Champions League Final 2021/22 Preview
Champions League Final 2021/22 Preview
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
A lot of clubs believe that they belong in Europe but only a few believe they are entitled to the biggest European club trophy on offer. Liverpool and Real Madrid are among a very select few that do; clubs whose dynasties from the past were crystalised by an era of dominance in Europe. They are old superpowers still going strong. The fans of these clubs believe their stadiums are enveloped by something divine.
“This is Anfield,” reads the famous sign adorned on the walls of Liverpool’s celebrated stadium.
“Now we have to go to the Bernabeu. We will need our fans like never before and we are going to do something magical, which is win," promised Karim Benzema after the first-leg of their semi-final against Manchester City.
The last time two old superpowers met in the Champions League final was when these sides faced each other in 2017/18. Neither of them will have any home comforts heading into this tie. More importantly, they’re heading into this tie hurting a little. Two no-longer-new-superpowers are mostly responsible for that.
Liverpool were five absurd minutes from being in the running for an unprecedented English quadruple triumph. They could still win a cup treble but without the biggest domestic competition in the bag, their claim to having the single-best campaign in English football history will remain a matter of debate instead of a foregone conclusion.
In their way were Manchester City, who have taken a giant Erling Haaland step towards reasserting their dominance. The young Norse prince never looked an ideal fit for the regal heads of Madrid but he was on their radar. He wasn’t the source of their indignation in recent weeks though. The Prince of Paris, now King, is behind that. He has broken an unwritten law in these lands: you do not refuse Real Madrid.
You do not until you do. By doing so, Real Madrid will not be home to Kylian Mbappe or Erling Haaland, the two stars that shine the brightest in 2022 and will do so for many years more. For all the ambiguity over Real Madrid’s playing identity over little less than a century, its portrayal as the home to Galacticos is now in threat.
It’s why losing is not an option for either of these sides. It’ll hurt their pride more than usual. To make sure they aren’t on the losing side will be their two managers.
The Strategist & The Tactician
“A clever tactician is the one that capitalizes on the chances offered by the opponents. A strategist is the one with a long-term project who knows how to get there and creates the opportunity. If a strategist comes up against a tactician and all things are equal, the strategist will always prevail. “
This dichotomy has been proposed by Arrigo Sacchi, the legendary Italian coach who popularized a 4-4-2 zonal marking system in Italy in the late ‘80s and achieved incredible success at AC Milan. The two managers in the dugout are among many that were inspired by his ideas yet it’s quite clear who the strategist is according to Sacchi’s definition and who the tactician is.
Jurgen Klopp’s manager and mentor, Wolfgang Frank, was among many coaches in the ‘90s who took Sacchi’s blueprint and applied it to Germany, which like Italy, had a history of man-marking and sweeping.
Klopp mentions this in Jamie Carragher’s book The Greatest Games:
“I did not learn it from Sacchi, but it was my manager at Mainz, Wolfgang Frank, who brought it to us, which meant as a player I watched five hundred videos of AC Milan.”
Klopp took umbrage recently when a journalist assumed that Ibrahima Konate was man-marking Benfica’s Everton Soares in the Champions League quarter-final.
“You saw us man-marking? Then we played really bad. It’s only a possibility if Everton is always around Konate because we defend the space. I have to watch the game back, if it (he) did it then I have to make sure it doesn’t happen again because we play against the ball not Everton or the other boys. It was not part of the game plan, not at all.”
Klopp’s a true ideologue. He recently had some strong words about the football played by Antonio Conte’s Spurs side as well.
Unlike Klopp, Ancelotti played under Sacchi and was his greatest devotee in his early managerial stints at Reggiana and Parma. However, Ancelotti has taken a different path.
Here’s an excerpt from The Beautiful Games of an Ordinary Genius, his first autobiography.
