Antoine Griezmann’s Atletico legacy is secure but can he finally achieve his Champions League dream?

Amid the touches of farce, there was a touch of class. On a night when others kept inadvertently finding opponents, Antoine Griezmann produced an exquisite flick to release Julian Alvarez and send him speeding through a hole where the Tottenham defence was supposed to be to score. That was the last round of the Champions League .

The quarter-finals could be the last round in the competition for Griezmann, presumably ever. The French World Cup winner with the German surname has spent his entire club career in Spain but will cross the Atlantic in the summer to join Orlando City; had the Major League Soccer club got their way, he would have already gone. Instead, Griezmann’s long goodbye includes a final tilt at the Champions League.

It may be cruelly fitting if his 13th and last bid is ended by former employers. In 2019, after joining Barcelona , he said winning the Champions League was his “dream”. It probably felt more of a nightmare when his first season at the Nou Camp ended with the historic 8-2 thrashing by Bayern Munich.

His second included a 4-1 loss to Paris Saint-Germain in Catalonia. Those two seasons at Barcelona cost Griezmann glory in La Liga, too: for one who has often shown an impeccable sense of timing and exhibited good movement, he has arguably been in the wrong place at the wrong time: Atleti have won La Liga twice under Diego Simeone , but Griezmann was a Real Sociedad player in 2014 and a Barcelona footballer in 2021. Antoine Griezmann assisted Julian Alvarez to score against Tottenham in the previous round of the Champions League (Getty Images) And yet a man who may have been miscast as Lionel Messi’s long-term replacement at Barcelona will instead go as the greatest Simeone footballer of them all.