Real Madrid perfect the art of vulnerable dominance

Real Madrid got lucky to beat Bayern Munich and reach another Champions League semifinal, but that’s starting to feel like the point.

Real Madrid advanced Tuesday to their third consecutive Champions League final, beating Bayern Munich 4-3 on aggregate thanks, more than anything else, to a freak error in each leg, the second even freakier than the first, as Sven Ulreich somehow contrived to gift Karim Benzema a tap-in to begin the second half.

That Bayern were the better side over the two legs, however, is exactly the point. Over the 180 minutes of this tie, Real were outplayed, outthought, even outworked by probably the only team in the world that can claim to match them in terms of talent, depth and big-game experience. They won anyway.

This performance didn’t come in isolation. Real have been outplayed for at least some significant stretch of every one of their knockout ties in this year’s competition: The first 75 minutes of the first leg against PSG, the first 94 minutes of the second leg against Juventus and now an entire tie against Bayern.

Real have, as the competition has advanced, looked increasingly like what they are, a team full of supremely talented, confident and experienced players, but aging, no longer quite as sharp in possession, sloppier in defense, seemingly propelled more by the players’ unflinching belief in their own superiority than by any specific tactical or technical merit.

The problem, of course, is that an unflinching belief in your own superiority isn’t actually a thing, or at least not a thing we can point to, or analyze, not the sort of thing that causes a keeper to do what Ulreich did on Tuesday, or a left-back to do what Rafinha did last week. The sheer audacity of Real’s arrogance is impressive, but it’s nowhere near as valuable as luck.

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That’s not to say this team aren’t special, but there’s vulnerability here, and that vulnerability is in tension with the image we have all been forming of Real as consummate, unflappable winners. They were seriously rattled by both Juve and Bayern, exposed to a degree that contradicts the inevitability we have occasionally been tempted to ascribe to their dominance.

They will be favorites once again in the final, whether they face Liverpool or, in the event of another unlikely comeback, Roma. And a win would cap perhaps the greatest era of European dominance since the original era of European dominance, when Los Blancos won five European Cups in a row in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

But there are signs, if you’re willing to look for them, that this is the end of an era.