When people talk despairingly of the cartels dominating the highest positions in their domestic leagues, it’s worth remembering that a competitive league where anyone can win is in not what people want to see. Of course, the fans that make up the mass of all clubs outside those special few want it. But as a spectacle, as pure observers, impartial or otherwise, nobody wants to see a league like that. It’s too complicated – there might be a thrilling finale if eight teams go into the final day with a chance of victory, but other than Jeff Stelling, nobody has the mental capacity to make sense of it all. When a league erupts into total anarchy, all the sub-plots go out of the window – nobody has time to process them. What people really want to see is a clash of the titans, two juggernauts enjoying an obscene level of dominance, rolling across the country like mediaeval knights, hooves crushing peasant’s heads.

One of the great myths of modern football is the ‘title race’, as though it’s an annual event. It’s actually something which happens far too rarely, despite the permanent elite which exist throughout European leagues. The English league had recently been decided by who out of United and Chelsea decided to have an off year – though the margins were sometimes close, one team would inevitably, in hindsight, have turned up to a gunfight with a fruit knife, be it Chelsea neglecting to create a valid contingency plan last year, United failing to adequately make up for Ronaldo’s departure the year before, or the Alan Smith years. Even the Benitez vs. Ferguson showdown, which had all the elements of a proper title race – a to-and-fro, all other teams falling away, psychological warfare, and identifiable turning points – remains a half-exception, with neither team really shining as truly great. You have to go back to the late 90s and early 00s to find the real stuff – two great teams in their own right going hell for leather from the first day and not letting up until the bitter end.

The rest of Europe has been no better in recent years. Inter’s dominance faded away as Milan decided to start taking things seriously again, the two passing each other by on their respective ways down and up, a bloodless coup that necessitated no ultimate confrontation. In Germany, Bayern alternated between boring processions and horrendous off-years which coincided with one of The Rest being far more suited to take up the mantle than the others. A primary reason for the historical revisionism over ‘mind-games’ is the fact that it’s been so long that we’ve had that sort of title race, people have forgotten what it’s like. Most campaigns in recent years have been a sort of passive, half-arsed parade encountering some minor difficulties along the way, like the American ‘hyperpower’ years which coincided with them in the world of global politics. Those years of United-Chelsea compared to ‘99 measure up as Iraq does to World War 2. Total, all-out, bitter conflict, all day, every day, until one side are all dead. Title races where the margin for error was so slim, and the teams so evenly matched, that it spilled out into the media and the training ground, as both parties desperately sought absolutely any other avenue to gain the slightest sniff of an advantage.

In Spain, of course, Barcelona have been as dominant in recent years as the USA have been on the aforementioned global stage. And as both should be realising, that level of unrivalled dominance leads complacency to creep in. Inter’s unexpected European triumph under Mourinho should have been a shock to Barcelona, a sign that they weren’t as impervious to defeat as they thought. Guardiola reacted by replacing Ibrahimovic with Villa at a price more obscene than the worst excesses of either Galactico era. The result was to improve Barcelona’s team but to severely reduce their variety. It was the final piece that cemented the Barca theocracy in place – the word made flesh. What Would Johan Do – the boiling down of the vast spectrum of everything that can happen on a football field to a handful of key skills, the total mastery of which would make them unplayable. Or so they thought.

Barcelona’s possession-based style of football may be perfect in Europe, with it’s pristine pitches and mostly homogenous style at the higher end. It is not, in fact, a plan suited to league football in any country. Brian Clough articulated the qualities needed to win a league title by stating that the domestic championship was “the one that you have to have every single aspect of football management about you to win it. You’ve got to have endurance, you’ve got to have talent, you’ve got to be a little bit daft, you’ve got to have strength, psychology, you name it – of course, you’ve got to have very good players, but it’s a real endurance battle over nine or ten months.” The sheer variety of skillsets needed to win a title when the competition is serious

Mourinho’s entire career seems to have been building up to such a campaign. He has actually never enjoyed such a battle like it – Porto enjoyed domestic dominance, at Chelsea he raised the bar quicker and higher than anyone could match before disappearing anticlimactically, and at Inter he was not seriously challenged by domestic contenders. But when it comes to a do-or-die titanic struggle, nobody would doubt that, all other things being equal, he surely has the weapons in his arsenal to succeed. It’s reaching the point where any advantage possible needs to be sought, a street fight in which there can only be one winner – and all else being equal, the smart money isn’t on the guy with the bad back and the leather tie. Barcelona have spent the past two years ‘refining’ their style, but they haven’t strengthened as much as they might, despite spending more than Madrid over the period.

Mourinho’s problem was that he had come to a club that was out of ideas. Madrid were on the verge of giving up when they hired Mourinho – a radical move for a club that has prioritised on-pitch stars above all else. He represented the last throw of the dice, and his arrival (combined with a tightening of the purse-strings) meant a shift away from the Galacticos policy towards a more specific, thought-out transfer policy, and the formation of a brutally effective team. The gap when Mourinho arrived was a vast chasm that seemed to be growing ever-wider. In just one year, it has shrunk out of sight. The ground he has already made up is utterly astonishing, and yet Mourinho gets no credit for his remarkable work. The only trophy won in this period, after all was the Spanish Cup – taking the Freudian, “there are no accidents” approach, Madrid reacted to this ‘victory’ by hurling the worthless trinket under a bus. They meant business.

Mourinho has inspired this radical new Madrid. In the space of a year, remember. Traditionally, your Real Madrid champions will have outspent all others to gain a team of superstars, who will go together by sheer virtue of ability, and showboat and waltz and entertain their way to a title. Mourinho has changed this already – a completely radical overhaul of a club’s culture and outlook. Compare and contrast the humiliations Real suffered at the hands of their rivals. Under Pellegrini, they were hammered because they gave up. Under Mourinho, they were hammered because they didn’t. Even at 4-0 down, there was a madness in their eyes, a blood-curdling, frenzied insanity which was always liable to be dangerous if it were correctly channeled.

Essentially, Barcelona can no longer pontificate from a lofty perch and simply outplay their opponents. If they lose this season, they will have blown their dominance long before they ought to have. If they hold Jose off for his entire tenure at Real, they will have achieved something that could only possibly be bettered by Mourinho triumphing this year. The simple amount of ground he has made up in such a short space of time is virtually unparalleled at this level of the game. Again like the USA, their hegemony has ended and they haven’t received the memo. What was a procession, where Barca could afford to seriously devote time to looking like the good guys, is now a pub fight, Kilmarnock rules. If Barcelona don’t recognise this, and quickly, they’ll soon find themselves with a pool cue wrapped around their head whilst their great rivals ride off into the sunset. Forget a competitive league for now and enjoy the show – these spectacles don’t come as often as you’d think.

Callum Hamilton

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