Manchester City vs. Real Madrid is a fight over radically opposed visions of football
For the third season in a row, Real Madrid and Manchester City will meet. It is as though one is Harry Potter and the other Lord Voldemort, living up to the prophecy that “either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives.” Again, the survivor will be the favorite to lift the trophy. The two teams live head and shoulder above the rest of Europe, nay, the world. Only they can defeat one another in this era of European duopoly. But what marks this age is that the two teams are at the pinnacle of their powers with fundamentally opposed paths of becoming superpowers and visions for remaining ones.
If there were a royal court of football, Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Liverpool, and Manchester United would have been its lords, dukes, and barons, however, Real Madrid would be the prince, the heir apparent. You would bet on it to reach the top in the end.
Manchester City is from an entirely different class. It is from the bourgeoisie, the new money club that, no matter how hard it tries, still feels the odd one out even when it wins, even though the aristocracy, with its fancy titles, envies City’s wealth like a hereditary English lord today might covet the bank account of a Londoner businessman. This insecurity was evident when, at the height of the adrenaline rush of a Champions League trophy, Pep Guardiola warned Real Madrid that this might be his team’s first, but they would be coming for Los Blancos’ 14.
There is another way to look at these two clubs: the people against the state. To whom does the game belong, the fans or the owners? That is the question often asked. Manchester City is owned by a state, whereas Real Madrid is fan-owned. This leads to a second question: What is the purpose of a club? For Real Madrid, a non-profit, it is sustainability and victory. For Manchester City, at best, it is profit; at worst, it is politics.
The two different visions manifest themselves everywhere. We see them in management, in branding, on the pitch, and more than anywhere in their coaches.
Rightfully, Guardiola is known as one of the greatest tacticians in history. On the pitch, his team works like a clock. Every player has his instructions and executes them masterfully. It is not that nobody knows what to expect from Manchester City. Quite the opposite. We all know their plan. Just that very few have figured out how to stop the bloody Citizens. It is as though you are in a prison cell, awaiting your execution. You know the date, time, and method that you will befall to. And befalling to it you will. Yes, City is as scary as predetermined death.
When Madrid plays, chaos reigns supreme. It is not execution. It is war. The opponent is a small army going against the mightiest military. You can injure the big dogs. You might even take out a battalion or two. You might cause the enemy even greater injuries and harm. At your best, you will see the enemy on its knees. But the big army always wins.
I cite Guardiola. In contrast, I mention Real Madrid, not its coach, Carlo Ancelotti. Guardiola is the lead character in the movie that the blue Mancunians display. It is his team. For the white mavericks, it is a different story. They won five Champions League titles in nine seasons, including the threepeat, with two different coaches. Each time that a new coach failed, he got the can, and things worked themselves out, nonetheless. Throughout these years, they played all styles of football, defensive, offensive, counterattacking, and so on. Just this season, they have played diamond, double pivot, with wings, and with a four-man linear midfield. Regardless, they have won.
Ancelotti, or the mister, as his players call him, is so successful at the club because he is Guardiola’s opposite. Unlike his nemesis’s well-oiled machine, at Madrid, the viewers can never confidently guess what is about to happen. Over the years, we have seen heat maps with a right wing that is as hot as the Arctic. The left flank instead carried all the offensive weight. The explanation is silly: Rodrygo, the team’s right-winger, is a left-winger. We have also seen Real Madrid hold the ball for the entire game over the weekend, only to sit back and exhaust the opponent for 75 minutes on a Tuesday. We have also seen a team that bombards the opponent from the beginning and wins comfortably. Creativity, technique, physicality, and a tactical mind are virtues abundant in their squad, but versatility is the highest good in this team.
On paper, it makes no sense why a lot of these players are on the same team. For seven years, the two greatest midfielders of all time, the two most press-resistant ones to ever touch the grass, stood ahead of a defensive midfielder whose on-the-ball talent made the fans skip a heartbeat or two in every game. Its two center-backs, Sergio Ramos and Pepe, were in a rush to attack the ball without the guarantee of the other one’s minding the gap. The team had no tactical identity, either, from anti-football to possession, we saw it all. It still does not; controlling the game’s tempo or exhausting the opponent, they do both depending on the day. As Jorge Valdano once said, Real Madrid does not have an identity; victory is its imperative. It does not win because of the team’s tactical acumen or its harmonious squad planning; it wins because of the players’ talents, and because it must.
