The 2017-18 European club season ended as it began: With Real Madrid on top, as the best team in the world, the undisputed king of the sport. But now our attention turns. Now it is time to crown the king of a different domain.
When Saturday night gave way to Sunday morning, the soccer calendar flipped. Eyeballs drifted away from Kiev, and toward Russia. The World Cup is upon us.
So this isn’t just any old season takeaways column. This is World Cup Touchline. These are takeaways spun forward to the greatest sporting event in the world. These are the links from one soccer domain to the other.
That, after all, has been the goal of Touchline: to build bridges to June. To connect the relatively barren months in between the World Cup draw and the tournament itself to what we’ll see in Russia this summer.
That’s why we’ve told the story of qualification, and provided a rooting guide, and compared the World Cup to the Olympics, and analyzed March friendlies. Now we are nearing the end of the road. But we have time for at least one more deep dive, on the club season that was.
We start with the Champions League final – and with a set of statistics that may or may not mean anything.