When you win as relentlessly as Real Madrid, you're destined to be perceived as the bad guy. Every club in Europe knows that when they face Madrid in the Champions League, they will confront an opponent endowed with the attributes of a comic-book villain. The Blancos have a vast array of superpowers, which only grow in number and potency in times of crisis. They are unaffected by the vicissitudes of battle, always supremely confident that the time will eventually come for them to turn the tables and win. Most of all, the moment you think you've finished them off is when they always, always, always land their biggest blow.
This dynamic takes on an even scarier tint when the team on the other side is Atlético Madrid. Real has haunted Atleti's dreams for generations now, and over the past decade has induced especially painful nightmares. When a Madrid Derby is on the horizon, the Colchoneros can't close their eyes at night without sleep sending them back to Lisbon or Milan, the sites of the most soul-crushing losses in the club's history. Surrounding the two losses to Real in those Champions League finals are a couple more UCL knockouts at the same hands, each one close and hard-fought and all the more excruciating for being so.
If the rest of Europe challenges Real under the terms of a comic book, for Atlético it's a horror movie. These matches aren't contests between two ostensibly equal superhumans. Rather, one side here is the embodiment of primeval, eldritch, unstoppable forces of destruction, and the other is a quivering group of college students in for the most terrifying night of their likely short lives. And the thing about a horror-movie baddie is that they are never dead unless you kill kill them.
With that in mind, it's hard not to just feel bad for Atlético when the same thing that always happens in these Champions League Madrid Derbies happened in this Champions League Madrid Derby. In last Tuesday's even, tense, not-particularly-well-played first leg of this round of 16 tie, two wondergoals from Rodrygo and Brahim Diáz canceled out a Julián Álvarez wondergoal and gave Real Madrid a 2-1 home win, which you could say they just about deserved. In Wednesday's second leg, Atleti came out with all the fire and determination of a character determined to overcome the genre's tropes and stand triumphant and alive at the end of this movie's runtime.
The home team was rewarded for this gumption almost immediately, when Conor Gallagher turned the ball into Thibaut Courtois's goal just 27 seconds into the match. Gallagher's goal leveled the aggregate score and had the Metropolitano absolutely rocking, making for an in-stadium atmosphere that would be easy to fall in love with if not for the knowledge of how many racists were assuredly contributing to it. For the next hour or so the match was played entirely on Atlético's terms. Real had most of the ball but did almost nothing of consequence with it. Once they took the ball off of the toothless Blancos, the Rojiblancos regularly gnashed their way up the pitch with real menace. Outside of one moment in the 70th minute, for the entire match it felt like if one team was going to strike the killing blow, it would be Atleti.
And yet, for all the good work it had done weakening its hated, feared rival, Atlético did not kill what it had wounded. Not even an uncharacteristic stroke of fortune—Kylian Mbappé, in his only memorable moment of the match, won a penalty that Vinícius, in his umpteenth unimpressive moment of the match, skied—could stave off the inevitable. The hosts never landed the killshot during their hour of control, and Real eventually fought back to more or less even terms. This change of dynamic came in the 65th minute, when Eduardo Camavinga came on for Aurélien Tchouaméni and Lucas Vázquez came on for Luka Modric, firming up what had been a non-existent midfield by uniting Camavinga and Fede Valverde there. Penalty aside, neither team seemed all that close to getting the winning goal after that—though Ángel Correa has to be pissed at himself today for deciding to shoot instead of squaring the ball to Álvarez at the telling moment of a dangerous attack on the cusp of second-half stoppage time.
After 120 minutes of play, the match went to penalties. The key moment there came right after Álvarez had slipped in the run-up to, but still managed to score, his spot-kick. The ref stopped the action to consult his earpiece (the beautiful game, baby!), the commentators said VAR was likely looking at whether Álvarez's kick was illegal for being double-touched, the broadcast cut to a few very inconclusive replays of Álvarez's slip-shot, and the ref waved the PKs back on. This was probably influenced by the fact that I had a squirming, shrieking toddler in my lap at the time, but it wasn't until I saw Valverde's supercharged reaction after he converted the subsequent penalty, and a graphic appeared on screen that showed Atleti's last kick had been a red one, that I realized Álvarez's penalty had been disallowed.
(The controversy around the penalty kick seems overblown to me. Though it wasn't evident to viewers at home until about the thousandth slo-mo replay during the postgame show, and has since been confirmed by UEFA's own video, Álvarez's plant foot did slide into the ball before he shot it with his other. You can quibble with whether the rule is a good one—UEFA itself said it will look into a potential tweak that would let incidental double-hits like this stand—but it is a clear one. So long as the referees themselves had conclusive evidence of the double-hit when the call on the field was made, everything seems like it was handled correctly. Though next time they need to do a better job communicating all of it to the spectators.)
