Strange beauty in watching City's system malfunction

It turns out Pep Guardiola was right after all. Manchester City’s pursuit of the double-treble will now remain “a hypothetical dream”.

This was Pep’s own excellent phrase before Wednesday’s second leg against Real Madrid, a formulation that suggests even Guardiola’s dreams are full of theory, algebra, hypotheticals, like a footballing version of Evelyn Waugh’s professor Silenus, the modernist architect who doesn’t sleep but instead lies in the dark for eight hours with his eyes shut doing high-speed calculations, before rising at dawn to design another machine-age masterpiece.

And City versus Real Madrid (1-1 aet, 4-4 on aggregate, pens 3-4) was a masterpiece in many ways. This was a game that felt for long periods like two teams falling asleep with their hands around each other’s throats. But it was also utterly gripping, all subtext, all narrative, a game that seemed, even in its more painful repetitions, to be telling us something important.

First of all, for the neutral it is surely a good thing that City will not win a second successive treble. It would be easy to gloss this by pointing out that watching anyone win an unprecedented double-treble would be a tedious and stratifying spectacle. But it is doubly true in this case.

It is a mark of where we are that victory for Real Madrid, in a competition created by money, out of money, for the future benefit of money, could ever be styled as a win for the little man. There are plenty of City fans who would see their team as self-evidently the underdogs in this company, although it takes a degree of cognitive dissonance to genuinely believe it.

It is worth remembering what the City project is for. This remains at bottom a public relations exercise staged by a sovereign