. Benfica are winning 4-0 and Atlético Madrid are in utter disarray. Zeki Amdouni runs the ball into an entirely unpatrolled Atlético area, gets a free shot from 14 yards and misses a glorious chance to make it 5-0. Nobody cares. Least of all Liverpool, even though this miss will effectively end up, five months later, knocking them out of the Champions League.
Of course, we’re in the realm of the absurd here, although when it comes to the new Champions League format this is a system with margins exactly, and absurdly, this fine. By virtue of this one goal not scored – and of course you could pick out many others – Benfica end up finishing 16th in the 36-team group phase rather than 15th: a position from which they, rather than Paris Saint-Germain, would probably have ended up facing Liverpool in the round of 16.
Naturally there were still a few bones of resentment as Liverpool made their exit on Tuesday, a certain bafflement at a format that allows a club to top the group table and still get drawn against one of the best teams in the world. Arne Slot himself lamented that Liverpool had been “so, so unlucky”. Luis Enrique’s verdict was: “Both teams deserved to go through.” And the way Uefa is going, maybe one day soon they both will.
For all this, there was also a certain magnanimity there, a recognition that Paris had been the superior team over the two legs. “The best game of football I was ever involved in,” Slot said. And of course magnanimity is much easier to come by when you are 15 points clear in the Premier League and in a cup final at the weekend. All the same, given the standard and given the stakes, it’s worth asking: just how much did this defeat mean? In an age when everything must be ranked and contextualised and GOATed, how does this failure affect the way a great Liverpool team will be …
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