Paris St.-Germain and Bayern Munich meet on Sunday in the final of the Champions League, the richest and biggest club competition in European football. The final will be played at Benfica’s Estádio da Luz in Lisbon. Bayern and PSG both won comfortably in the semi-finals.
TV: Sunday’s game will be broadcast in the United States on the CBS Sports Network and, in Spanish, on Univision. Television coverage begins at 2:30 p.m. Eastern, but – and this can be important when planning your day – kickoff is at 3:00 p.m.
The lineups for the finals are out. One change for each team.
Bayern Munich’s Hansi Flick has made one change from the semi-finals, with French winger Kingsley Coman replacing Ivan Perisic on the left. Perisic had played very well, but he also played a lot, so this may just be a search for fresher legs. Perisic is 31, and has played a lot. Coman should be an injection of energy, but he is also faster, and that can help with defensive coverage.
“It is very important that we can cut out the passing lanes so that we do not allow the opposition space to play the ball in,” Flick said Saturday. “We have always played with a high line against the opposition and in the end we have results that do.”
Bayern’s XI: Neuer; Davies, Alaba, Boateng, Kimmich; Thiago, Goretzka; Coman, Müller, Gnabry; Lewandowski
PSG’s biggest change is in goal, where the talented Keylor Navas is returning from a leg injury. But Manager Thomas Tuchel also said Saturday that Marco Verratti (who starts on the bench) is back to health. He can not go 90 minutes, if 120, but he is a valuable reserve if his team needs him. He had missed the quarterfinals but made a late comeo as a sub against RB Leipzig in the semi-finals.
PSG XI: Navas, Kehrer, Silva, Kimpembe, Bernat, Marquinhos, Herrera, Paredes, Di Maria, Neymar, Mbappé.
The finale in a few figures.
The only numbers that matter are the ones on the scoreboard, of course, but here are a few more to keep in mind today.
425: That’s the number of days it has been since the first Champions League match of this season. The five-month delay of the pandemic has made it the longest in the history of the competition.
-1: That is the number of days until the start of the new European season opens. (France was first on Saturday.) England, Spain, Germany and Italy will start their new seasons in September.
15: Goals were scored by Robert Lewandowski of Bayern in this season’s Champions League. He needs two more to match Cristiano Ronaldo’s record for one campaign.
5: Bayern’s total of Champions League titles. Only Real Madrid (13), AC Milan (7) and Liverpool (6) have more.
1: Champions League titles won by French clubs. Monaco, in 2004, was the last French team to make the final. Marseille, in 1993, was the only French club to win it.
Help me look bad when I’m with my friends later.
As always, our chief foot correspondent, Rory Smith, is here to help. Here is his example:
There is no such thing as a bad Champions League final. This is the culmination of the European season, arguably the single biggest club game of the year (and possibly the biggest annual sporting event on the planet, including Super Bowl). When the stakes are so high, the drama and tension is inherent.
But that does not mean that all Champions League finals are good. Some are overwhelmed by their own significance, and the game itself is expensive and cautious and inhibiting: think 2003, when AC Milan and Juventus produced 120 minutes of football so poorly that both teams would have to be disqualified, if even last year’s effort between Liverpool and Tottenham.
Many turn into exposures, where one team is so apparently superior to the other that the outcome begins to feel in advance: Barcelona, say, in 2009, 2011 and 2015, as Real Madrid in 2017 and 2018.
The true classics are the exceptions: The last few years, perhaps only the exceptional win of Liverpool in 2005, the remarkable opposition of Chelsea in 2012 and the last victory of Bayern, in 2013, could justify this description.
Despite the eeriness of an empty stadium and the fact that it is August, there are reasons to believe that 2020 may deserve a place in the canon. Both Bayern and PSG have star quality: Robert Lewandowski and Alphonso Davies, Neymar and Kylian Mbappé. And the two teams share many other similarities: Both are national champions who play on the front foot, and both are as happy in possession as they are dangerous on the counterpoint. Also, both have a bit of recent experience of losses, terrible attacks and, certainly in the case of Bayern, have some dubious defenses. PSG is built to win this tournament; Bayern is on the verge of a domestic and European treble.
Bayern’s imperial form – particularly Barcelona’s dismantling – was enough for most to assume that the German team is the favorite, but PSG will have seen the chances given by Lyon in the semi-finals ( and even by Barcelona before his column) were made and will have taken heart. Neither team is without its flaws. Both teams have an abundance of strengths. That’s exactly how a Champions League final should be drafted. There’s never a bad. This should remove that beam easily.
How did the teams get here?
Sunday’s game is a throwback of sorts: the first meeting in the final since 1998 of teams entering the tournament as home champions.
