On Saturday, Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid play a single game to crown the best club team in Europe, and effectively, the world.

[ Predictions | Match page | Real X-factor | Atletico X-factor | Bigger than Super Bowl? ]

The 2016 UEFA Champions League final may officially be its own standalone match in Milan, Italy, but comprehending this Madrid derby requires an understanding of the 120 minutes played between Atletico Madrid and Real Madrid on May 24, 2014 in Lisbon, Portugal.

[ Champions League Live: Real Madrid vs. Atletico Madrid, 2:45 p.m. ET ]

In the 2014 Champions League final, Real Madrid beat Atletico Madrid 4-1, but that scoreline hardly tells the story. Atletico Madrid led 1-0 at the end of 90 minutes. Mere seconds before the final whistle, Real Madrid defender Sergio Ramos levelled to send the game to extra time, where Atletico Madrid ran out of gas and fell apart.

With only the finest of margins finally giving Real Madrid its La Decima, what has changed in the two years since Lisbon?

First of all, Atletico Madrid’s defense has improved. That says a great deal about Atleti, considering they won the 2013-14 Spanish league title on the back of their defense. In that season, Los Rojiblancos only conceded 26 goals domestically and six European goals prior to the final.

Incredibly, the 2015-16 domestic campaign ended with Atletico allowing only 18 goals. In Europe, Atleti enter the final having conceded just seven times, but two of those occurred when they went down to 10 men at the Camp Nou and another two came against mighty Bayern in Munich. Behind Jan Oblak (who set a new club record with 24 clean sheets in La Liga), Atletico Madrid held Barcelona scoreless in the second leg of the quarterfinal and kept Bayern out for the final 15 minutes of their semifinal second leg on the road.

When analyzing statistics, one cannot help but note that Atletico Madrid’s 63 goals in La Liga and 16 goals in the Champions League are down from the 77 domestic goals and 26 Champions League goals the club managed in the 2013-14 campaign. However, those numbers do not pertain to the 2014 final because Diego Costa, who scored 27 goals in La Liga and eight in the Champions League that season, only lasted nine minutes in the 2014 Champions League final.

In many ways, Costa was Atletico Madrid’s attack. So, in effect, Atleti became one-third less likely to score after the first 10 minutes of the 2014 final. Luckily for them, they found the target via a defender on a set piece, and the match had been all but won until Ramos shattered hearts in one half of Madrid and won hearts in the other half.

This time around, Atletico Madrid has French forward Antoine Griezmann fully fit, along with club legend Fernando Torres in fine form. Torres has seven goals in his last 11 appearances across all competitions, and Griezmann’s 22 La Liga goals and seven Champions League goals are comparable to Costa’s tallies in 2013-14. Only, Griezmann does not require special horse placenta treatments to gain fitness and feature for only nine minutes in the final. The 25-year-old expects to start and feature for the full 90 minutes and beyond.

Atleti also enters the 2016 Champions League final decidedly more balanced in attack and improved in the back compared to their 2014 finalists. Of course, Real Madrid can argue that it has also improved in the two years since La Decima.

More accurately, though, things got better after the appointment of Frenchman Zinedine Zidane in January as club manager. Sacking two managers in the two years since winning the Champions League hardly hints at improvement, but if Zidane took the reins when the La Liga season began, Real Madrid would be champions of Spain, having wrapped up the domestic campaign with 12 wins on the bounce.

In the game prior to the 12-match winning streak, however, Atletico Madrid went to the Santiago Bernabeu in late February and handed Zidane his first defeat as a manager in a 1-0 result that featured a Griezmann goal. Zidane did not take the loss well and hinted at massive changes in the summer, including possibly on the bench.

In contrast, Atletico Madrid manager Diego Simeone seemingly has no threat of the guillotine, partly due to his devastating record of only one defeat in his last 10 meetings against Real Madrid, including five wins over that stretch.

In terms of direct changes for Real Madrid under Zidane versus the squad managed by Carlo Ancelotti in 2014, Gareth Bale’s freedom to get into central areas provides a physical and emotional shift for the club. Cristiano Ronaldo’s 35 goals in La Liga and 16 goals in Champions League hardly hint that he’s a fading superstar, but the team’s shift to relying more heavily on Bale is impossible to miss.

"I'm now enjoying Zidane. I have more freedom,” Bale said in the buildup to Saturday’s match.

In the same interview, Bale also described the prospect of losing in the final as the "ultimate failure." Atletico lived that disappointment in 2014, and as much as the team has improved on the pitch since then, the added motivation of avenging that defeat promises to make Atleti even hungrier than the side that nearly pulled off the upset in Lisbon.

On the whole, Atletico Madrid appears to be a notably stronger team than the one that featured in the 2014 Champions League final. Real Madrid is obviously a side chalked with higher-priced players, but Los Blancos still remain a team in transition.

Will Real Madrid’s strong form carry into the final and claim the club’s record 11th European Cup? Or will an improved Atletico Madrid avenge its 2014 loss and win its first-ever Champions League title? If 2014 has taught us anything, it is that neither half of Madrid will be celebrating until the final whistle sounds.

Shahan Ahmed is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow Shahan on Twitter: @ShahanLA and @perfectpass

Related Video: