If anyone was going to get the better of it, it was them. Surely.

But no. Again, in its own way, with its knack for doing so, just as it had done to 25 others before them, it got the better of them.

Ninety-five agonising minutes had passed at the Vicente Calderon on Wednesday when Filipe Luis shepherded the ball toward the Atletico Madrid touchline. Behind him, scrapping, fighting, Arda Turan threw his feet in and jostled for position. The end near, he had to keep going; it was this he’d specifically come here for, and he was desperate.

But it didn’t matter. 

In front of the Frente ultras who once adored him, Turan watched the ball roll out of play. His head dropped. He scratched it. He threw his arms down. 

For now, his dream would have to wait, the cruel irony striking. 

Nine months earlier, Turan had made the switch from Atletico to Barcelona with Europe’s biggest prize as his sole focus. “I’ve come to win the Champions League,” he told the media in July upon joining the club, whose latest honour at the time, claimed in Berlin against Juventus, stood as the one that had eluded him at the Calderon. 

For Turan, the move looked logical then with such a goal in mind, and still did as recently as Tuesday. In the hunt for European glory, he hadn’t joined just anyone; he joined Barcelona. This Barcelona.

The one that went 39 games unbeaten; that packs more punch in three forwards than most 20-plus-man squads do; that had vaporised most of Spain and Europe already; whose recent trip to London to face Arsenal was described by the Telegraph as “a kind of state visit”; whose aura, intimidation and superiority was undeniable; that was on course for history. 

But it didn’t matter.

Despite making the most obvious switch in the game for his particular dream, Turan watched the Champions League curse continue, his new team thwarted by his old one in a way he knew all too much about.

Ferocious, relentless, disciplined, the sophistication of their defensive scheme extraordinary, Atletico simply Atletico-ed their glamorous guests. Lionel Messi had no room to move. Ditto for Neymar. Luis Suarez couldn’t get involved. The midfield was sluggish, ponderous. Sapping the life out of them, Atleti left Barcelona with no spark, no joy. 

“CampeOFF,” ran the headline on the cover of Mundo Deportivo in a simple play on words. 

“Lost,” added Sport, depicting Barcelona players in the style of the TV programme with the same name. 

“Today it was not to be,” manager Luis Enrique told reporters. 

Not for them. Just like the 25 before them. 

Why? How? 

We’re now into the third decade of the Champions League in its current incarnation, and still no one has successfully defended the title. Not since AC Milan in 1990, when it was still the European Cup, has a team gone back-to-back on the continent. 

It’s become one of Europe’s curious quirks, not least because of the volume of powerful sides that have looked capable of pulling it off. Indeed, the Champions League era to date has witnessed two (perhaps three) waves of Barcelona dominance, a pair of great Manchester United sides, Real Madrid’s Galacticos, a treble-winning Bayern Munich, a sustained European assault by AC Milan, and the Ajax and Juventus outfits of the mid-1990s. 

Still, as title defences go: nothing. 

Why do these defences continue to crumble? How does this keep happening regardless of the who and the how good? Why hasn’t a single side in the Champions League era been able to match what Real Madrid, Benfica, Inter Milan, Ajax, Bayern Munich, Liverpool, Nottingham Forest and AC Milan all managed by going back-to-back prior to 1992? 

The obvious answer is that this is simply the nature of a cup competition, the randomness of the draw, and that the restructure 24 years ago for the formation of the Champions League as we know it has heightened the difficulty, stretching the demands and introducing more obstacles. 

“The Champions League is more and more competitive compared to the past,” Carlo Ancelotti recently told Goal. “When we won it in 1989 and 1990 there were not a lot of games to reach the final and to win, and not a lot of teams. In the past, there was only one team for each country, and now there are three or four.”

A five-time winner of the competition as a player and coach, Ancelotti would know. His is the prevailing view, too; going back-to-back requires the flawless navigation of six two-legged ties and two one-off finals across an 18-month period against the strongest crop there’s ever been. 

It’s some ask. 

And yet, doesn’t one major factor of the modern game suggest the task should be more achievable?

In the era of the super-club, Europe has never seen the sort of financial discrepancies among its clubs that it does now, nor the extreme concentrations of talent that exist in just a handful of locations.

In 2014-15, both Real Madrid and Barcelona posted revenue figures beyond £500 million, according to the Deloitte Football Money League. Not far behind was Bayern Munich, the sums almost double and in some cases triple those of other historically big clubs such Liverpool, Juventus, Borussia Dortmund, AC Milan, Atletico Madrid, Roma and Inter Milan. 

That financial dominance has been represented in the composition of the Champions League’s semi-finalists in recent years. Between 2010 and 2015, Barcelona, Madrid and Bayern occupied 15 of the competition’s 24 semi-final slots, which represents the least diversity at that stage in the tournament’s history.

Only Atletico‘s heroics on Wednesday prevented those clubs from taking three of another four this year. 

At the pointy end, this means competition of a dizzying standard, yes. But for the giants in the pack, it also means that the idea of a more extensive competitor list isn’t entirely true. Indeed, while from the group stage onward, the competition features 32 teams, then 16, then eight and then four, increasingly it’s trending in the direction of being a three-way fight. 

For Europe’s trio of behemoths, then—not coincidentally the last three champions—the odds should be pretty good. 

And yet, still it hasn’t mattered. 

In 2014, Bayern couldn’t defend their crown. 

In 2015, ditto for Real Madrid.

In 2016, ditto for Barcelona. 

It’s interesting to reflect on those three most recent failed title defences in particular, as a common theme exists across each of them at a time when the super-club era has intensified. 

For Bayern in 2014, by the time Madrid visited them for the second leg of their semi-final tie that April, they were on the wrong side of a peak. Already, they’d clinched the Bundesliga title with almost two months still to play, but from there, their incision and devastation faded. A draw and two defeats quickly followed in the league; in Europe, they were forced into a fight by the worst Manchester United side in recent memory.

For Pep Guardiola and his men, it had been a case of peaking too early. Headed the other way, Madrid butchered them, 4-0. “Munich burns, Lisbon awaits,” proclaimed AS. Bayern president Karl-Heinz Rummenigge labelled it a “slap in the face” and a “debacle” in his comments to the press.

Then Madrid went and experienced the same problem.

Taking the title from Bayern, Ancelotti‘s men went on a storming run, claiming the UEFA Super Cup and the Club World Cup as well while also smashing records in a 22-game winning streak to conclude 2014. But then, like Bayern, they ran out of steam, first losing their vigour and then their clarity of purpose.

By the time Juventus arrived at the Bernabeu last May in the semi-finals, Madrid were shot. Then Barcelona took their title. 

And since, the process has repeated itself for them, too.

For the Catalans, recent weeks have felt as though all of it has finally caught up with them, “it” in this case meaning a relentless fixture list, problematic injuries, a small squad, a summer on the road and in the air, trophy after trophy to contest, the existence of the hunted rather than the hunter, and the physical and emotional toll of winning. 

In short, the modern existence of European champions. 

Against Villarreal prior to the international break, Barcelona let a two-goal lead slide. Then in the Clasico, they fell apart; against Real Sociedad, they never got going at all; and the clash with Atletico was essentially a continuation of that.

With the benefit of hindsight, there’d been evidence of a slowing-down period prior to this too: Enrique’s men laboured past Las Palmas and Sevilla in February, while Arsenal created enough chances to trouble them in the second leg of their round-of-16 tie at the Camp Nou in March. 

Amid this pattern, questions arise: Exhibited by Europe’s finest, are we currently witnessing the limits that exist in regard to performance, intensity and durability? Is prolonging a golden run across the continent beyond 12-14 months too much to ask? Does a window of a defined time exist? Do we underestimate the cost of perpetual triumph? Does the grind of a title defence present obstacles the rest of us can’t fully grasp?

Despite the discrepancies in cash and the concentrations of talent, is it becoming harder to defend Europe’s top prize because of the extent of the demands placed upon the current crop?

Maybe. 

Last October, when Barcelona were still working through the gears and defeats to Sevilla and Celta Vigo were fresh in the memory, it was telling when Sergio Busquets admitted “pre-season was not the best.” On the other side of football’s most fierce divide, Cristiano Ronaldo said the same at Real Madrid, while Luka Modric added: “We spent the entire pre-season campaign in a plane.”

It’s true that most elite teams now spend pre-seasons abroad, but for the team with the most honours to defend, each trip, each hotel, each plane, each airport, each bus, each session, each warm-up and each press and sponsorship event adds up to something more than that. It’s not just the games that never stop; it’s the demand for their time, their thoughts and their attention. 

From this, there’s a cumulative effect that seems to have been evident in recent title winners as seasons have unfolded and the demands haven’t let up. It’s blunted them, hurt them. Even though the Champions League has entered an era of super-clubs in which the number of realistic contenders is small and the odds of the giants’ better, still it hasn’t featured a back-to-back winner. 

Not one. Not even treble-winning Bayern. Not even record-breaking Madrid. 

Not even this Barcelona. 

Is defending the Champions League growing harder? 

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