Catalan Among The Pigeons

Barring two footballing earthquakes, we’re now looking at the mouth-watering vista of a Manchester United vs. Barcelona final. It doesn’t get much better. United, freshly chastened after their FA Cup humiliation, looked a mighty force against an admittedly pretty shocking Schalke side who couldn’t have complained if they’d lost by five or six, in what must have been the least satisfying Champions League semi-final in living memory.

The following night, Real Madrid and Barcelona squared off in a clash so violent, niggly and ill-tempered it came close to resembling a re-enactment of the Spanish Civil War, or even provoking a sequel. You could feel the Bernabeu crackling with malevolence from your living-room, with the levels of hostility and rancour going through the roof. Inevitably, Real were widely painted as the aggressors. Certainly, Jose Mourinho’s post-match behaviour was atrocious, a transparent attempt to deflect attention from his own team’s shortcomings on the night. More generally, it cannot be denied that among non-Spanish audiences, Real tend to lose the popularity beauty-contest between the pair, a phenomenon which Mourinho’s antics may serve to intensify even further. They have never really managed to live down their association with General Franco, while Barca’s history strikes all the right romantic rebel notes. But (speaking as someone who frankly adores both clubs and both cities) it has to be said that Barca weren’t exactly blameless. This business of crying foul every thirty seconds, exaggerating the effects of tackles, berating the referee at every turn while yelping for cards and basically telling him how to do his job, is the only stain on a Barcelona side which is in the process of rapidly establishing itself as, very possibly, the best team we’ve ever seen.
The accolade may be a little premature, since they still have to negotiate a second leg (at the time of writing) and then account for the Red Devils, but the evidence has mounted week after week that something absolutely astonishing is going on in the Catalan capital. Leo Messi’s second goal was absolutely out of this world, straight out of the Maradona playbook. You might call it a rare thing of beauty, but you would be wrong about the rarity: he’s been doing this game after game for at least two years now. The strike was his 52nd of the season, an utterly unbelievable strike rate - and at least a dozen of them have been breathtaking solo efforts of the highest order. It has reached the point where every time he gets the ball, you half-expect him to pull off something sensational. Journalists are rapidly running out of superlatives to convey the full extent of the diminutive Argie’s magnificence. But this is hardly a one-man show: with the likes of Xavi, Iniesta and David Villa for company, Barcelona right now are playing football from another planet. Indeed, now seems an opportune time to examine where they stand in the pecking order of all-time great club teams. Since I have no memory of football before about 1982, only teams from the last three decades are eligible for consideration.
Throughout the ‘80s, it often appeared that Liverpool were an irresistible force, an impression confirmed when they lifted the European Cup in 1984. Heysel happened the next year, and there is absolutely no way of knowing whether they’d have added to their tally if English clubs hadn’t been evicted from Europe. I would speculate that the 1988 vintage, whose subs’ bench would have beaten everyone else in England with their eyes closed, would have had at least a fair chance of conquering the continent. Then again, they were also capable of being mugged by Wimbledon, a thoroughly horrible bunch who with all due respect do not make any short-list of the Greatest Teams Ever, unless a propensity for violent psychotic bloodlust is deemed to be the main criterion, in which case they will always be the true immortals beyond compare.
The Ajax side of the mid-’90s was, briefly and brilliantly, a spell-binding starburst of creative vibrancy and athletic potency, before the squad’s enforced obliteration (courtesy of the Bosman ruling, which destroyed football’s competitive balance permanently and irrevocably) scattered their players to the four winds. The Real Madrid of the early Noughties - the first collection of Galacticos, with Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo, Raul and friends - were also wondrous to behold, never more so than when they dismantled United over two legs of utterly enthralling football in the 2003 Champions League. But they were eventually undermined by compulsive meddling from the club hierarchy, precipitating their decline, which can probably be traced to the dismissal of Vicente Del Bosque as manager in the summer of 2003. The bushy-’tached Spaniard was the original architect of Real’s success - his capture of the World Cup with Spain last summer added further mystique to the growing legend - and Real have still yet to truly recover from the damage inflicted by his senseless sacking and the hierarchy’s lopsided policy of recruiting the biggest names with no apparent regard for the subtleties of squad balance. Nor is there any evidence that they’ve learned from their mistakes. And Mourinho will move on within weeks, I don’t doubt.
In all honesty, no English club from the last couple of decades really stakes a claim. Arsenal’s ‘Invincibles’, and the profoundly dull Chelsea crew who dethroned them, never really stepped up to the European stage. That was left to a Liverpool side in 2005 whose nearest and dearest surely wouldn’t attempt to seriously argue that they were genuinely the best team in Europe. Man United in ‘99 had unquenchable team spirit, four fine strikers and a great midfield, but they also got preposterously lucky - never more so than in the final against Bayern, when it seemed the entire occasion had passed them by - and, judged by the highest standards, they probably fall a little short.
In my living memory, perhaps the only team to surpass the present-day Barca as a force was the AC Milan of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The earlier incarnation of that team, with Gullit, Rijkaard and van Basten, could be truly mesmerising in full flight. By contrast, their ‘90s successors were a pretty unlovable crew, built on an edifice of Silvio Berlusconi’s billions and Fabio Capello’s ruthlessly unromantic footballing worldview, winning 1-0 more often than not with no apparent intention of scoring a second. The Tassotti-Maldini-Costacurta-Baresi back four may never be bettered in terms of pure effectiveness, but you couldn’t possibly be bewitched or enchanted by the football they produced. Nonetheless, if aesthetic appeal is deemed irrelevant - and football is, fundamentally, always about the results - we can probably conclude that AC remain, for now, the finest team in modern history. For Barca to surpass them, they will need to add to their tally of two Champions League triumphs (2006 and 2009). Which brings us to the question of whether they will finish the job, a puzzle to which I will return in a couple of weeks.