All great teams must fall, it is the immutable law of the game, and so when Real Madrid’s three-straight Champions League winners fell to Ajax Amsterdam’s partly homegrown, entirely low-budget ensemble on Tuesday the moment felt like a thrilling rejuvenation of the elite game.

It went the same way for the great Ajax team of the early 1970s who won three in a row, overtaken by the Bayern Munich of the mid-part of that decade later dethroned themselves by the late 1970s, early 1980s, English hegemony of Liverpool, Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa. There will be a time for the modern Madrid to be celebrated for four titles in five years but not in the immediate aftermath of crashing in all three major competitions at the Bernabeu in the space of one week.

For the Madrid of the last decade, the European success of the last five years has always come at a price, one that was ultimately unsustainable for the club, ignored by a supine Spanish media, and unchallenged under the autocracy of the president Florentino Perez. As long as there was glory in the Champions League it never seemed to matter that the club were borrowing to pay a spiralling wage bill, selling players to stay in profit and staggering under a delayed, debt-heavy stadium redevelopment.