APRIL 21 — Pep Guardiola made an interesting point this week, celebrating Manchester City’s triumph in the English Premier League by arguing that a league title is more significant than a knockout tournament like the Champions League.
His reasoning is perfectly logical: A league campaign is played over 38 games and nine months, and therefore provides an extended test of a team against a wide variety of opposition and in all sorts of playing conditions, having to cope with injuries, suspensions and losses of form.
A cup competition, however, only requires everything to fall in the right place on a much smaller number of occasions — the winning team in this season’s Champions League, for example, will have only played 13 games by the time they win the competition.
Any statistician will tell you that Guardiola’s logic is perfectly right. To make a meaningful conclusion, it is necessary to increase the sample size to ensure that the results are indicative of a wider trend rather than a few short-term coincidences and circumstances.
Nevertheless, it’s difficult to escape the intuitive conclusion that the most important and prestigious tournaments in the football calendar are the Champions League and, at international level, the World Cup.
Think about it by allowing yourself to lapse into fantasy: Would you prefer to score the winning goal in a game which secures your team the Premier League title, or the winning goal in the World Cup Final?
I think it’s safe to say that most people would choose the glamour and excitement of the latter, precisely because the greatest flaw of knockout tournaments is also their greatest strength: The immediacy and drama of a one-off game, as opposed to a long and gruelling campaign where an accumulation of results, rather than any one result in particular, proves decisive.
Some teams are more suited to the demands of knockout games than league competitions, and the clearest example of that right now is Real Madrid.
In La Liga, Zinedine Zidane’s team have suffered a pretty awful campaign. Following Wednesday night’s 1-1 draw with lowly Athletic Bilbao they are 15 points behind leaders Barcelona, having never mounted a serious title challenge at any stage.
But in the Champions League they have overcome Paris St Germain and Juventus to book a date with Bayern Munich in the semi-finals, putting them on track to secure their third consecutive European crown and their fourth in the last five seasons — and that, there can be no doubt whatsoever, would be an incredible achievement.
This has happened because Real, as a collective unit, are not an especially good team. They have no settled shape or structure, with Zidane fluctuating pretty much every game from one formation to another with a different batch of personnel, providing little room for consistency in approach or performance.
This fairly haphazard approach means that Real are liable to producing poor performances, meaning they regularly drop points in the league against teams they should be beating.
On the plus side, however, it means they can adopt a variety of different systems and strategies depending on the demands on the individual game. And due to the individual quality of their players, when they get it right they are very difficult to stop.
In considering this, it’s important to note that Real’s Champions League campaign, even though it has taken them to the semi-finals, has been far from flawless. They were absolutely battered at Tottenham in the group stage, fortunate to escape with only a 3-1 defeat, and then — in the quarter-finals — losing 3-1 at home to Juventus but still advancing on aggregate thanks to a 3-0 victory in Italy in the first leg (one of their on-nights).
Their rivals Barcelona, meanwhile, have committed themselves to showing greater consistency on a week by week basis, establishing a runaway lead in La Liga by following a clearly defined and disciplined playing structure.
The demands of doing so, however, have sapped their collective energy after eight months of continual intense effort — as opposed to Real, who only really “turn up” to one game in three or four.
Barcelona, therefore, have become vulnerable in these latter stages of the season, and when an opponent — like Roma in the Champions League quarter-final — works out how to counteract their playing style, they are left with few alternative ways of being successful.
So is Guardiola right? Would you rather win the league title, like his Manchester City team and Barcelona, or have a decidedly ordinary league campaign but still win the Champions League, like Real Madrid?
The answer to that can only be personal, but I’d side with Guardiola. For me, I’d much prefer my team to be consistently strong over a long period of time, rather than showing up for the big games but generally failing to reach their potential. What about you?
*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
