Barcelona fans in the Camp Nou could have been applauding for either of two reasons this past Saturday.
Either they recognised the scale of Atletico Madrid’s achievement in beating both their team and Real Madrid to the La Liga title—with a quarter of their budgets over a 38 game league season. Or they appreciated the glorious nature of how it had been done—with real, genuine heart, the whole way through. Both are correct answers.
“It’s one of the loveliest things that you can experience in football,” Atletico manager Diego Simeone said of the ovation his team received. It most definitely was. And to get all sentimental, in the summer afternoon sun it felt like a rare moment of equilibrium in the footballing universe, where everyone agreed that the team that did win was the team that was right to have won.
Saturday programming alert: Watch Real Madrid vs. Atletico Madrid in the UEFA Champions League final from Lisbon’s Estádio da Luz live on all four main Sportsnet channels. Our coverage begins with the pre-game show starting at 2 pm ET before kickoff at 2:45 pm ET. | Sportsnet World Online | TV schedule
And yet this was all despite the fact that victory had seemed so improbable for so long. The intensity that it took to outlast Barca and Real just doesn’t fit into normal ways of thinking, hence it hasn’t happened once in Spain over the last ten years.
For Atletico to do what it did this past weekend obviously required huge amounts of skill and focus—you don’t get close to winning a league title without that stuff in substantial quantities. But to pull itself back from a goal down away at Camp Nou, with Diego Costa and Arda Turan dragged off in tears, and to then hold off players such as Lionel Messi and Andres Iniesta, exemplified a season that’s been about working harder and wanting to win more than anyone else. What’s more, Atletico did it over and over again during the La Liga season, in a manner that had you reckoning “surely they can’t keep running like this?” every game, only to then be proven wrong, every game.
Magnificent defiance, that’s what this has been. The improbable made possible via wanting it to happen so badly. Amongst some great, clever football, there’ve been knockbacks and comebacks and one-goal wins that suggest every inch of potential has been maximised. Simeone has managed to get his players riled up. They ran and ran and ran all season for their manager and themselves and then, finally they won La Liga with a second-half comeback that came good as a perfect totem for the absolute power of absolute shared belief in trying really, really hard.
What an ending! Only, now they go again. Because while Atletico has fully seen off Barcelona, a meeting with Real Madrid in Saturday’s UEFA Champions League final beckons, in case you’ve forgotten.
Maybe only an all-Madrid European Cup final could feel like a justifiable follow-up to that league denouement, and here it happens to be. It’s both a shame and a delight. But the fact remains: The possibility of a league and European Cup double for Atletico, completed by beating its biggest rivals—local and symbolic – is equivalent, in satisfaction terms, to having the chance of popping all of the bubble wrap in the world simultaneously.
These teams are brilliantly opposed in every direction.
Real has all of the money and all of talent it wants with Ronaldo on one wing and Gareth Bale on the other. At times, these players and this club feel supra-human. Whereas Simeone has built his team to be exactly human, to work hard for each other, to win most of all for “the people” as he keeps on saying. The talk isn’t of “world-class” and “giving 110 percent”—it’s of working within the usual physical boundaries, but getting those people to come out with unusual results. Real is “them,” Atletico is “us” doing the best we can.
Despite that kind of talk, it’s actually Real that feels like the fanatic in this. Its self-confessed obsessive pursuit of La Decima—the tenth crown to add to the pile—for none other than its own sake contrasts with Simeone’s pitch. When he brought out his entire backroom staff after the game on Saturday and said “I want to share this moment with my people” it felt like genuine appreciation of a group effort, the likes of which you can’t get a hold of without a decent sense of perspective.
And when he added “I would say this means something for everyone; it means that you can win in different ways,” it tuned in to what he’s said all season about how his team lets people glimpse a world where anything’s possible, in a country and an economic reality that can make that seem far off. He’s absolutely engrossed in what he’s doing, but he seems also to be able to see outside of it, which a fanatic like Real doesn’t.
It is easy, admittedly, to start seeing this as Goodies (Atletico) vs. Baddies (Real).
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That’s never going to be entirely fair, even if it is entirely tempting, but the point is the (real or imagined) opposition between the two sets up a great final. The sense of an inherently huge meeting being used to settle an inherently huge disagreement gives this year’s European Cup final a chance to feel like it means something on top of being an amazing spectacle—even if meaning is always tricky to sustain once you look into it. At its most heightened, you’re watching to see if the humans or the elites win; the goodies or the baddies, with the potential for Atletico to create another one of those moments of perfect equilibrium at the end of it all.
Atletico’s season, though, is a great story however it ends Saturday in Lisbon. You don’t get applauded off at Camp Nou by fans whose hearts you’ve broken without providing a compelling narrative about why you deserved to be the ones to do it. Trying really, really hard, over and over again and getting this close to winning La Liga and the European Cup is exactly that. It’s been pretty amazing to watch.
The only shame is that these existing and potential moments of equilibrium probably can’t happen again. After the Lisbon final, win or lose, this Atletico team will probably be pulled apart by clubs with enough money to pull really, really hard. Courtois, Koke and Costa might all go. Because reality always intervenes at the end of the story, doesn’t?
As far as predicting the outcome of Saturday’s final, I’ve got another quote from Simeone to do it for me: “Sometimes it’s not the better team that wins, but the team that’s more convinced.”
Well, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a team more convinced than Atletico Madrid under Diego Simeone, so that’s who I’m hoping will win. Sorry, did I say hoping? Yes, I meant hoping.
Ethan Dean Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter.