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For a while, it looked as if the closest thing this season’s Champions League would get to old-fashioned, soul-stirring romance would be the new-build team, plucked out of thin air and deployed as a rolling billboard for an energy drink manufacturer.
As Ajax proved last year, a compelling outsider adds a sense of intrigue that can burnish even soccer’s most exclusive competition: a new face among the old, carrying with it an air of revitalizing freshness, of raw joy, that improves the spectacle. At one point, when Ajax had fallen, and Red Bull’s Salzburg franchise, too, it seemed the only contender for that role was, in more traditional eyes, hardly a welcome one: RB Leipzig.