To see the Arsenal squad at training this week, you wouldn’t necessarily think they were about to play for just a second Champions League final in their history. So many people at the club say they’ve just been more relaxed, and that’s actually been the case for every European game this season.
It has been a quirk of this otherwise arduously laboured campaign. There’s been so much focus on the Premier League and everything that great quest represents, that the greatest trophy in club football has almost been… overlooked.
“That’s the way we are all feeling,” Mikel Arteta said, “and that’s the energy that I feel amongst the team and the club. This is the stage that we want to be, that we have earned.”
The wonder is whether that feeling of freedom changes depending on how this week goes.
If Arsenal fail to beat Fulham at home, or if they get past Atletico Madrid as a title looks to pass them by, the Champions League will carry an even greater weight than it already does.
Victory would not just save a season, after all. It would transform it.
A season that has been cast as potentially descending into the worst “bottle job” of all time could still become the most magical in the club’s history.
And now, as they get a feel for the Metropolitano pitch, the grand trophy comes into sight for the first time. That may change the feeling. It may bring pressure, where there has previously been little.
All of that also comes amid an awareness that even getting to the Champions League final may have another effect. It will give the club an immense lift, a wave that potentially carries them to a title.
Arteta has naturally been keen to concentrate on such positives, to cast everything as an opportunity or “a privilege”.
It’s just that few others would necessarily describe playing a Diego Simeone side in a Champions League knock-out as a “privilege”. It tends to be a battle.
They’re “very, very competitive,” as Martin Odegaard put it, with some understatement. Arteta meanwhile praised the “communion” between the team, the manager, the club and even this relatively new stadium. No concerns about moving the atmosphere from their great old ground at Vicente Calderon here. They all come together for nights like this, as they showed against Barcelona in the quarter-final.
That stadium may this time be soaked by a rainstorm, deepening the sense of a game that has to be endured.
Atletico’s own ferocity may then be fired by how much much more desperate for this they are than Arsenal. It isn’t a break from anything for them. Atletico have no domestic title challenge. They last week lost the Copa Del Rey final to Real Sociedad.
That has only intensified the will to give Antoine Griezmann the send-off he deserves before going off to MLS, to fittingly crown an entire era at the club.
Atletico have so much unfinished business in this competition, and this is the first time in the Simeone era when they have got further than Real Madrid - the local rivals that have eliminated them on five occasions.
It all means that this semi-final pairs the two biggest clubs not to have won the Champions League.
If that reality has only deepened a pressure on Arsenal from underwhelming recent performances, they haven’t been playing anywhere near as disappointingly as Atletico. Simeone's side have only two wins from nine.
This is far from a great Atletico. It is not just that they don’t defend like they used to, it is that they can’t. Simeone doesn’t have the quality. They’ve been porous.
An argument even persists in Spain that one of the reasons they’re here is because Barcelona have their own Champions League complex about Atletico.