Real Madrid’s sporting vision in its recruitment reflects this anti-identity paradigm. Some recruitments are physical and rely on their speed and strength, while others are more technical who prefer to carry the ball or distribute it. Talent talks. If a player is the best in his position, then, he will be welcomed at Real Madrid. The coach will figure out how to make it work. And if the coach can’t, the club management will find someone who will.
Across the sea in England, Guardiola has filled his super team with players best capable of playing his brand of football. It is not good enough to be the best. It matters that you are a good fit. Possibly Guardiola’s most important player, Rodri hardly puts “defensive” in “defensive midfielder.” But as we saw earlier in the season, despite his defensive shortcomings, his team becomes paralyzed without him because he is simply the best on-the-ball player in his position, even better in positioning.
Ancelotti is often characterized as tactically poor. Certainly, his tactical understanding of the game is on an elite level else he would not be where he is, but also, he is not on par with the greatest tactical minds of this era. Because he’s a strategist.
In military terms, tactics are what happens on the battlefield, while strategy is about ways and means through the entire war, coordinating resources intelligently to gain an advantage. Tactics are more complex and consist of many parts. Strategies should be simple with few, broad objectives.
Real Madrid fills its team with the greatest talents in the world who can display unearthly powers on the pitch. They are not simply brilliant on the ball but also extremely intelligent in reading the game. Unlike in most teams, the Real Madrid coach’s job is not to give them instructions before the match. His job is to identify the strengths of his players and the weaknesses of the opponent. As a war philosopher once observed, know yourself and know your enemy, and you will not be defeated in a thousand battles. To this effect, the ideal club coach is tasked with figuring out how his players can best exploit those shortcomings and leaving the details to his students.
In 2022, Ancelotti brilliantly identified that City’s excessive pressing would leave them too exhausted to catch up with the dynamism of his team’s physical players, and he was right. A year later, like most generals, he was still fighting the last war, and it came at a humiliating price. Now, the strategist meets the tactician again.
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This year, again, Real Madrid will make a case for talent, while Manchester City will represent tactics. But they will also fight a class war and a political war at once. Manchester City’s identity is modernity. Like a skyscraper in New York City, the Citizens represent wealth and shiny objects. And they are the state. They are the proof that money can buy success and power. Since 2016, they have spent more than €850 million net to build their team. That number for Real Madrid is €100 million. Like the old stone building that has survived millennia of war, disaster, and ruins, Real Madrid looks to its past as a mark that it is the one constant in world football. It is the royalty that stands on the back of a loving people—its people, the Madridismo. The players are gentle princes, endowed with great talents, left in the wild of a soccer pitch against their foes. Only the strong survive. The weak will be eaten by wolves—or sold to a Premier League team like Chelsea or Arsenal.
This natural selection policy explains the miracle of the remontada season. When all hope was lost at minute 89, there was hope. During his postgame press conference, Guardiola said that they had a foot in the final, but, suddenly, it was all lost within a minute. Except that it was not. There were 30 minutes of extra time left. But Guardiola’s admission makes it clear that the mental strength of a team that staged a one-minute, two-goal comeback dwarfs that of a team that had accepted defeat when the game was still a draw.
The Paramount+ commentator’s words after Rodrygo’s second goal put it best:
They do things on the edge. They live with the improbable. They demand of themselves. They are just not normal.
They are not normal because they are from the galaxies.
The Citizens are from the Earth, and the Galacticos are from the skies, super men against Supermen. Like all cities, the English stand on the foundation of their wealth, and the Spaniards are an inexplicable phenomenon that football scientists can only theorize about from afar as astronomists do about stars. And they meet again because only they can defeat each other.
After eight years at the helm, Pep Guardiola has made a truly invincible team. To repeat his last year’s success, he must again get past Real Madrid, the inevitable success story.
What happens when an unstoppable force impacts an immovable object?
