Man City v Real Madrid: Disruptors v establishment for Champions League and Haaland

The day before Real Madrid and Manchester City, a story linking Erling Haaland to Madrid in the press drops. It’s Old Money vs New Money, as ever.

To a point, you have to admire the chutzpah of the timing. Real Madrid are due in Manchester for the biggest match of the season for both clubs: a Champions League semi-final finely poised at 1-1 after the first leg. So with a little over 24 hours to go before kick-off… there it is, on The Athletic’s website (£).

‘Could Erling Haaland to Real Madrid still happen?’

It’s a curious article, full of tropes that are very familiar to the modern observer of football media. Anonymous sources? You bet. Swirling speculation? Oh, loads of it. The assumption that Real Madrid will get what they want because they always get what they want? Mostly implied, but there in spades. Pointed reminders of how hard done by the Spanish giants feel over the fact that La Liga’s broadcasting contract is only worth a fraction of that enjoyed by clubs in the Premier League? Well, of course.

But it’s the timing that causes the eyebrow of the reader to involuntarily lift, because Real Madrid have been accused of deliberately planting stories of this nature into the media in the build-up to big matches before. Indeed, that very accusation was made before their round-of-16 match against Liverpool. Ten days before that match, a story appeared in El Nacional linking Jurgen Klopp to the – pointedly not vacant – manager’s job at their club. There was even less to this story, but it’s certainly a striking coincidence that these links keep emerging shortly before Real Madrid are due to play these clubs.

But at its heart, this story touches upon probably the defining cultural clash of 21st century football. Old money vs new money. Established hegemony vs disruptors. This debate was to be found at the very point that Financial Fair Play was first being introduced more than a decade ago in 2009.

For those with the financial resources of a small state looking to buy into football, the purpose of these new rules seemed obvious: to entrench the already-richest clubs at the top of the game in perpetuity, in the full knowledge that the growing financial disparities between the biggest clubs and the rest were already reaching a point where it was becoming increasingly impossible to compete.

It was a reasonable argument to make. For all their talk about the potentially damaging effects of having to keep up with rapidly inflating wages and transfer fees, UEFA seemed strangely quiet about the fact that this had already been happening for much of the previous two decades while they did nothing about it whatsoever.

And those who were worried about the corrosive effects on competitive balance of having one club with too much money, power or control certainly seem to have been vindicated since it was introduced. In France, PSG are one win from their ninth league title in 11 years. In England, Manchester City are one win from their fifth Premier League title in six years. In Italy, Juventus won Serie A nine times in a row. In Germany, Bayern Munich won ten, and are at least as likely as not to make it 11 this year. In Spain, 18 of the last 20 La Liga titles have been won by Barcelona or Real Madrid.

Both old money and new seem to have benefited from these growing financial gaps. That’s all five of Europe’s big leagues, and it strongly suggests that if FFP was put in place to increase competitive balance, it has resoundingly failed.

But within the game itself, there remains an extent to which ‘old money’ clubs remain on a pedestal. Whether the placing of the latest Haaland rumours are primarily mischievous in intention or not, the fact remains that the goal-bot is often linked with Real Madrid; the suggestion is that ultimately Manchester City (probably the best football team in the world) will be a stepping stone in a career that inevitably ends up at the Bernabeu.

In the case of Jude Bellingham, the lure of becoming a Merengue seems to have outweighed the possibility of becoming a chief supply line to their Norwegian goal machine. When Robert Lewandowski went to Barcelona, he offered a tiny window into the thought processes that factor into such decisions: “I have always wanted to play in a great La Liga club and this is a great opportunity for me.”

And it’s understandable. Football has a way of mixing the deeply sentimental with the utterly ruthless, and the huge, historical clubs hit that sweet spot. On the one hand, these are the pillars of the sport that Lewandowski and co. have grown up watching, and on the other they remain able to meet the wage demands of the elite-level player.

Professional footballers are usually lovers of the game, just as fans are. Why wouldn’t they want to scratch that itch, especially when playing for one of this tiny number of clubs has long been considered the peak of their profession?

These matches will continue to be framed as old money versus new. Manchester City have been European club football’s biggest disruptors over the last decade, but the route to the top of European club football becomes more treacherous the closer you get to the summit and they haven’t quite managed to get there yet.

The 21st century debate of football’s old money vs new won’t be decided once and for all at The Etihad Stadium on Wednesday night. The game doesn’t work like that. But it will give us a substantial clue as to whether Manchester City will be able to brute force their way to becoming the champions of Europe because it’s difficult to see how this Manchester City team, with Haaland in full flow, does not hold the power to end Real Madrid’s grip on the Champions League.

But it may take something more than the endlessly deep pockets of the owners of the club to break the hold that the traditional giants of the game still have over the sport and its chief protagonists.