“The Champions League is not the consequence of a great work.”
You would imagine that to have been Pep Guardiola’s internal monologue over the past six seasons as his Manchester City side won five Premier League titles but played in just one Champions League final — and lost it.
But the quote actually came from Jose Mourinho, a head coach many view as knockout football personified, in 2014 during his second spell at Chelsea. Mourinho is an eight-time Champions League semi-finalist and two-time winner — with Porto in 2003-04 and Inter Milan six years later.
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“You can win the Champions League in the worst season,” Mourinho went on to say. “A knockout competition is something that always has a big percentage of unpredictability. I (as a coach or manager) can do nothing to win it. I can only work to improve my team all the time.”
Contemporary analysis, of which I am guilty, is hyper-focused on repeatable, predictable patterns, on team shapes and structures. Often, what happens between both penalty boxes is considered more important and controllable than what happens within them, to the extent that managers or coaches now talk about the result and performance as separate entities.
This applies for league formats, where predictive metrics such as expected goals (xG), a measurement of chance quality, are used to forecast long-term performance. Across a 38-game Premier League season, for example, overperforming and underperforming teams can regress and improve, but cup competitions do not offer the same scope. Using such data on a single-game basis is, according to Opta website The Analyst — which collates xG data — “the most common” misuse of the statistic.
This is important because metrics such as xG form, or at least contribute to, the predictive models that successful cup sides often “break”.
Their five Champions League wins in the last nine completed seasons have desensitised many to Real Madrid’s European success, as though they arrive at the stadium on final day without a tactical plan and leave with the trophy a few hours later purely through sheer individual brilliance, the awesome power of Carlo Ancelotti’s eyebrows, and good old pure luck.
Goal prevention and goalscoring are becoming forgotten skills, and are wrongly undervalued when it comes to analysing teams such as Real Madrid.
Last season, their No 9 Karim Benzema (15) was the top scorer in the Champions League and their goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois (4.6) prevented the most additional goals of any goalkeeper (based on the quality of shots faced, according to xG data.) His nine saves against Liverpool were the most in a single Champions League final (albeit data on that has only been kept since 2003-04).
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Where league performance is about sustainability, successful cup teams or players can produce one-off, match-winning performances.
Cup and league successes become self-fulfilling prophecies — teams at the top of the league prioritise those matches and rotate in their cup games, and vice versa.
Sevilla have won the Europa League a record seven times in 17 years, having beaten Mourinho’s Roma in this season’s final. “Within the club, this history is very present — they make you very aware of it,” said Sevilla midfielder Ivan Rakitic. “We have made it so that nobody loves this competition like us.”
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Football can learn from cricket, where Twenty20, one-day internationals and Test matches are viewed as separate disciplines. The distinction is natural, due to their different formats (largely involving the numbers of overs bowled and innings played), the type of balls used and fielding requirements.
Yet the strategies are different, many international players are picked for some formats and not others, and, as Nathan Leamon and Ben Jones write in their 2020 book Hitting Against The Spin, the statistical predictors of success are different across fielding, batting and bowling.
Critiques of cup teams are inherently tied to league success and form, but the bar for winning the Premier League has risen.
In its first nine seasons of operating as a 20-team division, the winners averaged almost 83 points. It has been 94 over the last seven. As Arsenal have just learned, despite winning four FA Cup finals since 2014, anything less than perfection and relentlessly winning is not enough if you want to finish top of the Premier League.
Unless they have had to go through the summer pre-qualifying rounds or the February play-offs, Champions League and Europa League-winning teams play 13 games, including the final. Six of those are in two-legged knockout ties, where the primary focus is on not losing.
Bayern Munich 2019-20 are the only Champions League winners to end the tournament with a perfect record, yet even that has an asterisk next to it because it was the COVID-19 pandemic-affected season that featured single-leg knockout ties from the quarter-finals on (so they played 11 matches) and finished behind closed doors.