“Now, years later, I regret how it went. I was wrong to be intransigent. Over time, I learned that there is always a way of allowing a lot of great and talented players to work together and get along. At Parma, I still thought that 4-4-2 was the ideal formation in all cases, but that’s not true. If I had a time machine, I’d go back and of course I’d take Baggio. I could have handled the situation very differently. All of this, of course, caused problems for me. I was branded a coach who was opposed to attacking midfielders, and that wasn’t entirely unfair. For that matter, the year before, I’d turned down Zola as well. Ancelotti, the anti-imagination. Give me anything, but not another number 10.”
“The truth is that I was afraid of moving into territory that I thought I knew too little about. It was a lack of courage, but I made up for it in the years that followed. I found a new source of courage, in part because I went to coach Juventus. And I really couldn’t bench Zidane.”
Ancelotti’s pared-down tactics have been put under the microscope in recent years but a La Liga title with Madrid this season and the Champions League run have helped preserve his reputation. Managers have their ideas and they are passed down to them through different channels. Two people can have different reactions to that base concept. An opposite reaction to a concept only strengthens it. It acknowledges its existence.
Jurgen Klopp isn’t Wolfgang Frank. His fiery charm and self-deprecating humour are just as important as his ideas. Ancelotti isn’t Klopp. He’s a strong and silent type like Gary Cooper. Ancelotti would be fighting against his bare instincts if he was to continue mirroring Sachhi.
The two managers might have taken different paths despite having the same source of inspiration but it is their lack of doubt and complete belief in the ideas that they’ve settled with over the years that draw players to them. This remains the most important characteristic to become a successful manager.
Let’s now find out if all things are equal by looking at the players that typify these great sides.
Unconditional Superstars
Certain words like systems and profiles tend to crop up more often than others when we talk tactics. Many of the great footballing nations have neat little labels for the roles that a player takes up. The Italians are probably the best at it. You’ve got registas, liberos, trequartistas and more.
The idea behind this is fairly simple. Two players might play in the same zones but undertake that task differently. It’s then the manager’s job to identify the strengths and weaknesses, enhance the former, mask the latter and ultimately have enough players to complement one another. Grace Robertson has written something on this. Every player is a system player. 1
But every now and then we get players that might not need a lot of favourable conditions to perform. These two clubs have got one on opposite sides of the table that you could consider as unconditional superstars.
Liverpool have one in the heart of their defence. Tactics writer Michael Cox came up with a way to broadly distinguish centre backs as cool cats and dutiful dogs two years ago. Virgil van Dijk is the best centre-back of the cat archetype in some time but he doesn’t lack the dog-like qualities. 2
He had to be more of the latter during his time at Southampton as well. More recently, Van Dijk was seen discussing centre-backs with Rio Ferdinand and was put on the spot when Ferdinand asked him who he’d rank as his top-5 centre-backs in the Premier League era. There seemed to be a consensus on what they valued. There was an appreciation for each other’s game and Jaap Stam. The two also alluded to the three of them being comfortable in any era.
All three of them had the footballing ability, recovery pace, 1v1 ability, intelligent reading of the game, strength, aerial ability and some silverware to materialize their worth. There isn’t much lacking here.
Van Dijk will have the arduous task of handling Karim Benzema, another unconditional superstar. There are far too many centre-forward archetypes. Benzema, who had to take the role of facilitator extraordinaire for large parts of his career, has been all of them since Cristiano Ronaldo’s departure. He’s a poacher, playmaker and battering ram rolled into one. It’s taken a while for him to receive the plaudits but with arguably the greatest Champions League campaign of all time to his name this season, everyone’s taken notice.
These players still need great systems and great teammates to win the biggest prizes but they make it very difficult for their contemporaries by being so complete. On top of all that, they make their teammates better. Van Dijk is often seen instructing his teammates and the same goes for Benzema, who is constantly communicating with the younger forwards at Madrid.
If Van Dijk and Benzema’s contributions are accentuated by their towering presence, the same can’t be said of two of their most important teammates.
Small In Size But Big In Heart
The late noughties saw the value of dainty little playmakers rise and they remain the most valuable cog in any great machine a decade later. Xavi Hernandez, Paul Scholes and Andrea Pirlo were key to this development at the time for their respective clubs and leagues.
