Knockout-tournament soccer is the best soccer because of how it amplifies the sport's essence. The magic of the game lies in the tension between unpredictability and mastery. On one foot, the game is so difficult, so low-scoring, and played over such a relatively short timespan, that in 90 minutes truly anyone can beat anyone. On the other, the best players and teams are so good at dictating the encounter's terms and appearing in the match's few critical moments with touches of brilliance, that the outcome is rescued from a randomness that might render it meaningless and becomes imbued with real significance. The knockout tournament heightens both sides of this tension. Teams that reach the final do so by proving their ability to conquer entropy, but they only achieve glory by winning one last game, where anything can happen.
On Saturday, Arsenal pulled off a monumental upset by defeating Barcelona in the Women's Champions League final. While this doesn't make the Gunners necessarily the best team, it does I think make them the perfect winners of the club game's best competition.
Coming into the final, there was no real reason to expect Arsenal to win. Even in what was probably its weakest season in recent years, Barcelona remains the women's game's greatest force. Their talent is unrivaled, their style of play is mesmeric, and their status is unquestioned. This was Barça's fifth consecutive Champions League final. Had the Blaugrana gone on to win on Saturday, three-peating as queens of the continent, everyone inside the stadium and watching on TV would've said it was what they had expected.
Yet if anything has defined this Arsenal season, it's the team's defiance in the face of expectations. As third-place finishers in last season's Women's Super League, Arsenal began this campaign with a dogfight even to make it to the Champions League proper. The Gunners bested Rangers and then Rosenborg in a pair of one-off, pre–group stage qualification rounds, and faced Hacken in a two-legged tie for a spot in the big show. Hacken won the first leg in Sweden by a score of 1-0. Rather than wilt under the pressure—which might have been expected of a club that has been sliding out of Europe's and even England's elite—Arsenal smashed Hacken, 4-0, in the home fixture.
But things took a turn for the worse only a couple weeks later, when longstanding manager Jonas Eidevall resigned in October after a bad start to the season, which included a 5-2 loss to Bayern Munich in the WCL group-stage opener. Eidevall's ousting had been overdue, in part because of his inability to stop the aforementioned slide as Arsenal had been surpassed by Chelsea and Manchester City in the domestic hierarchy. The club turned to Renée Slegers, the 36-year-old former Dutch international who had been one of Eidevall's assistants. Very quickly Slegers's calmness, confidence, and detailed preparation gave the team a healthy new energy, which helped a talented roster reach its best, even—or, rather, especially—in moments of adversity.
The Gunners managed to put that ugly Bayern result behind them and, in the end, claimed their WCL group's top spot above the Germans. In the quarterfinals, Arsenal had a tough matchup against Real Madrid, and (thanks in large part to a criminally unkempt pitch) fell in the first leg, 2-0. But Arsenal stuck with Slegers's calmness and confidence, and cruised to a euphoric 3-0 home win in the second leg that itself felt almost like a trophy. The semifinals brought Lyon, a club that, like Barça, is perennially favored to at least reach the Champions League final. As expected, Lyon came to London for the first match and won, 2-1. Yet in the second, Arsenal once again defied expectations with an enthralling comeback, winning 4-1 in France and qualifying for the WCL final for the first time since the club won the tournament in 2007.
Just by making it to the final, Arsenal had had a season to be proud of. In Slegers, they'd found the real deal. Alessia Russo was starting to really cohere into the superstar she could be. Mariona Caldentey, the splashy new addition the club made last summer to hopefully raise the team's ceiling, was proving herself more than worth the money, playing like the best player in England and one of the best in the entire world. Eidevall and his sour vibes both within and outside of the club were finally gone, the energy in the locker room was great, and the future looked bright. Arsenal didn't really have anything to lose coming into the final, because they had already won so much.
Sometimes, though, the very fact of having nothing to lose can springboard a team to an unexpected win. It's hard not to read that effect into Saturday's match. Because Barcelona was the team that, in a sense, had to win, the 0-0 scoreline sort of felt like an advantage for Arsenal. From kickoff, Arsenal played like a team determined to build on this "advantage," while Barça seemed in a hurry to find the opening goal and the relief from the pressure of expectation. The favorites played a rushed style that eschewed the patient but inexorable attacking that has been the team's biggest weapon during its dynastic period. This played straight into Arsenal's hands, helping the Gunners force Barça into bad turnovers that would arm the counter-attacks that were always going to be Arsenal's path to glory.
The first 45 minutes of play were fairly even, which was a massive boon for Arsenal. Barça was playing badly. They had a lot of the ball, as expected, but hardly ever cobbled together plays with any real menace. Arsenal had stretches pinned back into their own half, but they defended admirably, and, especially off of the turnovers they were forcing, had the much more dangerous attacking forays. This sort of imbalance—a bad Barça and a fantastic Arsenal—was exactly what was needed if the underdogs hoped to bridge the sizable gap in talent between the two teams, and it was breaking Arsenal's way. The worst news for the Gunners was also the best news for Barça: despite Arsenal's strong first half, they had not managed to capitalize on it with a goal.