Analyse recent Champions League and Europa League winners, and the same threads present themselves:
- A clear playing identity and predictable tactical set-up — Real Madrid, Chelsea, Eintracht Frankfurt
- Built on a strong defensive base, not necessarily high-possession teams — Chelsea, Frankfurt
- Match-winners at both ends of the pitch (goalkeepers and No 9) — Real Madrid, Bayern Munich
- Capable of pulling off outstanding comebacks in ties — Liverpool, Real Madrid
- On average, these teams were not young and often older — Sevilla
Mourinho stated that Ajax would “watch the final on television with their philosophy” after the Dutch side dramatically lost a Champions League semi-final second leg at home to Tottenham Hotspur in 2019.
But what he added is worth reflecting on.
“For special matches, you need sometimes not to be tied to your philosophy,” Mourinho said, after watching Ajax lose 3-2 to Spurs on aggregate, courtesy of Lucas Moura’s late goal, having led 3-0 at half-time of that second leg. “They played like it was a group-phase game, or one more game in their own league.”
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Frankfurt won the 2021-22 Europa League with a 3-4-3 formation, defending in a 5-4-1, attacking through crosses and counter-attacks with a minority share of possession — yet they were just the second Europa League team ever to score in all 13 games.
Their tactical approach remained the same this season and they reached the Champions League last-16 on their debut in that competition, while also making the German Cup final, but the club have just one top-five Bundesliga finish in the past 10 seasons.
Chelsea’s 2020-21 Champions League triumph owed much to their pragmatism, with Thomas Tuchel a mid-season replacement for head coach Frank Lampard. Chelsea lifted the trophy in Tuchel’s 30th game across all competitions, their back five keeping 19 clean sheets and conceding just 16 goals in those matches.
Manchester City’s success this season is tied to a stronger defensive base.
“The problem is not scoring goals,” Guardiola said in March after they put seven past visitors RB Leipzig to advance to the Champions League quarter-finals. “The problem is that we conceded stupid goals in the past. We gift them. A lot of time we were out (of the competition) because we conceded a lot. Right now, these guys defend really well.”
This season, City have conceded five goals in 12 Champions League games — their fewest goals conceded and most clean sheets (seven) since they were 2020-21 finalists (also five goals against with eight clean sheets in 13 matches).
Inter Milan, City’s Champions League final opponents on Saturday, have done the domestic cup double (Coppa Italia and Supercoppa) in consecutive seasons under Simone Inzaghi, who religiously plays a pragmatic 3-5-2. They won 23 but lost 12 of their 38 Serie A games this season, finishing third, but reached the Champions League final by keeping the most clean sheets (eight), including in all but one of the six knockout-phase matches.
Paris Saint-Germain have had similar European failings to City; they have won nine of the last 11 Ligue 1 titles but reached just one Champions League final in that time, losing to Bayern in 2019-20. That season was their best defensively in the competition, conceding just five goals on their 10-game route to the final.
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“I don’t know if it’s a lesson to be learned, but there’s a lot of frustration,” said PSG head coach Christophe Galtier after their 3-0 aggregate exit to Bayern in this season’s round of 16. “If we’d scored first, it would have been different, but we didn’t.”
It sounds obvious, but the first goal matters even more in knockout football.
A study from Spain’s University of Granada analysed Champions League teams who reached the final from 2000 to 2020, a 252-game sample. Across their group and knockout matches, the finalists had win rates between 86 and 94 per cent when they scored first, which the authors found to be “the best performance indicator to predict which team will win the match”.
One of the significant takeaways from FIFA’s technical study of last year’s World Cup was that more successful sides had less possession. Of course, game state has an impact — most teams are likely to sit back when they are ahead — but of the 19 times a side had 33 per cent possession or less, they won or drew 14 times, a better rate of avoiding defeat than teams with 57 per cent possession or higher (seven wins/draws, seven defeats).
Similarly, three of the semi-finalists, including eventual winners Argentina and runners-up France, spent the highest proportion of defensive time in a mid-block, rather than pressing high. Didier Deschamps’ defending champions got to their second straight final with a similar set-up to the one shown below, against England in the last eight.
The Champions League format continues to change — there used to be two group stages, and the number of knockout qualifying rounds to get into the groups has evolved from one to three.
From 2024-25, the group stage will become a league in the “Swiss model”, with teams playing a minimum of eight games against eight different opponents, not facing three sides home and away as is currently the case.
It will still not need “great work” to win it but, then, it never has done.
(Photo: Etsuo Hara/Getty Images)