The 2020 Champions League final between Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain stands out as an anomaly in recent seasons.
Kingsley Coman’s goal proved the only one of the only final in the past five not contested between some combination of Premier League clubs and Real Madrid. Bayern’s success makes them the only winners from outside that group in seven years, too.
The context, as the pair prepare to meet in the last-16 tonight, casts two of Europe’s biggest clubs as strange outsiders again.
In the red corner, Bayern, in the blue, PSG, but between them, in the ring proper, animosity is brewing once more, between Juventus, Real Madrid and Barcelona — the trio of holdout European Super League clubs who launched a new and somewhat airy plan for the competition last week — and the Premier League elite, who withdrew from the original ESL and have perhaps realised since that their own division is on its way to becoming a de-facto version.
Bayern and PSG are hardly peas in a pod: the former are majority fan-owned, the latter the pet-project of an oil-rich state. Bayern you sense, did not want the Super League on principle; PSG, firmly in bed with FIFA and UEFA, and backed by sovereign wealth, did not need it.
It is undoubtedly the French club for whom winning this competition, right now, matters more. Off the back of a World Cup that, for all manner of reasons, put Qatar on the sporting map, lifting the Champions League for the first time would stand as the ultimate sporting return on their huge investment.
Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe are in contention to play after injury, though the latter is a doubt having returned to training only on Monday.
The draw has not been kind to PSG, who, for the second season in a row, have been handed a heavyweight knockout tie after failing to top their group. Nor has timing, tonight’s first-leg coming after back-to-back defeats against Marseille and Monaco, the latter prompting a row between Neymar and sporting director Luis Campos.
“It’s part of football, things happen every day,” Neymar said. “It’s like with my girlfriend. Football isn’t just love and friendship. There is respect but there have to be disagreements and discussions are needed to help you improve.”
