There was no doubt about which way the 1994 Champions League final would go.
In one dressing room was Johan Cruyff’s 'Dream Team', European champions two years earlier and three-time La Liga winners. In the other was an AC Milan team that, with none of Barcelona’s aestheticism or elegance, were clearly an inferior team.
"Barcelona are favourites," Cruyff said before the game. "We're more complete, competitive and experienced than [in the 1992 final] at Wembley. Milan are nothing out of this world. They base their game on defence; we base ours on attack."
This quote is infamous for the arrogance and lazy preparation it betrays; for the doom it foreshadows. However, what is most telling is Cruyff’s line of reasoning, and the inherent assumption that progressive beats reactive, that beauty is truth.
In 1994, ‘attack is superior to defence’ was the prevailing wisdom. But a quarter of a century later, defence-first tacticians – those who prioritise pragmatism and counterattacks – still litter the game. Fabio Capello’s approach in Athens started it all, or at least revived the ‘Catenaccio’ school of thought that prioritised a strong backline.
AC Milan’s shock 4-0 win over Barcelona wasn’t just the day the 'Dream Team' died; it was the day reactive tactics were reborn.
In retrospect, it is obvious that Barcelona’s nonchalance would backfire against such a tactical mind as diligent as Capello's.
“You’re better than them, you’re going to win,” was Cruyff’s parting message to his players. It is precisely the kind of attitude that would play into the hands of a team who focused on exploiting opposition weakness.
Like Diego Simeone or Antonio Conte teams today, Capello's system was all about humility, hard work, pragmatism, and nullifying opposition strengths, meaning Barcelona were torn apart.
Capello set his team up to press only in their own half, suffocating the Barca midfield with a narrow blockade before ruthlessly exposing them down the flanks on the counterattack.
Dejan Savicevic’s impudent lob over Andoni Zubizarreta for the third goal, and Marcel Desailly – the defensive midfielder – running through for the fourth, were points of particular humiliation.
In the dressing room after the game, Cruyff was silent. The era was over, just like that. Barcelona didn’t win another trophy after Athens and Cruyff was eventually sacked in 1996.
Cruyff and Capello could hardly be more different in their managerial approach, and so the latter’s victory over the former had a symbolic – and political – resonance.
If Cruyff’s vision was intertwined with the socialist idealism of Catalonia, then it is fitting AC Milan’s 1994 victory came on the same night the club’s president Silvio Berlusconi won a vote in parliament that allowed him to lead a new right-wing government in Italy.
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The Cruyffian dream had died, and in its place was a new way of playing: determined, rational, and openly embracing qualities of destruction.
Barcelona’s demise had an instant impact on European football. Italy’s Serie A became a dominant force through the late 1990s, while the next three Champions Leagues were won by Louis van Gaal, Marcello Lippi, and Ottmar Hitzfeld – three coaches defined, to varying degrees, by sharp edges; by caution over creativity; by reactivity.
This post-Cruyffian way of playing the game would reach its zenith around 2006, when Lippi’s Italy won the World Cup against a backdrop of dry, defensive football becoming a suffocating force all around Europe.
The spell would be broken shortly after by Pep Guardiola reviving his mentor’s methods at Barcelona, but that decade-long Cruyff vacuum was long enough for a new style of manager to imprint itself permanently on the game.
Their spiritual leader, of course, is Jose Mourinho, the man who deliberately set himself up in opposition to his rival Guardiola; who found joy in disrupting and nullifying Cruyffian aesthetics; who dominated the 2000s with resilient defensive football; and who would not have got his big break in football without AC Milan’s 4-0 victory over Barcelona in Athens.
Offside Sport
Bobby Robson’s single year as Barcelona manager in 1996-97 is often regarded as a failure, and yet he won the Cup Winners’ Cup and Copa del Rey while finishing just two points behind league winners Real Madrid.
However, it was never really about results. Following Cruyff was always going to be a challenge, and Robson was just too old school – which is why his translator, a young Mourinho, served as a go-between for the players.
It was at Barcelona that Mourinho’s position grew beyond that of translator. He took an increasingly active role in tactics, befriending the likes of Guardiola as he added detail to Robson’s match plans.
Mourinho’s route into management might not have happened without this unique opportunity to link Robson with his players, and Robson would not have landed the Barca job when he did without Cruyff’s team unravelling after the 4-0 defeat to AC Milan.
A crude history of modern football illustrates the propensity for oscillation between expansion and compression, attack and defence, possession and counter. Just as one reaches its peak, the other pushes back.
Since the 1970s, Dutch Total Football and Italian Catenaccio have broadly laid the foundations for these two opposing sides, but while the cultural movement is usually a gradual and multi-faceted process, in May 1994 a single football match appeared to swing the pendulum.
Capello and Cruyff were perfect adversaries, their meeting in the Champions League final a crystallising moment for two contrasting and conflicting schools of thought, one on its way up and one on its way down.
So, when the Italian overthrew the Dutch in one of European football’s greatest ever upsets, he recalibrated the future of the sport.