Opinions on the new Champions League format range from “look, it’s not like the old group stages were any good” to “this is the death of football”, but Europe’s top competition did a great job of setting up Saturday night’s Clasico at the Bernabéu between Real Madrid and Barcelona.
Bayern Munich have often proved Barcelona’s nemesis in Europe but in midweek the Catalans smashed them 4-1, while for their part Madrid crushed Dortmund 5-2, having been 2-0 down after an hour.
Some might complain that ideally top-level football should feel a little bit less like pro wrestling; it shouldn’t be that easy for Madrid to score five in half an hour against one of the top teams in Germany.
But this sort of thing has come to feel normal for Madrid in their latest imperial Galactico phase, and they went into Saturday’s match unbeaten in 42 league games, one short of the Liga record of 43, set by Barcelona in the Messi-Suarez era.
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Barcelona under Hansi Flick have been playing an extremely aggressive offside trap, catching opponents offside far more than any other team in the top five leagues.
Carlo Ancelotti decided to hit them at their strongest point. Madrid would attack the enormous space behind Barcelona’s high line with the two most vaunted fast attackers in world football: Kylian Mbappé and Vinicius Junior up front in a 4-4-2.
At Madrid it is said that the only person in the hierarchy who was convinced they should sign Kylian Mbappé was the club president, Florentino Perez. Others discreetly pointed out that Madrid’s best attacking player was Vini Jr, essentially a Brazilian Mbappé. Both Mbappé and Vinicius are top players – but how do you fit them together in the same team? Wouldn’t it be better to sign complementary players rather than near-identical ones who want to play in the same position off the left side of attack and are ultimately destined to become rivals?
The arguments were clear and logical, but Madrid is a dictatorship posing as a democracy. Perez is the only person whose voice really matters, and so Mbappé arrived at Madrid in the summer.
Barcelona, playing 4-3-3 as always, had some dangerous wingers of their own in the prodigious Lamine Yamal and the rejuvenated Raphinha.
In the first half the game raged from end to end, with both sides trying to hit their fast attackers with long balls and almost none of the play going through midfield.
The furious tempo was a welcome stylistic change from the tedious coachball that has lately been dominating the Premier League. The biggest cheers from the crowd at the Emirates for Arsenal v Liverpool came when either team won a free kick in a potentially dangerous area; these are the moments the set-piece coaches have worked towards all week.
Managers have always been respected more in England than in Spain and this remains true even now that the managers have shrunk into first-team coaches. In recent years, as expanding club bureaucracies have stripped them of many of the administrative and decision-making powers they used to wield, it feels as though coaches are trying to exert greater and greater control over what actually happens out on the field. Choreography has driven out spontaneity.
In La Liga, where coaches are less powerful and more disposable, it’s still more of a players’ game. Nowhere is this more true than at Madrid, where Perez believes that football is a game of superheroes.
And so, on Saturday night, they flocked to the Bernabéu to see Barcelona destroyed by Mbappé, the presidential protege and aspiring superhero. Instead they witnessed the worst night of Mbappe’s club career. Madrid lost 4-0 and Mbappé made a fool of himself by being caught offside eight times.
It’s hard to overstate how humiliating this is for any striker, let alone a player of Mbappé's standing. Opta reported that it was the most any player had been offside in a La Liga match for 15 years. According to L’Equipe, it was the most offsides by a single player in any match in the top five European leagues in the last eight seasons.
Only three other players in La Liga have been called offside as many as eight times in the entire season so far – this at a point when teams have played 10 or 11 matches.
Likewise, only three Premier League players have been offside eight or more times since the season began in August. Those players are Jamie Vardy, Dominic Calvert Lewin and Chris Wood, who also jointly-holds (with Son Heung-min) the Premier League record for most offsides in a single game – with six.
Even Darwin Nuñez, celebrated for his blithe indifference to the concept of offside, has never managed more than five in a single match for Liverpool.
Mbappé was offside six times in the first half, twice in the second. The second offside was a very close call and for the third and eighth, he was let down by team-mates delaying the pass.
But most of the time the problem was Mbappé himself, jumping the gun, making his burst too early. Quite why the fastest player on the pitch felt he had to keep stealing a yard was anyone’s guess. The embarrassment was exacerbated by the fact that he was consistently getting foxed by the positioning of his 17-year old opponent, Pau Cubarsí.
You could say Mbappé was guilty of being too eager – but there were also moments of sheer laziness, when he was called offside after failing to make the effort to get himself onside at any point in the move.
He might have redeemed himself by scoring one of the four chances that fell to him after he actually managed to stay onside – but twice he failed to control the pass, and twice he shot at the keeper after being put through.
In the meantime, Robert Lewandowski scored twice, the first goal demonstrating how to break an offside trap. Lamine Yamal underlined his status as the most exciting young player in the game with a spectacular third, and Raphinha contemptuously lobbed Madrid’s keeper Andriy Lunin for the fourth goal in the closing minutes.
The reverberations of Mbappé's horror show will be significant. Many Madrid fans were against the idea of signing him to begin with, unable to forget the indignation they felt when he turned Madrid down to renew with PSG in 2022. They now ask: “This is what we waited for?”
Mbappé might let it be known that, if Madrid want to see him at his best, they should use him in his best position. What that might mean for Vinicius is not his concern.
But however that plays out, Saturday was a great night for La Liga. It looks as though its two great clubs are returning to their core identities: Madrid creating the drama, while Barcelona play the football.
