The cost of success
Success comes at a price.
This is just revising an old adage. This is an adage wryly associated with some of the lesser-fancied, more successful football clubs of recent years. Cue Valencia, Monaco, Porto, Deportivo La Coruna, Sevilla, Lyon, and more recently Borussia Dortmund and Atletico Madrid.
Selling off assets is a hard thing to do, but when the limits are smaller and the ceilings lower, a football club gets outgrown. Sometimes by the manager, more often by members of the playing roster. Being successful is not too good a thing if you aren’t among those elite clubs. Those clubs that can pay a quarter million quid every week to one single player, the clubs that are familiar even in the remotest of places in the world.
Atletico are facing a dead end. They are losing their star players, and losing them quick. I fear how far they will end up behind Real Madrid and Barcelona next season (although I could die happy if Los Colchoneros repeat their heroics of last season), with both giants embarking on an early spending spree.
Atletico have lost star striker Diego Costa to the big bucks of Chelsea, and star goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois to the clauses of a loan agreement to the same club. David Villa is heading to the Big Apple for his swansong, while Tiago, Miranda and Filipe Luis ogle the lucrative advances on their respective tables. This leaves the club with only Koke, Diego Godin and Arda as the genuinely top-notch players. The day isn’t far when they’ll be gone too.
This is the price Atletico Madrid are paying for their ‘success’. This is not something new. Clubs only become big with the big players, and big players always have their own little ‘stepping stone’. For clubs like Atletico and the aforementioned octet, there is always a chance of a player outgrowing the club itself, thus leaving him with little chance of staying put.
The Valencia team at the turn of the millennium is quite an exception to this. They had unprecedented success for a mid-tier Spanish team, reaching two Champions League Finals (losing both) and winning five top-flight trophies in a remarkable five-year period, two Liga titles included. And the price they had to pay wasn’t from the playing staff (Gaizka Mendieta to Lazio was the only big, expensive player move), it was the managers who departed after satisfying quite a few bellies. Hector Cuper went on for bigger things at Inter after two straight Champions League Finals, while Rafa Benitez headed to Liverpool after two Liga wins for Los Che.
This is only one end of the food chain. There is a supposed hierarchy to this. FC Porto are fodder to the big Iberian clubs, as well as to the top clubs from across the continent. The annual sale of their best players is hardly a secret, but they always remain competitive (although they never become world beaters). The reason for this is the second level of the food chain where the likes of Porto are predators.
This runs down to the bottom-most level; it is almost cast in stone as to where the clubs’ respective positions in the world order lie. Succeed and you’ll be shown your place, fail and you’ll prey on the lesser ones to regain your lost status. This is almost a norm. And so much for the talks about the game of football evolving, it is barely moving.
The status quo remains maintained; the smaller clubs remain always shunted in their ambitions. The bigger clubs will always have the better things: better players, better stadiums, better fans, better social space, and more money. Success for the smaller clubs always comes at a price, only that the extent of the ‘price’ is magnified after the success arrives.
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