The VAR'd penalty wasn't technically decisive: Jan Oblak saved Vázquez's penalty after Valverde's converted one, giving Atlético a chance to even the score with the next kick. It nevertheless felt like the definitive moment—like when the horror movie's sole surviving college kid creeps up to the unconscious bad guy's prostrate body, axe in hand, ready to bury the thing in his skull, and a second bad guy, one the college kid thought his friend had already dealt with, taps the kid on the shoulder, and at that moment you realize what kind of ending you're in for. Marcos Llorente stepped up to take the would-be equalizer and thumped it off the woodwork. (It would've been easy to pity the crestfallen Spaniard, a former Real Madrid academy product and a descendent of Blanco royalty, if not for the knowledge that some of the racists in the stands that night may have been made extra rowdy after drinking one of Llorente's Nazi coffees.) That miss put the winning penalty on Antonio Rüdiger's foot, and though Oblak mustered a last flicker of hope by getting a hand on it, the deflection wasn't enough to keep the shot out of the net.
Against forces not fully of this world, Atlético competed admirably, gave itself chances to win, but came up short, as expected. It's tempting to think Atleti could've done more. Real Madrid was never really good at any point during either game, and was actively bad for the majority of the second leg. The Blancos have the most talented roster in the world, but they still haven't made the click that would turn them into a whole even equal to, let alone greater than, the disparate parts. The team is unsustainably lopsided, featuring an attack that never defends and doesn't even attack in concert very often. The superstar trio of Mbappé, Vinícius, and Jude Bellingham were individually and collectively bad in both matches—only the attack's overlooked fourth member, Rodrygo, acquitted himself well. Real's injury-ravaged defense usually folds under just a moderate amount of consistent pressure, especially when applied to wherever Vázquez is standing. This is probably the weakest moment in what has been a comparatively weak Real Madrid season.
But instead of trying to step on the jugular, of trying to go out and kill kill the clearly struggling bad guy, Atleti never really pressed its advantage. Down a goal in the first match, Atleti looked content to play out the string for the final half hour, betting big that they could overcome a one-goal deficit in the home leg. Though the Rojiblancos were just a goal away from going ahead in the tie for 119 of Wednesday's 120 minutes, they never went for broke by, for instance, trying to force an error out of Real's super shaky buildup or adding an additional attacker to the mix, instead making either like-for-like or defensive substitutions. Real Madrid has shown its vulnerability all season long, and yet Atlético seemed to do less than everything it could to capitalize on those vulnerabilities. It was almost like Atleti played Real as if they were still the same, fearsome Real teams of before, the ones responsible for Atleti's nightmares. In doing so, they may have helped this story end like the others.
Still, you can't be too hard on Atlético here. Though the Colchoneros have done a better job at maximizing their available talent this season than the Blancos have with theirs, in terms of overall quality of players, the advantage is still heavily in Real's favor. A less-talented team taking one of the Champions League favorites to penalties and losing is hardly some debacle. And even if they could've done more in this game, we've seen previous installments of this franchise where they did everything exactly right and still got their head chopped off in the end. Maybe an honorable death is the most Atleti can realistically hope for.
For Real, the story is different. While it feels like they always win the Champions League, in fact it only ("only") happens about half of the time in recent years. At the start of the season, we wrote that this team had exceptional talent, clear flaws, and would need time to find a new way to play if it wanted to repeat as champions of the Champions. It's concerning how little progress has been made over the intervening six months. Real did seem to happen upon one potential path to glory as recently as a month ago, which hinged on two developments: 1) Mbappé finally accepting that his team's, and probably his own, ideal future laid with him playing as a true center forward, and 2) manager Carlo Ancelotti turning the midfield reins over to Dani Ceballos, the only midfielder who both knows how to circulate the ball and is not 39 years old. But then Ceballos went down with a bad hammy and everything the team had been building collapsed with him.
Real Madrid can't win the Champions League if it plays the way it did against Atleti. Indeed Arsenal, Real's upcoming opponent in the quarterfinals, is well positioned to press on Real's weak points in ways Atlético didn't. Granted, Ancelotti is the best in the world at helping his teams find themselves over the course of a season, and there's still time for that to happen. It would hardly be a surprise if the wise old Italian pulls the lever that unlocks the team's potential. None of the UCL competitors this year are without shortcomings, so Real doesn't even need to achieve some world-conquering version of itself to get past the remaining foes. Remember, even in this weakened form, they do remain the outrageously hard-to-kill villain in this story. But unless they up their game, their competitors are going to watch the horror movie that was this tie, and it won't be hard to find ways they might escape Atlético's fate.
