Barça, the cleanest champion

Dedicated to football 's polluters, to the emperors who pull the strings, hidden away, to those who sully from above what others beautify below. La Cartuja was the scene of a memorable final, a container for everything that this colossal game encompasses. There was everything in Seville . A radical contrast of playing styles, passion, alternating scores, and even controversy, which no one can use as an excuse because the underdog team emerged victorious.

Flick's Barça won, a miracle-working coach, and they did so cleanly. No "corruption in the Federation," no evil referees, no delusional conspiracies, not even Negreira or, for that matter, Freemasonry. Football passed sentence, elevated its thumb, and blessed FC Barcelona . It happens sometimes. The Real Madrid players, with regrettable exceptions at the end of the match, lived up to the spectacle, making the most of their proverbial sense of competitiveness and recovering the resilience gene that makes them so dangerous. They were true to their history. It may serve little purpose as a cleanser, but they gave meaning to that crest that has been so tarnished lately. Maradona, as he said, lost everything except the ball.

The remote-controlled madness of the capital on Friday effectively required disinfecting the match before undertaking its analysis. The best antidote in these cases is to return to the origins and remember the dimensions of the field—in the case of La Cartuja stadium, 105 meters long by 68 meters wide, the same for both teams—and to repeat to ourselves that this was and is football, no matter how much they try to turn it into something else. The issue, therefore, was going to be to discern which of the two teams plays the best football on a rectangular piece of grass. And the performance was epoch-making.

At first, things went as expected… When the ball started rolling and the only noise generated was the deafening roar of the crowd and the subtle sound of the impact of a boot on the ball (read: Pedri), Barça took control of the match. The appearance of both teams on the field confirmed the previous predictions. Flick's Barça implemented the plan they had imagined, while Ancelotti's Madrid implemented the plan they could and were allowed to implement. The two Barça center backs, Cubarsí and Iñigo Martínez, initiated the plays neatly, and the straight flush began: the two full-backs opened up to create space, De Jong offered himself in the center, and Pedri and Dani Olmo alternated behind him to accelerate or slow down the game. The forwards should have been in charge of finishing it all off, but in the phenomenal move that led to the 1-0, they preferred to take charge of the distraction duties. Everyone was focused on them, and out of nowhere appeared the canary with the skinny legs to destroy the net and the game.

Madrid responded after the break with Bellingham, a competitive beast, unleashing his sprinters, including Mbappé, who had just entered the field and was much more of a footballer than Vinícius. Szczesny gradually solved everything that the excellent Cubarsí, Iñigo, and Koundé couldn't stop before, but the Madrid attack was so intense that they scored two goals in a row. The Madridistas had entered a trance, and at that point they are inimitable.

But resilience, so white as usual, is also present with this blue and maroon team. Flick's players rebel against old fates and turn games around when they're decided. The referee didn't support them on a couple of potential penalties, but they persisted. With soul and football as their banner. The two banners with which Koundé smashed the ball and silenced those who enjoy the game only when they try to muddy it.