That, of course, is how it used to be in the days of the old European Cup, when you had to win your home competition just to gain access to the competition. The establishment of the Champions League in 1992 changed all that, and opened the door for extra teams (from the big leagues, mostly) and extra income, but also set the stage for all-Italian, all-German, all-Spanish and all- English finals.
Tradition is still a powerful force – PSG have won seven straight French titles, and Bayern Munich eight in a row in Germany – but you take your nostalgia where you can.
Bayern Munich came out of the group stage an easy winner over Tottenham, Olympiakos and Red Star Belgrade. In the knockouts, it easily outscored Chelsea (7-1 on aggregate), Barcelona (8-2 – ouch!) And Lyon (3-0). Bayern are 10-0 in this year’s league, and have scored at least three goals in nine of those games. At 4.2 goals per game, in fact it is the page with the highest score in Champions League history.
PSG also crossed out the group stage, producing five wins and a post-competition in a group that included Real Madrid, Club Brugge and Galatasaray. It overcame a first-leg deficit to drive out Dortmund in the round of 16, and then decided – with two goals after the 90th minute – to defeat Atalanta, 2-1, in their quarter-final in Lisbon. RB Leipzig went much easier (3-0) in the semi-finals on Tuesday.
Unlike Bayern, which can field a handful of players who were present when it won the competition in 2013, PSG have never played in this Champions League final before.
Who has the momentum?
What is strange is that the two finalists were the two teams that some predicted would fight the most in Lisbon.
As the French league closes in the middle of the pandemic and never returns its season, Paris St.-Germain arrived, having played only two competitive games since March. Bayern Munich had a month-long break between the final of the German Cup and their return from playing in the Champions League, a dismissal that Oliver Kahn, the club’s new general manager, could have caused a disadvantage.
It turns out that neither rest nor rest was a problem. Bayern have scored 15 goals in their three Champions League games this month, and PSG seem to be picking at the perfect time
The Qatar connection.
Much has been written about the use of Qatar in football in general, and Paris St.-Germain in particular, as a platform to burn its national image. About the influence of the country in the football games that fans see. About their hand in the way the sport is regulated (both in Europe and worldwide). On the question of whether that money has won a discussion on Qatar that the Gulf country prefers not to have. On the question of whether all those hundreds of millions of dollars that have been thrown in from Qatari accounts are good for the game or not.
That conversation will not end today either, if the trophy flies to Paris or Munich after the match. Qatar certainly has the preference. “” They will be the most important 90 minutes of our lives as footballers and in the history of the club, “said Marco Verratti, who has been with PSG for eight years.
But know this: Qatari interests are now so deeply invested in European football that the country may shine in the reflected glow of victory, regardless of who wins.
Here is some first name read.
On PSG: Sunday’s match is the highlight of the season for both teams, but for a few others – especially at PSG – the match is the culmination of years of preparation, planning, preparation and positioning. Qatar, of course, built this whole club for this one moment, with an investment in both money and national pride that is likely to be unattainable. Kylian Mbappé, still only 21, can bring the world’s biggest club title to his birthplace two years where he brought the world title home to France. Thomas Tuchel can pull off what so many other coaches with big names could not, and form the wealth of talent PSG in the best club of Europe. And then there’s Neymar. Let Rory Smith take you through what this game, and this season, can mean for him, for his image and for his legacy.
At Bayern Munich: Hansi Flick was a temporary solution to be Bayern’s manager when he was installed last autumn, a trusted hand there to gently guide an aging and faltering team away from the downfall of the downturn. Instead, he has become the perfect man for the job. But he did not turn Bayern around with tactical wizardry or some madcap system as a revolutionary approach, Rory found in dozens of interviews with those who know him best. His biggest trick, as it turns out, is that he’s not kidding.
About life in Lisbon this month: The reboot of the Champions League in Portugal over the past two weeks was a herculean affair for UEFA, the organizer of the event. Usually it takes months to put his plan together, and a host city instead takes more than a year out. This year was, almost, different in almost every respect. Earlier this month, Rory and Tariq Panja went through the rules and found that there was a plan and a policy in place for everything: who stayed where, how much water and sports drinks would be delivered, the parts of the fields where teams could warm up and (perhaps more importantly) where they could not. Two weeks later, the most draconian lines in the book – the ones set up to deal with how you side with coronavirus-shedding side – remain happy, unused.
And something special from the archives: If you want a real treat, here’s a piece from 2018 about an earlier experiment that hopes to merge big money and star power to create a Paris superclub. The club was Matra Racing de Paris, and it’s quite a story.
What if I just want to see a bunch of goals until kickoff instead?
That’s good too. UEFA, the governing body of European football, has collected useful videos of every PSG goal and every Bayern Munich goal en route to the final.
Enjoy.
