Redondo, Thiago and magnetic boots
In a little over a week, the UEFA Champions League, once known as the European Cup, will celebrate its 65th champion. With two past winners — Bayern Munich and Barcelona — facing each other in the last eight, there is a strong chance that Big Ears, as the famous old trophy is nicknamed, will have a new name engraved on it come August 23.
If that did happen, for the first time since Chelsea triumphed against the odds and the run of play in Munich in 2012, they would be only the 23rd club to find a place on the winners’ list. Ten of those have won it just once. Of the multiple winners, the Big Five — Real Madrid (13), AC Milan (7), Liverpool (6), Bayern and Barca (five each) — have triumphed an astonishing 36 times.
With Real and Liverpool eliminated in the last 16, and Milan not even having qualified for the competition since 2014, it’s an opportunity for both Barcelona and Bayern to partly bridge the yawning chasm that separates them from Real, the undisputed kings of European football who have won the trophy four times since 2014.
The key individual in that clash of the titans is a man who has played for both clubs. Thiago Alcantara was formed as a player at Barcelona, though he was born in Italy and his roots are in Brazil. Mazinho, his father, was part of the team that won the World Cup in 1994, a fact that has special significance as far as this narrative is concerned.
Thiago spent four seasons with the first team — years when Pep Guardiola guided them to the pinnacle of club football — before leaving for Bayern in search of greater playing time. His coach there? Senor Guardiola. His time in Germany has been interrupted by several injuries, and a career record of 35 goals and 42 assists in 287 matches may make some wonder what the fuss is about.
But as he showed over 70 minutes in last week’s 4–1 destruction of Chelsea, Thiago is the complete midfielder — strong in the tackle, accurate with his passes and with an innate sense of where his better placed teammates are. After that Chelsea game, Rio Ferdinand, who won the Champions League with Manchester United in 2008, told BT Sport: “He is a conductor, somebody who controls the tempo of the game, he’s got a wing mirror so he can see behind him, can see all angles, play every pass in the game.”
If you followed European football closely in the 1990s, those words would immediately summon up the image of a waif-like figure with long hair. A younger generation of fans accustomed to Champions League domination may struggle to believe it, but there was a time a little over two decades ago when many Real supporters might have been forgiven for wondering if the club would ever add to the six titles they won in the Di Stefano-Puskas-Gento golden age of the 1950s and ’60s. Between 1966, when they won №6 and 1998, when they faced off against Juventus in Amsterdam, Real reached just one final, losing to Liverpool in Paris in 1981.
Then, between 1998 and 2002, they won it thrice. If you just cast a glance over the record books, you would think it was a dominant era. You couldn’t be further from the truth. In that five-year stretch, Real won La Liga just once. In the three seasons that they lifted the Champions League, they finished fourth, fifth and third in Spain, with dismal campaigns that didn’t even cross 70 points.
Then, as now, Real were a club run on hubris, with little thought given to structure or planning. That was the Galactico era when the underlying philosophy was to go out and buy the world’s best players, before praying that they would gel together on the pitch. If you have the choicest ingredients, even the most mediocre cook can rustle up a half-decent dinner.
In an era of so much flux and player turnover, Real won on the biggest stage courtesy their talent and talismans who thrived under the brightest lights. Only four of those that played in the 1998 final started the 2000 one, but they were all key individuals. Whether as left-back in ’98 or as a left wing-back two seasons later, Roberto Carlos was always a potent threat. Until Cristiano Ronaldo came along to obliterate his records, Raul was the face of modern-day Real. Alongside him, Fernando Morientes was so much more than just a big target man.
But these men were not conductors. And for such a flawed orchestra to produce the odd immaculate performance, you certainly needed one. That role went to a deep-lying playmaker that the Argentines called El Flaco — The Thin One. The current generation may know of Fernando Redondo only through the YouTube clip of him embarrassing Henning Berg and Manchester United in a Champions League game in 2000, but for over half a decade, he was both Real’s beating heart and passing metronome.
When at his best, Redondo’s one-touch passing was a sight to behold. But he was also a risk-taker, and that meant ceding possession a lot on the days when the radar wasn’t quite switched on. It drove the likes of Johan Cruyff crazy, but his coaches, whether that was Jupp Heynckes in 1998 or Vicente del Bosque two years later, had little hesitation in making him their on-field general.
Back home in Argentina, Redondo divided opinion just as he did throughout his club career in Europe. For Alfio Basile, he was a key member of the squad that won the Copa America in 1993. But for Diego Maradona and the positive drug test that scuttled the 1994 World Cup campaign, that brilliant Argentina side would surely have provided more highlights than the drudgery that Brazil and Italy served up in the final.
That was Redondo’s only World Cup. Daniel Passarella, who took over from Basile, was the celebrated captain of the 1978 World Cup-winning squad, and also a strict disciplinarian who didn’t want ‘homosexuals, long hair or earrings’ in his team. Redondo wore no jewellery and has been married to Natalia Solari since 1992, but he wouldn’t countenance cutting his hair.
In truth, the dispute between the two men went much deeper than that. Passarella was from the Carlos Bilardo school of safety-first coaching, though it was ironically Bilardo that took the captain’s armband from him and gave it to Diego Maradona. Redondo was part of a left-wing generation that grew up contemptuous of the military junta that had ruled Argentina at the time of the 1978 World Cup win. He studied law, read Borges and Marquez, and was inspired by coaches like Cesar Luis Menotti, the maverick who had guided that 1978 team to glory.
Redondo declined to be on Bilardo’s bench at the 1990 World Cup, and his very public disagreements with Passarella meant that there would be no way into the 1998 World Cup squad. Gabriel Batistuta cut his hair, but Redondo and Claudio Caniggia wouldn’t. Neither was even part of the discussion around choosing the squad. The hypocrisy of Passarella’s position was breathtaking. He could call himself a World Cup-winning leader primarily because of the goals scored by Mario Kempes and Leopoldo Luque. Both could have featured in shampoo commercials given the length of their hair.
Instead of Redondo, who had helped end Real’s Champions League pain weeks earlier, it was Matias Almeyda that lined up at the base of midfield for Argentina at France ’98. Almeyda was a fine player, good enough to be part of an excellent Lazio side at the turn of the millennium, but Redondo he was not. Not a day goes by that Argentine fans of a certain age don’t wonder how differently that tournament might have ended with El Flaco around to pull the strings in midfield.
Again, if you go purely by numbers — and there are some idiots who do — Redondo’s career didn’t amount to much. He scored just 13 times and provided a mere 12 assists across 383 games for Tenerife, Real and AC Milan. But when the newspaper Marca asked Real fans to choose an all-time XI in December 2017 — and remember that no club has had so many star names pass through its portals — Redondo was there in the midfield four, alongside Zinedine Zidane, Luca Modric and Michel.
Men like Redondo and Thiago seldom make the headlines or highlights reels. But there cannot be a great football team without them. They aren’t just exceptional players themselves, but their awareness of what goes on around them makes their teammates so much better. The last word should go to one of the game’s greatest coaches. Awestruck after Redondo’s virtuoso display at Old Trafford, Sir Alex Ferguson asked: “What does this player have in his boots? A magnet?”
From Athens humiliation to Beating the Kings of European football