A wholly predictable Champions League final was a wholly appropriate ending to the season
We're well past the point of knowing who's going to win these matches. We now also know exactly how it's going to happen.
Around twenty minutes into last night’s Champions League final, I pointed at the screen and squawked, “I’ve seen this one before”. Because I had. We all have. There came a point in the past at which we stopped thinking, “Who’s going to win this Champions League final?”, and started thinking, “Real Madrid are going to win this Champions League final, but how are they going to do it?” instead. And now we’re through into the next stage of this evolution. Not only do we know who’s going to win, but we also now know exactly how it’s going to happen.
It requires a certain degree of self-delusion to get to this point. You have to disavow the evidence of your own eyes. The team in yellow and black looked like the better team for seventy full minutes. They hit the post. They wasted chances as though chances would keep flowing in perpetuity. All they had to do was keep going and the goal would come.
As for Real Madrid… well, they were doing that thing that they do when they’re not being relentlessly brilliant. The star players under the highest degree of scrutiny seemed to be wilting. Jude Bellingham, about so much had been said before the match, played like a Jude Bellingham look-a-like who’d been parachuted in at the last minute. The attacking parts of the engine looked lost and isolated as Dortmund layered on the pressure.
But the goal didn’t come, and as any fool knows, you have to take your chances when they manifest themselves. Because they will. And we know this because they did. A corner from the left, and one of the smaller players on the pitch, Dani Carvajal, was given just enough space—no more than six inches—for a free header, and that was that. Vinícius added a second nine minutes later, with the closing minutes and stoppage-time being treated as a pre-party by the winners. It was notable that such a high profile game should only have five minutes of stoppage-time added at the end. Everybody knew it was done.
There’s no shame in this, from a Borussia Dortmund perspective. This was their first European final in just over a decade, and this team had hardly been expected to get this far in the first place. There is shame to be had in the sponsorship deal that the club has just signed with an arms manfacturer, but doubtless their supporters will be already planning to make their voices heard over that. But on the pitch, they can end their season with their heads held high at having got this far in the first place. For a team assembled from the spare parts of others, to reach the Champions League final is an achievement.
But this achievement has masked problems at the club this season. Circumstances out of their control have come to mean that their 5th placed Bundesliga finish this season is enough for a return to the Champions League this time around. But 5th place is still 5th place, and while they did finish 16 points ahead of sixth-placed Stuttgart, they were also still ten points short of Bayern Munich and 27 short of shock runaway team of the year Bayer Leverkusen. It’s true to say that no-one was catching Leverkusen this season. Dortmund will certainly be praying that their 2023/24 was a flash in the pan.
Meanwhile back in Madrid, the obvious question is, “Well, where do we go from here?”, to which the obvious answer is the very quick confirmation that Kylian Mbappe will, as has always been just about certain, be going ahead in the next few days. Well, obviously. Where else was he ever going to go? Who else could offer him the money, the 90,000 crowds, the opportunities to build up an obscene haul of medals and trophies?
Of course, this isn’t so much the transfer of a footballer as the acquisition of a big business by an even bigger business, and any lingering sense of romance was squeezed out of it years ago. In 2024, with Real having also won La Liga by ten points and lost just once in 38 league games, and coupled this up by winning the Champions League without losing a game. Indeed, the only team to have beaten Real Madrid this season has been Atletico; once in the league at the end of September and once in January in the Copa Del Rey.
So Real Madrid won 2-0 and are the European champions again. And perhaps that's appropriate for the end of an almost completely predictable season. Manchester City were involved in a Premier League title race that looked closer than it now appears in the mirror. Two huge clubs were in CRISIS all season, yet one of them finished sixth in the Premier League while the other won the FA Cup.
The three promoted teams were relegated back after one season. Two of the three promoted teams are also only back after a year away. The rules of football continue to be tweaked to make the game less appealing to watch than ever, while the scales continue to be tipped in favour of the richest few, to the detriment of just about everybody else.
And against this background of a game that is fundamentally changing into not really being a sport any more, the governing bodies are fighting over the last few nanoseconds available in the calendar, all determined to make sure that they're the ones who profiteering from this brave new world of laughing consumers who swallow the marketing whole, and without doing anything inconvenient like complaining about huge price hikes.
See you in August?
We'll see.