In the modern world, there are two ways of running an elite football club. You can work with a manager and impose a philosophy, buying players to fit it, or you can sign lots of famous players and hope they’ll all fit together somehow. Tuesday features the meeting of the two biggest exponents of the celebrity route, Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain, and, yet again, one of them is going to be disappointed.
The truth is that a galacticos policy never really works for the long haul—or rather, it hasn’t since the advent of pressing in the mid-to-late 1960s.