Manchester City’s gripping system failure offers glimmer of hope to others

Madrid being cast as underdogs is a grotesque measure of where we are but absorbing tie was a telling clash of contrastsIt turns out Pep Guardiola was right after all. Manchester City’s pursuit of the double-treble will now remain “a hypothetical dream”.

City are by their own accounts the most financially powerful club in world football. Vast dumps of cash have been thrown at this thing, billionaire will-to-power applied to football’s laughably inadequate governance. This is sport as foreign policy, backed by the laughable fiction that in doing so the ruling monarchy of Abu Dhabi is breaking open a cartel, sticking up for the little guy, outsiders against the overclass and all the rest of it.

But there is also a tactical and textural side to this. Why should Real Madrid chasing to the point of exhaustion before winning with the final kick feel like a strange kind of sporting beauty? What is it in the spectacle of City’s brilliantly grooved machine running up against its own limits that feels so moreish?

It is easy to dismiss the dualism in this model. Every system will be mixed to some degree. Think too hard about it and these concepts seem to evaporate a little. But there was no doubt City versus Madrid presented a powerful and absorbing contrast. Even in defence the Madrid players organise themselves on the hoof to some degree. In attack they trust their own style, which is more inventive, spontaneous and personality-based.Jude Bellingham has described it as playing off the cuff.

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