Champions League final: Why Liverpool and Tottenham, this decade's 'nearly' clubs, can survive Madrid defeat

Losing on Saturday should not affect either well-run club, trophies are the only thing they miss

Take the top 20 European clubs as currently ranked by Uefa. Since 2006, all but two of them have won more than one league, cup or European trophy. Bayern Munich have 16 titles to their name. Barcelona have 17. Shakhtar Donetsk, 18. Who are the two clubs to have claimed only one, measly honour each? Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool.

That will change at the Wanda Metropolitano, of course. And while much has been made of the fact that either Mauricio Pochettino or Jurgen Klopp will win the first trophy of their respective spells in charge, Saturday night will also be a rare, unalloyed triumph for one of this young century’s ‘nearly’ clubs.

Both Tottenham and Liverpool have only one League Cup to show for their efforts in the past 13 years. Both could have won significantly more. For Spurs, the two tentative runs at the Premier League title in 2016 and 2017 under Pochettino particularly stick in the craw, but there were also the League Cup final defeats in 2009 and 2015. Six semi-finals - four FA Cup, two League Cup - have been lost over the same period.

Liverpool, meanwhile, carry a greater sense of what might have been. Since their FA Cup win in 2006, they have finished second in the Premier League three times but never by more than four points. Twice, they have been Champions League runners-up. They were FA Cup finalists in 2012, League Cup and Europa League finalists in 2016. Four semi-final appearances have ended in failure.

In both cases, if the title challenges had proved successful and one or two of the cup competitions had also fallen their way, these clubs would look back on the last decade as a distinguished era in their long histories. It would be Tottenham’s best period of success by some margin. Instead, the record books will show relatively barren spells which promised much but delivered little.

Saturday’s final is therefore something of a double-edged sword. Whatever the result, one club will be celebrated for having claimed the greatest prize there is on offer, the other will be reminded of their long run without tangible success. On the one hand, critics will pore over the minutiae of how the winners did it, promising the inside story on the process behind it all. On the other, they will ask the losers what the point of all this ‘progress’ is if it does not translate into trophies.

Pochettino’s view on the value of silverware is well-documented. “It only builds your ego,” he sighed back in January, tired of debating Tottenham’s record in cup competitions after another exit. Klopp holds a similar opinion. “If only the best counts and effort doesn’t count then life is s***,” he said in December. “You can do pretty much everything right but in the end one team can do a bit more right and you don’t get it.”

It is a controversial view to take, particularly in this country, but it is increasingly a sensible one. As elite European football contracts to the point where only around a dozen teams can realistically expect to compete for the top prizes, and as league and European competitions take on more importance than domestic cups, ‘silverware’ becomes less and less reliable as a measure of how well a particular club or manager is performing.

This year’s final is a testament to that. Neither coach has brought a major honour to their respective club yet, and yet neither has come close to losing their job at any point over the last four or five years. Their progress has always been clear and demonstrable. Each season, they have moved their clubs have moved closer and closer to a position where they can compete for the sport’s greatest prizes, even if the cabinets have remained empty.

Contrast this with each of their greatest domestic rivals. Manchester United have won more silverware than Liverpool since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement despite all their problems, picking up an FA Cup, a League Cup and the Europa League. But which of the two clubs has challenged more regularly for the top honours, and which would you back to do so again next season?

Arsenal waited nine years to win a trophy under Arsene Wenger. After the FA Cup triumph in 2014, two more followed in 2015 and 2017, but the many problems at the club remained unsolved, festering underneath. Arsenal continued to regress while Tottenham continued to move forward. The power balance in north London has since tipped decisively.

And whereas the recruitment at Old Trafford and the Emirates of late has been geared towards achieving short-term goals - whether that be a top-four place, or success in lesser cup competitions - Tottenham and Liverpool have sought players that are yet to reach their prime, knowing that their best is yet to come.

On Sunday morning, United and Arsenal will still be ahead of both Tottenham and Liverpool on pure trophy count over the last decade. One of the finalists will have added to their tally, the other will wake up still a ‘nearly’ team. Yet whichever it is, they will be among those clubs best placed to return to this stage and compete for such honours again.