At the final whistle in Lisbon in 2014, both Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale danced and waved with their shirts. They were overjoyed, because Real Madrid’s obsessive wait for La Decima, a tenth European Cup, had come to an end. Real Madrid had demolished their city rivals Atletico Madrid 4-1 in 30 minutes of frantic extra time play with a flurry of goals.
Diego Simeone’s team had chased, harried and pestered Real for much of the 90 minutes, restricting Ronaldo to a peripheral role in the game, but central defender Sergio Ramos’s 93th minute header cancelled out Atletico’s lead and near-grasp on the trophy. It was football at its most cruel.
At the San Siro in Milan on Saturday, Real and Atletico renew their recent rivalry in a repeat Champions League final, the culmination of the European football season. The final has many subplots: can Real’s novice coach Zinedine Zidane crown a mediocre season with a major prize? Is Ronaldo playing his last match for the Galacticos? Will Atletico seek revenge for Lisbon 2014?
What is stylish football?
Style, however, is the overarching narrative of this final. In football, style is everything – it is the one aspect which elevates an otherwise simple ball game into an art form, causing that inner jolt of unfettered joy among sports fans and observers.
But then how to define what is aesthetically pleasing football? For many, Atletico Madrid’s elite defending is worthy of the highest praise. At the same time, Ronaldo’s isolated flashes of swiftness in his skills and daring swagger in his understanding of the game encapsulates Real Madrid’s attacking game.
Simeone, and newly appointed Manchester United coach Jose Mourinho, are lone crusaders for a school of pragmatic football with a simple maxim: winning is everything, victory as the highest good in the game. The Argentine manager is among the few fixated on such a philosophy in a world where most other managers profess that anything other than attacking football is a blasphemy.
Attacking football revolves around possession, risk and pro-activeness. Ironically, at the height of Pep Guardiola’s “Tiki-taka” induced FC Barcelona, the Catalans’ game was often a mix of perpetual dallying and dithering on the ball combined with a ceaseless pattern of knitting and weaving that provoked opponents into erring. Barcelona, often with 70% of ball possession, simply invited other teams to commit mistakes. Inconspicuously, Barcelona’s game had become reactive, because it was risk-free.
This attritional strategy is also an extreme way of ball recuperation - a team should continuously keep the ball. Another strategy to get the ball is to sit deep and rely on defenders and defensive shape to regain the ball and hit on the counter with the opponent off-balance. Alternatively, one can press and go hunting in pack high up the pitch.
Defending deep
Europe’s best teams combine these three strategies with varying degrees in their game – and with varying success. Atletico Madrid does so too, but with a big emphasis on defending deep. Yet, when in possession, Simeone’s team demonstrate radiant simplicity in their passing, lightening-quick transition and lethal finishing. They stalled both Barcelona and Bayern Munich for better parts of their respective knockout encounters, but Atletico, arguably, also demonstrated many fine attributes of their game with gushing aplomb.
Atletico Madrid – and Leceister City in the domestic English scene – has proven that an unsexy football philosophy is both justifiable and successful and not an anachronism at odds with today’s fixation on possession and pressing. The footballing world’s axis may not revolve around Pep Guardiola and his philosophies after all.
For their part, Real Madrid’s style aspires to be inviting and forward-minded, but they are no longer the Galacticos of days gone by when current coach Zidane dazzled in the midfield alongside a cast of otherworldly players – Luis Figo, Raul, Roberto Carlos and Ronaldo, among others.
No, Florentino Perez, Madrid’s larger-than-life chairman, shudders at the notion that his team are somewhat blue collar, with their icon Cristiano Ronaldo an outcast in a group of middling players. This season Real Madrid played power football, a game vision that doesn’t align with the mainstream view of what is beautiful football either.
In the semi-finals, they barely managed to go past a disjointed Manchester City side, and had to labour to reach the final. There, they will meet their neighbours. That borderline chumminess between the two clubs will translate into a tactical stalemate on the field – picture Atletico inviting Real deep into their own half right from the kick off.
But that does not mean the final will be a mundane affair. Indeed, it may not be the projected dream final between Barcelona and Bayern Munich, but systems and players are transient, the diversity in football philosophies and their innate beauty is not.