The Barcelona that came out after halftime was much closer to the usual, irrepressible team they've taught the world to expect. It was as if they had finally woken up, remembered what they normally do to pulverize far superior opponents than Arsenal into a fine dust, and then got to grinding. For the next 20 minutes or so Barça played the best soccer that would be played in this final, a whirling and precise onslaught that created first cracks, then fissures in the Arsenal defense. In the 49th minute, a scything triangular move between Aitana Bonmatí, Alexia Putellas, and Clàudia Pina ended with a deflected Pina shot that struck the top of the crossbar. It felt like the beginning of the end for Arsenal.
But the Gunners kept resisting, principally behind a monster showing from its defensive line. The star of this was Leah Williamson, who was the game's single most outstanding performer. Whenever Arsenal looked on the verge of breaking, there appeared Williamson, gliding in to intercept the ball and avert the danger. Her sense of positioning, her ability to nick away the ball, her serenity under pressure, and her knack for finding a teammate with her clearances were uncanny. Barcelona took 12 of their 20 total shots for the game in the 20 minutes coming out of halftime. Yet, like Arsenal in the first half, they'd committed the often fatal sin of failing to convert their ascendency into a goal, and so the result hang in the balance.
When teams don't turn their advantage in the run of play into goals, what often decides a match is a particular moment of brilliance. What makes great teams and great players so great is that they generally provide both run-of-play supremacy and the consistent ability to meet singular moments with the genius required. You'd expect that Barcelona, as the greater unit that also possesses of more and better individual talents, would be the one to overcome its run-of-play failure with a moment of inspiration. Instead, though, it was Arsenal's Beth Mead.
Coming off a poorly cleared corner kick, Mariona fired a low pass into Mead. Mead's caressed first touch allowed her to square herself toward Barça's goal at the top of the box. From there, she shifted the ball inside, which let her disguise a deliciously subtle reverse pass into Stina Blackstenius. The ball found the forward wide open in the box, which gave her plenty of time to hit a low shot past keeper Cata Coll into the net. Mead's three touches (and let's also give credit to Mariona's patient kneading of the ball, only releasing it when a real advantage came about) in that play were so exquisite as to be worthy of a Champions League title:
Blackstenius's goal in the 74th minute made real the imagined advantage Arsenal had been playing with at 0-0. It spelled a definitive end to Barça's post-halftime stretch of superiority, which, try as they might, the Blaugrana would not recover. Barça went back to rushing everything, Williamson and her defensive teammates sealed up all the cracks, and Arsenal, for the third and final time in these Champions League knockout rounds, upset expectations and won. This gives the Gunners their second ever WCL trophy, and they are still the only English team to win the competition.
For Barcelona, the loss is a painful missed opportunity. Barça's usual standard should be enough to beat a team like Arsenal without much trouble. Indeed, even in an actively bad performance against an Arsenal team that played out of its skin, the Blaugrana only narrowly fell short. But as a team of legitimately historic dimension, Barça should see its task as creating monuments to itself of such magnitude that the sport will forever be defined by them. Winning three consecutive WCL titles, and four in five years, would've been one such staggering work, and the team couldn't finish the job. And while Barcelona is still the most talented roster in women's soccer by some distance, it wouldn't be wrong to wonder if this could be the beginning of the end. Alexia, Caroline Graham Hansen, and Frida Rolfo—three pillars of the team during this stretch of dominance—all had bad finals, and all are on the wrong side of 30. (You could also include in there Mapi León, who turns 30 next month.) The club has expressed its commitment to keeping the women's team at the top of the game, but it has also seen world-class players like Mariona and Keira Walsh leave for competitors in England just over the past 12 months. It's unclear whether the cash-strapped club will have the ability and drive to reinforce the team in coming years, especially as England continues investing along its quest to make the WSL the unquestionable best league in Europe.
For Arsenal, this has to feel like just the beginning. As mentioned before, even a loss on Saturday would've allowed Arsenal to look at its future with shining eyes. In Daphne van Domselaar, Williamson, Mariona, and Russo, Arsenal has a world-class spine on which a formidable team could be built. The Gunners' next goal should be to knock Chelsea off its domestic perch the way they've knocked Barça off the continental one. To do so, Arsenal will certainly have to strengthen, as it finished 12 whole points behind the Blues in the WSL this season. But the Mariona signing, narrowly missing out on getting Walsh last summer, and the decision to cut its losses with Eidevall midseason do imply that the club is serious about getting better. And there's no better incentive for the pursuit of winning than the firsthand experience of how good winning feels.
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