Everywhere you look, there are pulsatingly brilliant stories in this season's Champions League quarterfinals.
Take Benfica, who recently moved on four players who now feature for other clubs in the competition's last eight for over €350 million — Joao Felix (€126m to Atletico Madrid), Enzo Fernandez (€121m to Chelsea), Ederson (€40m to Man City) and Ruben Dias (€68m) — and who've not been in a Champions League semifinal for 33 years, yet here they are on the verge of reaching one if they can beat Inter Milan.
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Or there's the fact that we have three Serie A clubs in the quarterfinals for the first time in 17 years; if you're old enough, you'll swoon at that idea. There was a time when Italian football had European competition under its thumb. This is a renaissance after some dark ages.
Among them, Napoli, who face Serie A rivals AC Milan. The fanatical supporters of Diego Maradona's former club have never, in Neapolitan history, seen their team go this far in the European Cup or Champions League. But, don't forget, nor had they seen Napoli become Italian champions since 1990: something which is about to be remedied and in dramatic style.
Your eye could easily be caught by Pep Guardiola taking his Manchester City project back to Bayern Munich, where he successfully coached on the domestic front but never won them the Champions League they craved. He won everything else while he was there, changed the ideology of the club, thrilled with his football — yet left some die-hard traditionalists yearning for Bayern's old-school, arrogant «power-fussball» rather than anything too pretty and geometrical.
That the tie pits new Bayern coach Thomas Tuchel against Guardiola adds sauce
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