In the modern world, there are two ways of running an elite football club. You can work with a manager and impose a philosophy, buying players to fit it, or you can sign lots of famous players and hope they’ll all fit together somehow. Tuesday features the meeting of the two biggest exponents of the celebrity route, Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain, and, yet again, one of them is going to be disappointed.
The truth is that a galacticos policy never really works for the long haul—or rather, it hasn’t since the advent of pressing in the mid-to-late 1960s. It worked for Real Madrid in the late ’50s because the game was different then, and it has to an extent remained prisoner of that history ever since. Buying famous players makes club presidents look good, and probably helps get them reelected. It stimulates global interest, and in the modern age it makes the social media figures look impressive, but it is inefficient.
Of course, if you have lots of good players, more than the other teams, you still have a good chance of winning—particularly in knockout competitions, and particularly if you happen upon a combination in midfield that can offer control without a loss of creative variety. Real Madrid’s successes over the past decade came because Casemiro, Toni Kroos and Luka Modrić provided a platform for Cristiano Ronaldo, whose reliance on the selflessness of Karim Benzema has only really become apparent since he left the club. (And yet even then it was a side that could peak in only key games; Real Madrid won just two La Liga titles in Ronaldo's nine years in the Spanish capital, a record of remarkable underachievement for the richest club in the world).
