Everywhere you look, there are pulsatingly brilliant stories in this season’s Champions League quarterfinals.
Take Benfica, who recently moved on four players who now feature for other clubs in the competition’s last eight for over €350 million — Joao Felix (€126m to Atletico Madrid), Enzo Fernandez (€121m to Chelsea), Ederson (€40m to Man City) and Ruben Dias (€68m) — and who’ve not been in a Champions League semifinal for 33 years, yet here they are on the verge of reaching one if they can beat Inter Milan.
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Or there’s the fact that we have three Serie A clubs in the quarterfinals for the first time in 17 years; if you’re old enough, you’ll swoon at that idea. There was a time when Italian football had European competition under its thumb. This is a renaissance after some dark ages.
Among them, Napoli, who face Serie A rivals AC Milan. The fanatical supporters of Diego Maradona’s former club have never, in Neapolitan history, seen their team go this far in the European Cup or Champions League. But, don’t forget, nor had they seen Napoli become Italian champions since 1990: something which is about to be remedied and in dramatic style.
Your eye could easily be caught by Pep Guardiola taking his Manchester City project back to Bayern Munich, where he successfully coached on the domestic front but never won them the Champions League they craved. He won everything else while he was there, changed the ideology of the club, thrilled with his football — yet left some die-hard traditionalists yearning for Bayern’s old-school, arrogant “power-fussball” rather than anything too pretty and geometrical.
That the tie pits new Bayern coach Thomas Tuchel against Guardiola adds sauce to the stew. Friends, of a sort, almost perpetual rivals, whether at Borussia Dortmund and Bayern or then Chelsea and City, Tuchel is the bright pupil with whom Guardiola exchanged notes — until the German stole his homework, reinvented himself as Guardiola-kryptonite and, famously, beat the Catalan in the 2021 Champions League final.
But forgive me for trying to persuade you that Real Madrid vs. Chelsea on Wednesday is every bit as compelling, every bit as idiosyncratic as any of the other three ties.
Chelsea are the club that have taken a look at Real Madrid president Florentino Perez’s near quarter century of “Galactico” policy (sign the best players, of any age; hire the best coaches; don’t wait patiently for success before repeating the formula) and made a complete mess out of it.
This team, now managed by club-legend Frank Lampard again until the summer after the sacking of Graham Potter, have scored less than a goal per game in the Premier League. Only six teams have fewer.
What the Champions League draw has done, perhaps unfairly, is put a very harsh spotlight on the Chelsea project.
Madrid have only intermittently employed a director of football over the past 23 years, and on the rare occasions they did, one of them was Zinedine Zidane, who knows his stuff. Under no circumstances would Perez have undermined his own control of the club by hiring two joint directors of football with all the envy, power politics and backbiting that would inevitably cause.
Madrid’s policy, at the beginning of their Galactico spend-big-to-sign-magnificent-quality era, yielded them Zidane, Luis Figo, Ronaldo Nazario and David Beckham. All habitual winners and experienced players who brought massive knowledge of handling pressure, of generating income for the club, and of being stars.
Los Blancos’ policy, toward the latter end of Perez’s reign, has been to invest in beating every other European rival to elite youth talents like Vinicius Jr. (€45m), Rodrygo (€45m), Fede Valverde (€6m), Eduardo Camavinga (€31m), Aurelien Tchouameni (€80m) and Eder Militao (€50m), all of whom signed in their teens or, at the latest, early 20s.
Those six players — who will play significant roles as Madrid WILL knock Chelsea out of their last remaining winnable competition this season and deny them the chance to play in the Champions League next year — moved to Madrid for just over a third of what Boehly, Eghbali & Co. have spent since June.
There’s crystal clear evidence of business and entrepreneurial brilliance among the owners who bought Chelsea. In their previous existences, that is. It’s a reasonable deduction that, with time and a rapid assimilation of the brutal lessons they’ve been learning these past few months (and are likely to learn at the hands of the current Spanish, European and world champions), the Blues can not only steady this chaos but become competitive again.
