The difference between success and glory is both a fine semantic line and an insurmountable chasm.
Success is what most football clubs are after and what a few football clubs even manage to achieve. It is ephemeral, fits neatly into newspaper reports and statistical breakdowns, and brings with it widespread approval and a series of monetary rewards. Success is the accumulation of goals, points and trophies, for the sake of goals, points and trophies.
Glory, on the significant other hand, often borrows some of the same gestures as success, but remains separate in crucial ways. The points, goals and trophies are only part of the journey with glory. They all have to form a part of the creation of something more: Great beauty (Kaka’s thigh-control-then-volley against Deportivo La Coruna in 2004) or surges of pride (France’s World Cup moment in 1998, when a football team suckered a divided country into coming together).
Glory is when winning or losing means something more than merely winning or losing: where “the way” it’s done matters, as do “the why” and “the who,” not just “the what” and “how much.”
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Days on from a troublingly dull draw versus Barcelona which demonstrated that it is at least as good as a bad version of the Catalan club, it’s becoming clear that Atlético Madrid is at the very least playing around with the idea of glory. It has acquired the scent, tasted the edges, or in the style of the great Shia Labeouf, lifted the concept from someone else and begun using it as if it is its own.
If Atlético beats Real Madrid and Barcelona—the twin peaks of footballing badness, now smuggling in extra corporate messages underneath their shirts—to the La Liga title, then the win might well involve some glory.
Nicking the Spanish league title from two of the richest teams the world has ever seen, while maintaining the debilitating pattern of selling off its best player every summer (via financial coercion), would definitely mean more than winning for its own sake. It would also mean: outmanoeuvring the odds, demonstrating the fallibility of the “money = strength” formula, humiliating the overly wealthy and powerful, and reminding us all of the kind of magical effect that is collective strength, lifting individuals beyond that which they really should be capable of.
The last one in that list is especially striking. Diego Simeone—the fiercest manager to hit the European big time since Jose Mourinho—has come up with a team which can afford to lose Radamel Falcao in the summer and still be level on points with Barcelona in the winter.
When everyone tries to figure out how he’s done it, they come up with phrases like “hunting in packs”—specifically, in fact, that phrase “hunting in packs.” The explanation behind the figurative language being—almost mundanely—that he’s made his players work together really, really well: they press hard for and with each other, then they win, and it’s amazing to watch.
The power of the collective transforms the individual into something more as players such as Diego Costa, at the age of 25, suddenly start being bracketed as superhuman talents. What a cool message to send out to a footballing world where the individual rules—Madrid signing Gareth Bale in the summer, Barca signing Neymar—and one it’s not necessarily ready to receive either, given that its first response was just to try and sign Costa for big money. Either way, the existence of that message suggests Atlético means something more than winning for its own sake.
With the creation of a team that is greater than the sum of its parts, Simeone has performed a feat of magnificence, whether his team wins in the end or not. Doing it your own way, creating it yourself rather than artificially implanting it, using brains rather than finance: it all makes for a glorious victory or a glorious defeat. Competing against sides drenched in money—and with it the notion of quantitative success as the definitive end-point—Atlético’s collective endeavour has more to it.
This isn’t to say there aren’t complaints and doubts about it because there are always complaints and doubts, always and forever. There’s the diving, and the fact that Atlético has spent money, albeit a large part reinvesting what it has had taken out.
But come on now, there is some romance, some glory, around a team which has team spirit as its greatest resource fighting off Barcelona and Real Madrid towards a La Liga title. It’d be good if they won it. No, it’d be glorious.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter.