If you’re watching the Champions League semifinal second legs this week you might notice a trend.

Three of the four teams involved are unified by their adherence to the following unsubtle, one-dimensional idea, borrowed from politics (elections fought on growth targets) and popular culture (consumerism): more is good.

The cartel of three clubs that now reaches this stage of the competition almost every season—Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich—does so precisely because of the “more is good” approach that they can afford to indulge in. They have the most money (unprecedented financial dominance), so they can buy the best players (unprecedented monopolization of talent), so they win most often (unprecedented levels of success.) Every summer, they buy all the best players, then every season, they win everything.

Tuesday programming alert: Watch Bayern Munich vs. FC Barcelona on the four main Sportsnet channels at 2:30 pm ET. || Sportsnet NOW || Broadcast schedule

On top of a monotonous lack of competition, the issue that this thinking brings about is that “more is good” becomes not just a mantra for the super-rich, but also an utterly unrealistic expectation for the not super-rich. As if everyone else is somehow failing because they can’t simply copy these three teams. For instance, Arsenal is just coming to the end of its most successful season in ten years, getting stronger with every passing game, using a squad built up with patience and care—and the first suggestion for how it should approach next season? It needs four new top-class first-team players. Now. More if possible. Also now.

For me, a visible corrective is required for all of those for whom success on these terms is not affordable: someone needs to keep suggesting that “more is good,” as pitched by The Big Three, is not the only way to win—for morale, more than anything. With this in mind, it’s somewhat of a plus that there are four semifinalists in the Champions League, not just three.

Enter: Juventus.

Whereas last season it was Atletico Madrid, and the season before it was Borussia Dortmund, this season it’s Juventus that offers the credible alternative to those clubs capable of conversing in the language of record transfer fees. An unlikely ideological outsider given the club’s old money credentials and national-league dominance, it’s an outsider all the same.

Juve can’t pay big for stars. The country and the league it’s tied to means that Juventus can be as big a fish in a small pond as it likes, but it simply doesn’t have access to the kind of money that Bayern, Barca, Real and the three richest English sides carry around with them. It can’t do “more is good” on the same scale as those clubs, so it’s realized that it has to compete on other terms. Those terms are as follows: Balance, continuity, cohesion, team spirit and quiet, well-placed risk taking.

This alternative approach begins with the transfer policy. Juve picks up players that the other semifinalists aren’t looking at. Slightly unfashionable players. Carlos Tevez was tainted by problems at Manchester City. Andrea Pirlo was considered too old at AC Milan. Paul Pogba was considered too young at Manchester United. Arturo Vidal was signed from a Bayer Leverkusen at a low-eb. And yet each of them has been one of the best players in the world over the last two seasons.

What is working is that these are players undervalued by the absolute elite, but, crucially they’re also given time together to form relationships that work on the pitch that they wouldn’t be elsewhere. Juve owns and controls a huge number of players in Italy, but it has kept a core group of players together in the inner-sanctum of its actual team. Of the 11 that started against Real last week, three players signed this season made the first 11, but the highest profile of these, Alvaro Morata, still cost around a fifth of what Gareth Bale cost its opponents, while Stefano Sturaro only came in for the injured Paul Pogba and Patrice Evra’s peripheral role at left-back shifted no in-team paradigms. The team stays the same a lot.

Big names and the big adjustments which often come hand in hand with them haven’t happened, even under new management this season. And that continuity absolutely showed when the rest of us got to see Juve beat Real, the most expensively assembled side in history, last week in the two teams’ semifinal first leg. Having developed their understanding of each other over a number of years, often quietly, away from the limelight of the latter stages of the Champions League, here all these Juve players were, absolutely sure of themselves under huge pressure; working hard for each other and combining brilliantly both on and off the ball—as a collective, against Real’s slightly disparate group of individuals.

Wednesday programming alert: Watch Real Madrid vs. Juventus on the four main Sportsnet channels at 2:30 pm ET. || Sportsnet NOW || Broadcast schedule

And the end result? The cut-price alternative to “more is good” didn’t just compete in that match, it won. Carlo Ancelotti’s Real, a team which sold two of its key cogs immediately after winning the competition last season (Angel Di Maria and Xabi Alonso), was knocked off balance by the team that has stayed together in the face of “more is good” ideas and then picked off by it. This Wednesday, Juve will be favourite to progress.

This doesn’t prove that “more is good” will stop being the dominant force in European football for the foreseeable future (it has been for a long time and there is very little in place to stop it: as long as the absolute best players are concentrated around a tiny cartel of clubs, they will tend to win). And it certainly doesn’t prove that any non-super-rich club not doing as well is failing (because it’s really tough). But Juve’s competence in getting this far in the Champions League and its excellence against Real does offer hope for any teams that can’t afford “more is good.”

At the very least, Juve’s run proves that it’s possible to go far without nine-digit spending summers; it proves that “more is good” isn’t the only game in town, even if it will always be the safest option. There are viable, competitive alternatives, just about and the unsubtly of “more is good” means it can be out-maneuvered in the right circumstances.

In times like these, that’s about as optimistic as it gets. Not every club can do “more is good.”

Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter