Everywhere you look, there are brilliant stories in this season championship Quarterfinals.
Take Benficawho recently moved to four players who now play for other clubs in the last eight of the league for more than 350 million euros — Joao Felix (126 million euros for Atletico Madrid), Enzo Fernandez (121 million euros for Chelsea), Ederson (40 million euros for Man City) and Ruben Dias (68 million euros) – and have not reached the semi-finals of the Champions League in 33 years, but here they are on the verge of achieving one if they can beat Inter Milan.
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Or is there the fact that we have three Series A the clubs reached the quarterfinals for the first time in 17 years; if you’re old enough, you’ll swoon at the idea. There was a time when Italian football had European competition. This is a renaissance after some dark times.
Among them, Naples, who face Serie A rivals AC Milan. In Neapolitan history, the diehard fans of Diego Maradona’s former club have never seen their side go this far in the European Cup or the Champions League. But, let’s not forget, they also haven’t seen Napoli become Italian champions since 1990: something about to be remedied and in dramatic style.
Pep Guardiola can easily catch your eye City of Manchester back project Bayern Munich, where he successfully coached on the domestic front but never helped them win the Champions League they coveted. He won everything else while he was there, changing the ideology of the club, getting excited about his football – but still leaving behind some extremely hungry traditionalists. old Bayern style, arrogant “power-fussball” than anything so beautiful and geometric.
That the draw pits new Bayern manager Thomas Tuchel against Guardiola added sauce to the stew. Friends, of some kind, are almost eternal rivals, whether in Borussia Dortmund and Bayern or later Chelsea and City, Tuchel was the smart boy with whom Guardiola exchanged notes – until the German stole his homework, transformed himself into Guardiola-kryptonite and famously beat the Catalans. in the final. Champions League Final 2021.
But forgive me for trying to convince you that Real Madrid versus Chelsea on Wednesday were every bit as fascinating, as idiosyncratic as any of the other three.
Chelsea is the club that has looked at almost a quarter of a century of Real Madrid president Florentino Perez.”Galaxy” policy (signing the best players, of all ages; hiring the best coaches; impatiently waiting for success before repeating the formula) and has made it a mess padded.
It was as if their multinational bosses – Todd Boehly, Behdad Eghbali, Jose E. Feliciano and Mark Walter – had somehow grasped the Perez blueprint that has brought Madrid 33 titles since 2000. (including 6 Champions League titles and 5 Club World Cup titles). spill a few glasses of cheap champagne on them, blow dry the wet pages with a hair dryer, turn them upside down and read backwards.
Since Boehly & Co. took over Chelsea last May, they: spent more than 600 million euros on players until the squad became bloated; hire three different managers; hire football co-directors (those who have a technical director on them); important lessons learned in former executives Marina Granovskaia and Petr Cech; and sank to 12 points above Premier Leaguerelegation area.
Their Galaxy Equivalent: Felix, Fernandez, Mykhailo Mudryk And Raheem Sterling – no one is a striker, something Chelsea desperately lacks and has been able to do all season. Unable to explain.
This team, now managed by club legend Frank Lampard again until the summer after Graham Potter was sacked, they were scoring less than one goal per game in the Premier League. Only six teams have less.
What the Champions League draw has done, perhaps unfairly, has brought the Chelsea project to the fore.
Madrid have only occasionally hired a director of football in the past 23 years, and on the rare occasions they have hired, one of them is Zinedine Zidane, who knows his job well. In any case, Perez is not going to undermine his own control over the club by hiring two joint directors of football with all the envy, power politics and backing that is sure to cause havoc. go out.
Madrid policy, at the start Galaxy The era of big spending to sign great quality, has brought them the likes of Zidane, Luis Figo, Ronaldo Nazario and David Beckham. All habitual winners and experienced players who brought huge knowledge of how to handle pressure, how to generate income for the club and how to become a star.
Los Blancos’ policy, towards the end of Perez’s reign, was to invest in beating every other European competitor to attract elite young talent such as Vinicius Jr. (45 million euros), Rodrigo (45 million euros), Fede Valverde (6 million euros), Eduardo Camavinga (31 million euros), Aurelien Tchouameni (80 million euros) and Eder Militao (€50 million), all of whom signed in their teens or early 20s at the latest.
Those six players – who will play a key role when Madrid WILL knock Chelsea out of their last remaining competition this season and deny them the chance to play in next year’s Champions League – have moved to Madrid for a fee. only a third of what Boehly, Eghbali & Co. spent since June.
There is clear evidence of the business and business excellence of the owners who purchased Chelsea. In their previous lives, that is. It can be reasonably deduced that, with time and rapid absorption of the harsh lessons they have learned over the past few months (and potentially learned at the hands of the defending champions Spain, Spain, Europe and the world), the Blues can not only stabilize this chaos but become competitive.
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Why Real Madrid vs Chelsea will be an ‘attractive’ UCL quarter-final
Gab Marcotti and Julien Laurens preview the Champions League quarter-final between Real Madrid and Chelsea.
The strange thing is that while Boehly and Eghbali in particular, have spent so much time acquiring clubs and cherishing ambitions to spend huge sums to attract some of the best young football talent, they don’t seem to have done a case study on Perez. Madrid and how it successfully applied the shock and awe tactic of adding a host of world-class talent and an outstanding coach to an already well-established squad.
There’s so much to learn: good trials, bad trials, failures, essential fundamentals, philosophies of success, which, considering Boehly first tried to buy Chelsea four years ago, have could have been copied and pasted from their European rivals so that the eventual acquisition and takeover didn’t look like this bad, bad imitation of a Galaxy project.
Am I being too strict with Chelsea? That is far from my intention. In their overcrowded squad, there are some extremely talented, hungry and potentially important players.
However, they will need to sign a top-class goalkeeper and add a striker with a high scoring ability (probably from RB Leipzig). Christopher Nkunku for more than 60 million euros in the summer). But once an elite coach is hired (former Spain and Barcelona coach Luis Enrique Martinez would be a wise choice) and the team is off the hook, the club can certainly restore credibility, threaten and become an interesting project.
Football is such a idiosyncratic sport that perhaps my offer of this chaotic version of Chelsea could not have produced a typical squad with the right tactics and an elite mentality. times in six days will go straight down my throat. I doubt it, but we’ll see.
However, it is still very strange that Real Madrid is a perfect case study for the new owners of Chelsea to cut and paste, instead they chose the big mistake of reinventing the wheel and , in the early stages, build in a few perforations. while trying to do so.
