Each remaining Champions League team’s superpower

It also took time for Andres Iniesta to find his form this season, while Sergio Busquets and the Barcelona defense have suffered numerous injuries. Barca’s defensive purchases weren’t spectacular to begin with, and then Thomas Vermaelen missed six-plus months.

Barca are a very good team that can win the Champions League, but what if Suarez kept his teeth in his mouth? What if Iniesta hadn’t been run into the ground over the previous campaigns? What if Barca had made better decisions in the market, bought healthy defenders? This could already be an all-time great team. Instead, they’re just pretty good.

PSG are the bad guys of this competition, having beaten Chelsea in a wonderful villain vs. villain Round of 16 battle. They have everything that people hate about football clubs: owned by fabulously wealthy foreigners, no history, incredibly arrogant and, most importantly, dirty on the pitch.

None of their ultra-expensive defenders have had great seasons, but they’re protected by a midfield that absolutely batters the living hell out of their opposition. Thiago Motta’s been this kind of player forever, but his midfield mates Blaise Matuidi and Marco Verratti have joined in the fun. Verratti’s especially fun to hate, because he’s both the dirtiest of the bunch and the classiest passer.

It’s not clear if PSG are good enough to beat Barca over two legs, but they’ll make sure the Blaugrana don’t go into the semifinals injury-free.

You know what no one likes? Defensive-minded midfielders. Whether they be true holders, destroyers or box-to-box runners, defensive midfielders are usually the most unappreciated players on the pitch. Real Madrid chairman Florentino Perez has a particularly intense distaste for these players, so he doesn’t buy any, and leaves Carlo Ancelotti to figure out how to fit all of the Galacticos into one team.

Ancelotti’s done fabulously well for himself, converting James Rodriguez into a fairly competent attack-minded central midfielder and Toni Kroos into a fairly competent holder. Buying these players to play them in these positions is insane, of course, but that’s not Ancelotti’s concern. And is playing Kroos and James out of position better than dropping them to start Asier Illaramendi and Sami Khedira? Of course.

Madrid won’t repeat as champions because their team doesn’t make any sense, but kudos to them for getting this far without a real midfield.

Like the perfect combination of Jupp Heynckes’ Bayern Munich and Tony Pulis’ Stoke City, Atlético Madrid are here to destroy your hopes and dreams with their set piece prowess. Usually, teams who are this good at set pieces focus on that area of their game because they know they’re going to get outplayed. But Atléti don’t get outplayed at all. They Pulis it up and they’re good with the ball.

With Pepe out for Real Madrid, set pieces could be huge for the Rojiblancos. Raphael Varane is a sensational athlete, but still a kid. Los Merengues’ three attacking midfielder lineup limits their set piece defense and attack. Diego Godin and Miranda will be the stars of this tie. They will score. Probably more than once.

And, while set pieces are the thing Atléti are best at compared to their competition, it’s not like they’re bad at anything else. They don’t have the depth or top-end talent to beat Barca or Madrid in the league, but they’re basically the perfect knockout team, and it shouldn’t be the least bit surprising if they smash Real.

Serie A is not a good league. They fell to fourth in the UEFA coefficients and they’re under threat from France. The years since Calciopoli have not been kind, and the folks at FIGC have to be wondering if rooting out one particular form of corruption was worth the hassle. Juventus, AC Milan and Inter Milan used to be three of the world’s best. Now, the Milans are a mess and Juve have failed to come all the way back from their exile to Serie B.

But hey, it’s not for a lack of trying, because this Juventus side is pretty impressive. They’re not the Juve of Alessandro Del Piero, Pavel Nedved and Fabio Cannavaro, but shhhh. Don’t think about that. What they are is the best team in Italy by an absurd order of magnitude, the only one with multiple world-class players, and a sign that the league might not be completely impossible to revive.

Carlos Tevez, Paul Pogba and Arturo Vidal laid a legitimate beating on Borussia Dortmund, and they’re good enough to do it to Monaco. The fans of other “big” Italian teams might not be willing to admit it, but Juventus is carrying a whole country on their backs, and doing it very well.

Monaco are basically a very poor man’s Atlético Madrid. This is both a good thing to be, because Atléti are great, and a hilarious thing to think about, because Monaco shouldn’t be a poor man’s anything. They don’t have defenders as good as Godin and Miranda or any sensational all-around talents like Kóke, but these guys can defend frustratingly well.

Arsenal beat the holy hell out of Monaco in the second leg of their Round of 16 tie, but only because Monaco knew they had an almost unbeatable lead from the first leg, where they baffled the Gunners. Right back-turned-defensive midfielder Fabinho broke up play and started counters better than any non-elite player has any business doing against Arsenal, and he did it because the two men ahead of him pressed Francis Coquelin into oblivion.

This is going to be a lot harder to do against Pogba, Vidal and Andrea Pirlo, who make up arguably the best central midfield in world football. But they’re certainly going to try, and if they can keep a clean sheet for the first 45 minutes, their tie is going to get really interesting.

Basically, inverse Monaco, and everything we want in a Champions League underdog. If you’re not going to win, you might as well be entertaining, and Porto have got this far on the back of scoring really awesome goals.

Are Porto actually better at being fun than Barca and Madrid? Well, no, probably not, but there’s no such thing as a wildly entertaining 2-0 win for Barca or Madrid because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to expect. A team with Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo needs to score six or seven to impress. Porto? As long as the goals are really good, a 2-0 win is a masterpiece.

And the goals are always really good. Porto has the good sense not to bore us with set pieces and tap-ins off nice-but-not-jaw-dropping moves. They score goals off backheel assists, they blast 35-yard free kicks into the top corner, and Jackson Martinez and Yacine Brahimi are both members of the Trying Crazy Shit All-Stars. This team rules, even if they have no chance of progressing.

Oh, you’re entertained by Porto? Well screw you, you’ll get a complete decimation and like it. Porto are a gazelle; Bayern are a hungry lion on steroids. Change allegiances now and enjoy their murderous rampage.

Bayern don’t have any of the four or five best pure attacking players in the world, but they don’t need them, because the players they do have are (a) in the top 15 or so and (b) good at everything. They press, they create, they keep the ball, they score. They can cover more distance, more quickly than everyone else because, unlike Barca and Madrid, the players on the bench are not inferior to the starters. If Messi or Ronaldo is tired, their teams have a problem. If a Bayern player is tired, they make a sub and there’s no drop-off.

Their midfielders, individually, are as good as any other team’s. Their defenders too. It’s usually impossible to work out what formation they’re playing and it doesn’t matter, because everyone is in the right place at the right time. Everyone who starts for Bayern could be playing in four different positions and it wouldn’t make any difference.

The only thing that threatens to derail Bayern’s season is injuries, but those issues have illustrated just how good they are. If any other team had Bayern’s luck, they’d fall apart. Bayern still appear to be on track for another treble. This competition is only in doubt because all human minds and bodies are fragile; Bayern are clearly the best team in the world.