Ajax Helps UEFA Champions League 2019 To Riposte To Super Clubs Over- Reliant On Wealth
As Pep Guardiola will now be so achingly ruminating, the UEFA Champions League really is a cup competition dictated by a large degree of randomness and strange happenings. A few inches in any way can make a huge difference to your historic legacy.
And yet, after all the randomness and moments of VAR drama that we witnessed this week, it still feels as though this entire season — for the first time in a long while — conforms to a trend that is eminently explainable.
It feels like all four of the clubs still standing have got to that stage as part of a journey, as a result of bigger plans. There’s no better example of this than Ajax, whose intelligence as a club has so wonderfully defied the economic intransigence of European football.
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Mauricio Pochettino’s Tottenham Hotspur is a greater version of this, while Jurgen Klopp has so strategically and calculatedly built his Liverpool side, in a way that has elevated them way beyond a team merely capable of creating destruction and chaos.
Then there is Barcelona, who have always dominated their home tournament — La Liga, and it was no doubt that the Champions League was to be the next step. They have waited a long time for that relative to their quality, let alone just making the semi-finals. Leo Messi himself feels a personal obligation to win it, and fulfil this side’s potential and desire.
That sense of a quest, or a goal or to see the end point of a long journey, is of course what defined the European Cup for the majority of its history. The very fact you had to win the league first created this essential threshold, this sense of milestone and progress. It was like getting checkpoints in a video game.
The modern culture of the Champions League has completely changed this. The fact it just collects all the wealthiest sides and puts them together actually accentuates the effect of luck and defeats the idea of reaching a milestone. It means the best team very rarely wins.
Real Madrid’s recent period of domination has been the result of this. A team that could barely be the best in their own country in La Liga somehow manages to keep succeeding in the most prestigious cup competition. Randomness prevailed, so long as it was randomness supported by a lot of resources akin to wealth.
This UEFA Champions League has been the natural swing back against this, as is always going to happen.
It does not feel completely coincidental that all of the super-clubs who enjoy such a monopoly in their own countries — Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich — all were eliminated. Many of them have got to the point where they have stopped planning in the way they used to, and in the way that got them ahead, that this Champions League was a harsh lesson.
Juventus just looking to stay grounded and their over-dependence on Ronaldo was no match for the joyously vibrant co-ordination of Ajax.
This UEFA Champions League season has been one big riposte to just relying on that wealth.
Johan Cruyff’s famous comment that he’s never seen a bag of money score a goal has never been so relevant, relatable and so repeated, even if there is a great irony that the great man might actually disapprove of some of the more specific interpretations of his philosophy.
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He could still only be proud of what Ajax has done, and the greatest thing of all is that it doesn’t seem like a freak consequence of random fortune if they won the competition. Nor are they one of those lesser-resourced sides who look to force fortune by playing reactive percentages football and just digging in.
They are that good. They are that invigorating.
They really shouldn’t be underestimated, even as it feels the Liverpool-Barcelona tie is “the true final”. The very league positions indicate they are the best sides left in the competition right now, but all four of these clubs left know well that can mean little when it gets to this point.
They know they have to plan around it.
This should be a harsh lesson for the future of the Champions League, except is the very culture of the competition to swing back. It is that capricious. Guardiola knows that well. All any side can do is seek to capture the moment.
All four now left will feel that sense of fate.
Originally published at Sporcial.
