A scoreline that doesn’t so much reflect the truth of the game but a wider reality. There is a chasm between Manchester City and the rest of Europe, and certainly to Bayern Munich. They are the continent’s best team. Despite the frustration that Pep Guardiola has long faced in the Champions League, Abu Dhabi’s lavishly-funded political project - of which the manager is the key part - has in truth made success an inevitability, and it is impossible not to feel like it might be this year. It might even be a treble, further reflecting that total superiority.
Thomas Tuchel can fairly argue that this 3-0 first-leg defeat would have been nowhere near as bad had some of his key defensive players done their jobs properly at key moments, but that was still just looking to reduce the margins; to bring it a bit closer. The mistakes were really an illustration of how stretched Bayern were. City’s superiority was still evident even when the game was tight. By the end, as Erling Haaland slotted the third for another of the season’s inevitabilities, it was abundant.
