15th European title – Real Madrid beat Dortmund to win fifth Champions League since 2015

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Dortmund 0-2 Real Madrid  

Real Madrid continued their seemingly unrivalled dominance of Europe’s premier competition on Saturday with an 2-0 win over Borussia Dortmund to take the club’s trophy haul in the European Cup and Champions League to 15 trophies. The latest success now means the LaLiga giants have won the tournament more than twice as many times as second-placed AC Milan, who have seven titles to their name.

In a match that was far from the one-sided affair that many expected, Madrid were forced to work for every inch of the Wembley pitch. Rather than sit deep and hope for the best, Dortmund instead took the game to their Spanish opponents in the first half and had a flurry of chances to open the scoring, most notably through chances from Karim Adeyemi and Niclas Füllkrug. At half time the Bundesliga side looked determined to win, while Madrid looked somewhat frustrated with their performances in the opening 45 minutes.

However, experience and raw talent won the day for the Spanish side in the second half. After the reset Madrid took the game to Dortmund and broke the deadlock in the 74th minute, when a perfectly placed corner from Toni Kroos found Dani Carvajal at the front post, to tap home a glancing header into the back of the net. Vinicius Jr then doubled Madrid’s lead and confirmed the famous win on the night with a well-placed finish 10 minutes later. Not only did Carvajal’s goal put Madrid on their way to their fifteenth major European trophy, but it also placed the Spanish defender level with former Madrid legend Paco Gento as the player with the most European Cups to his name with six. Luka Modric and the aforementioned Kroos also join Carvajal at the top of a most illustrious list.  

Although Ancelotti’s side is a star-studded collection of some of football’s most impressive talents, the manner in which the LaLiga side have assembled their continent-conquering team is perhaps even more impressive. When we consider the purchase value (i.e the price of each transfer fee for every player in the squad) of this Madrid side, it stands at €573 milliIon. That may seem like a lot – it is certainly much more than Dortmund’s purchase price of €314m – but when compared to the rest of European football it sits well below most of Madrid’s typical rivals. For example, when compared to every team in Europe, Madrid’s squad comes in as the ninth most expensive assembled, well below the likes of first-placed Chelsea (€1.05 billion), Manchester City (€940.7m) in second, Paris Saint-Germain (€886.4m) in third or Manchester United (€863.1m) in fourth, In fact, the squad that Ancelotti guided to Champions League success cost less to assemble than Newcastle’s (€616m). Which goes some way to showcasing the Spanish club’s remarkable efficiency in the transfer market. 

When we then compare the purchase value of Europe’s biggest clubs with the market value of their respective squads, we can then gauge how much said clubs have improved their players after signing them. Clubs with a higher squad market value than the initial purchase value will, by definition, have seen their players grow in value. While clubs with higher market values than the initial purchase value would have seen their players lose value after join their clubs. And, again, we see Madrid outperform their European rivals here. As the graph below shows, the difference between Madrid’s purchase value and current squad market value is +€464m. That beats clubs typically famed for developing young talents, such as fifth-placed Real Sociedad (+€397.7m), fourth-placed Bayer Leverkusen (+€422.2m) and Arsenal (+€462.1m) in third. In fact, the only club that beats Madrid in this metric across all of Europe are none other than LaLiga rivals Barcelona, who have an impressive return of +€467.1m – but that is largely due to the influx of impressive youth graduates from the club’s famed La Masia academy.

Another way to look at Madrid’s success in the transfer market is to consider how much each of their stars has improved since making the move to the Spanish capital. As the table shows, most of the players that featured in Saturday’s final have all improved dramatically at Madrid, whether that be Eduardo Camavinga (+€35m in market value since joining the club), Jude Bellingham (+€60m), Rodrygo (+€60m), Federico Valverde (+€94m) or Vinicius Jr (+€115m). In total, those five clubs cost Madrid just €229m in transfer fees. And to put into context the contrast between Madrid’s modern practices in the window to how they used to behave, that tally is only slightly more than what the club once paid for the services of Eden Hazard, Luke Jović and Reiner in a single transfer window five seasons ago.