Barcelona v Juventus: Battle for the treble between the have-everythings and the have-nots

A few days before all the tension of Berlin began to take hold, a relaxed Andres Iniesta described a more serene picture as he sat in Camp Nou.

“The image of Xavi lifting the Champions would be the perfect goodbye for him, for Barcelona and for all his teammates,” Iniesta enthused.

The Spanish maestro, however, is not the only legend who has his teammates and so many others looking to do him justice. If Gigi Buffon wins the  Champions League with Juventus, it would complete a remarkable set of honours, as well as provide a fitting last destination for a path that has taken the goalkeeper from a victorious World Cup final in Berlin to Serie B and back to the German capital again.

That this season’s European showpiece will culminate with one of those endings is apt because “perfection” - as Iniesta put it - is the underlying theme to this final.

To decide it, for one, Juve manager Max Allegri is pretty much going to have come up with the perfect game plan in order to successfully stop the world’s perfect player in Leo Messi just doing what he does.

Whoever comes out on top, it will result in a season that is impossible to top. Because, for just the third time in the history of the European Cup, both finalists are aiming for a treble. Both are aiming for the most successful season you can have, both are aiming to win every major trophy they can. Both are aiming for perfection.

That in itself is ironic and symbolically significant, however, because it represents the inevitable flip side to a wholly imperfect situation in European football.

The previous two finals involving treble-chasers were in 1999 and 2010, with Bayern Munich losing out to Manchester United in the former and then Internazionale in the latter, but the fact another has come around more quickly does not feel like a coincidence.

It reflects the increasing effect of resources accumulating at extreme ends of the club game, to the detriment of competition beyond these elite clubs. Even within them, though, there are tiers.

The sequence of finals and potential winners should not escape attention in that regard. If Barca do win on Saturday, it will be the first time in history they and Real Madrid have claimed the trophy in close succession, and Bayern Munich winning it in 2013 only emphasises the issue.

Those three clubs have occupied 15 of the last 24 semi-final places, and are clearly a super-club cabal all of their own, just ahead of about four English clubs benefiting from new Premier League money. That the elite trio have not yet met in the final itself is merely down to quirks of fortune and the different nuances of knock-out football.

This showpiece does follow another trend. It is the third season in a row in which one of those super-clubs has met someone from the third tier, who have pretty much defied modern football economics to do so well. The difference is presented in the scale of the task Juve face, and the contrast between the make-ups of the squads.

It was similar for Borussia Dortmund and Atletico Madrid.

Many might point to the fact those last two finals went right down to the last minute, but that does not seem like a coincidence either. Rather than a situation where it could really have gone either way, it felt like both Dortmund and Atletico were pushing themselves right to the edge, and eventually gave way. That will happen when you don’t have the resources to eventually cover inevitable exhaustion. It also reflects the increasing polarisation of the games into fixed tiers, the have-everythings and have-nots.

Juventus themselves represent a scaled-down version of this problem in Italy, as illustrated by how they are attempting to win everything they’re in.

It says much that, whatever happens on Saturday, European football will see its fourth treble winners in the last seven years.

That we are now seeing this “perfection” so often does not look like the best picture for the game as a whole.