The Real deal
It's impossible not to be excited about Arsenal taking on the 15-time Kings of Europe
Everything looks like it happens faster when Real Madrid are in their groove on a Champions League night at the Bernabéu. Football played on fast-forward. Do not adjust your sets, this is just the level.
Since 2010, Real Madrid have failed to reach the Champions League semi-finals just twice, in 2018/19 and 2019/20, the two seasons immediately following the exit of all-time top goalscorer Cristiano Ronaldo.
They had won four of the five editions of the competition immediately before that relative barren spell, and have won two of the four since.
Like so many football fans, I’ve often looked on scratching my head, wondering how a seemingly-beaten Real Madrid side, up against an incredibly talented and much more organised opponent, have managed to come back from the dead, overturning deficits and scoring late goals and somehow clinging on to progress. Round after round, season after season. There’s no point trying to understand it, just accept it: there’s something about Real Madrid in the Champions League.
But don’t write it off as luck or a happy accident. Because everything happens faster when Real Madrid are in their groove on a Champions League night at the Bernabéu. Those who play for Real Madrid — even the squad players, the outcasts, the depth options, the ones who can look like they’ve just managed to stick around because they’ve come through the academy and are happy to warm the bench most weeks — every single one of them has incredible technical ability, an unwavering belief that they belong where they are, and the conviction that it is their innate right to win.
Who are we to argue? The belief makes their successes possible, the successes reinforce the belief, and Real Madrid have ultimately created that unique thing: a positive self-fulfilling prophecy.
And I cannot wait to see Arsenal take them on. Without Gabriel, with a midfielder up front in lieu of a fit striker, with Bukayo Saka only just back from a lay-off that lasted over three months. I just cannot wait.
This is the draw I have wanted since Arsenal’s return to the Champions League for the 2023/24 campaign. This is what playing in the Champions League is all about. Not just seeing where you measure up against the best teams but against the biggest mythologies in the sport.
It does not get bigger than this.
During the seasons of hovering at the upper ends of midtable — the back-to-back eighth-place finishes providing the unappetising filling in a Europa League-era sandwich — I used to watch Manchester City taking on Liverpool in awe. That’s where I wanted Arsenal to be, but it was so, so, so far away. The ball moved quicker in those games, and the players rose to the occasion to keep up with it and with each other.
Real Madrid in the Champions League at the Bernabéu was the continental version. Amid the cries of ‘they can’t keep getting away with this’ it was impossible not to admire the speed the ball moved at, from Modrić to Kroos, Kroos to Modrić, Marcelo to Vinicius Junior and back to Modrić and to Kroos and forward to Benzema. In an era of teams stretching the pitch and thus the opposition, Real Madrid gathered together around the ball because they did not care how tight the gaps were, they backed themselves to squeeze out of them. And, just about often enough, they managed to.
There’s the obvious history and the gritty defending and the miraculous goalkeeping displays but above all else, I was always captured by that interplay, the speed of the ball, the confidence to ping it around so nonchalantly on the biggest stage, against the best teams on the planet.
And while I enjoyed those games, there was a part of me just desperately longing to see Arsenal at that level again. Not to win, necessarily, but to see if we could.
You could argue that taking on Barcelona or Bayern Munich would provide some of the same magic but Arsenal have met them so often over the past couple of decades that those match-ups have lost a little something. We don’t have those scars when it comes to Real Madrid. Our only meeting with them came en route to the 2006 final, with a famous 1-0 win away from home carried over the line with a 0-0 at Highbury.
From that run to the final 19 years ago until 2022, Arsenal only ever got further from the top. Back in 2006, Real Madrid were four years into a 12-year ‘drought’ without being crowned Kings of Europe, chasing the seemingly cursed idea of La Decima, a tenth Champions League/European Cup triumph. They’re now all the way up to 15. This is their competition and they know it. Whether or not they’re even the best team in Spain, and they often aren’t, they set the bar at the very top of European football.
It’s a bar Arsenal have never leapt but have gradually, over the past few years, approached with a bit more momentum, a bit more belief. There has been no silverware to back it up but the domestic form, in the toughest league in the world, has left no room for interpretation: very few teams in the world are still better than Arsenal.
Now, in back-to-back weeks, we get to see how we do measure up on the continent. We get to see to what extent we are approaching the game’s summit, or how much further there still is to go. And we will, at the end of it, still be in the hunt for our first ever Champions League or we will have some feedback to implement when the hunt begins again next season.
The ball will move quickly over the next couple of weeks. Bring it on.