When speaking to The Guardian’s Sid Lowe in 2011, Xavi felt that his archetype was extinct only a few years prior to the interview. 3
The three players have been greatly complimentary of each over the years. It’s hard to believe that they had many lean years but these developments often get airbrushed by history. Sven-Göran Eriksson, particularly, gets a lot of grief from the English media because of the way he used Paul Scholes in Euro 2004 but Scholes never actually played the role that has immortalized him in football quotes until much later.
Their managers at various intervals had trouble finding a place for them in the side, trying them in various roles before they all mystifyingly were figured out at the same point in football’s tactical timeline.
Part of this was the death of the archetypal number 10 and box-to-box midfielders from the ‘90s. Conservative tactics were finding success. Number 10s were getting marked out of the game and the 4-4-2 was replaced by the 4-3-3 and 4-2-3-1 formations. The middle of the park was getting packed and players who could slip their marker had become the most valuable commodity.
These playmakers had the guile and the graft. They weren’t luxuries nor were they water carriers. With teams getting increasingly better at pressing, these players are in even greater demand now. Real Madrid and Liverpool have two of the best.
Like the legendary names mentioned earlier, Thiago Alcantara and Luka Modric have had their lean years. The former’s career has been hampered by injuries. Like, a lot of injuries. He had to play second fiddle for a while at Barcelona to Xavi and Iniesta to ever get the recognition there. At Bayern Munich, he made 16 starts in his first season under Guardiola and seven in his second season. Things got a bit better in the next two years before making 19 starts in 2017/18.
His big moment was in 2019/20 when he finally won the Champions League with Bayern but once again, he only made 24 starts. Last season, there were not only big question marks about his fitness but his fit in the Liverpool side and English football. Thiago’s another player who maybe doesn’t need the best conditions to perform but as mentioned earlier, without the best of teammates it can be hard to notice the qualities of even the very best.
Thiago heads into this final with doubts about his fitness but he should start. With him in the side, you can expect Liverpool to dictate the tempo of the game. This is an interesting role reversal of sorts for Liverpool in a very short time. In the 2017/18 final, they were the plucky underdogs who hadn’t been a European force for a near decade and had not won a league title in over two. All that’s changed in a few years. FiveThirtyEight gives Liverpool a 65% chance. Bet365 offers Liverpool odds of 2.05 and Real Madrid with 3.40.
Liverpool used to play to one rhythm under Jurgen Klopp but the German’s shuffling of coaching staff and playstyle are acknowledgements that he needed to mix it up over time. The man most likely to cause damage to Liverpool when there are disruptions to their tempo is a 36-year-old Luka Modric.
Modric didn’t even get into the conversations among the elite before his move to Real Madrid at the age of 26 and he was famously considered one of the club’s worst signings after his first season at the Bernabeu. There were also question marks around his game post the heroics of the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
Madrid fans believe this is Modrics’ annus mirabilis. The underdog narrative seems to stimulate something extraordinary in him. Modric’s used to playing for lesser sides as has been the case for the Croatian national side. Modric has had more consistent seasons in the past for Real Madrid but rarely during his time at the Bernabeu has he had to be the one conjuring moments of magic with regularity like he has this season.
These battles between the players and managers are among the many matters at stake in this season’s Champions League final. Another letter could be dedicated to their bench. The two sides have even built a nascent rivalry through their meetings over the years. With fans back in stadiums, this season will live long in the memory.
The two clubs, their history, their stadium and the belief emitted by those that represent their colours are compelling but one of them will lose on Saturday. The narrative that at least one of these historic clubs has built for themselves over the course of this season will die at the Stade de France. The faith of the fans that put their time and money into these teams will be put to the test for 90 minutes and for one of them a summer of sorrow will surely follow. For me, that remains the most captivating feature of this tie.
Hey!
I hope you enjoyed that. I just wanted another space for non-Manchester United blogging and this felt like the best space for it.
I thought about blogging on medium but Substack felt more interactive. So, here it is.
https://theathletic.com/1909441/2020/07/06/caglar-soyuncu-jonny-evans-leicester-city/
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2011/feb/11/xavi-barcelona-spain-interview