about to be absolutely Madrided. (Naturally, Davies is going to be playing for Madrid from next season too.)
Thomas Tuchel then erred in his own rational way, becoming another opposition manager to bring an excess of logic to the mind-bending challenge of Real Madrid. He swapped to a back five on the 76-minute mark and then declared at 1-0 by subbing Musiala and Kane with five minutes of normal time remaining.
Thomas, you fool! You don’t bait fate at the Bernabeu!
Neuer didn’t deserve to make the mistake for the equalising goal, but when you’re dealing with Madrid, deserve rarely has anything to do with it. There was an inevitability to Joselu’s winner coming a few moments later, and while Tuchel reassured his players they had another 10 minutes left to send the game to extra-time, his team never looked like scoring. They raged about their disallowed goal and while the whistle was blown too early, Madrid had stopped playing in reaction to it.
Tuchel had shorn them of their attackers but Madrid had sapped them of all hope and belief.
Because this is what Real Madrid do.
This is their era.
