The 2019/20 Champions League season was one to remember. Which is ironic, given that it turned out to be the season that everyone other than Bayern Munich fans forgot. This surely had something to do with the Covid-19 pandemic, which started in February 2020, just as the competition was heating up and – so to speak – gaining in temperature.
Not only was there no Champions League football from February until August, but from the quarter-final stage onwards, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) decided to play matches behind closed doors in two stadiums over a single round.
This meant that the entire Champions League was truncated, which meant, in turn, that the usual tantalising build-up of drama through March, April and May was watered down.
In case we’ve forgotten, the last eight featured Leipzig against Atletico Madrid, PSG against Atalanta, Manchester City against Lyon and Bayern Munich against Barcelona, an important match to which we will return in due course.
Partly because the two round-of-16-legs were played six months apart as a result of the pandemic, the second-leg matches in the round didn’t really capture anyone but the die-hards’ attention. The four quarters came and went, I think it is fair to say, without anyone really noticing.
No-one got the shivers. No-one got the shakes. And no-one broke out into a cold sweat.
With Covid spreading like an out-of-control virus, people had other things to worry about. The vagaries of Joshua Kimmich’s form in the Bayern Munich midfield became less pressing when people are freaking out about masks and sanitisers and hard lockdowns.
Those were the little things they were getting worried about. The big things had to do with ageing parents and mortality generally and hunkering down to confront the end of the world with as much grace and good cheer as you could muster.
We all received those videos – since revealed to be bogus – of bodies piling up outside of hospitals because they had run out of space inside of hospitals. They were images to make even the most phlegmatic souls slightly jittery.
“Run out” is the operative phrase. There were shortages everywhere, or predicted shortages everywhere, which means that running out onto the football pitch suddenly took on a whole new meaning.
That whole new meaning, I’m sure you’ll agree, is that football – like all other sport in the pandemic – becomes crushingly irrelevant. Football, as it turned out, was, to invert former Liverpool manager, Bill Shankly’s famous quote, less important than life and death.
Without ever mentioning the D-word, everyone was worrying about death, didn’t you find? It was socially unacceptable to gnaw away at the bones of death, so they worried instead about other things, like food. Did you notice that, too?
What if, you asked yourself, I reach out in the supermarket for the last banana for the banana bread everyone is going bananas for and someone else reaches out, too?
What happens next? Do I lose my dignity for a banana?
Or is the scenario irrelevant because there will be no last banana. The last banana will be taken because in the early days you were only allowed into your local Woolies or Checkers or Pick ‘n Pay one at a time and, invariably, the last banana was already long gone.
You looked down at the supermarket shelves to where the bananas once were and wondered if dying from the plague hadn’t been over-hyped. What you were really going to die from was lack of food and a glut of banana-bread recipes.
During the pandemic there was a whole new language to become infected by. You could wash your hands as much as you liked and you still couldn’t avoid it. Who now remembers phrases like “co-morbidities” or, “vaccine rollout” or “anti-vaxxers” or, “social distancing?”
We’re profoundly social animals, partial to hand-shakes and kisses and hugs, so social distancing was counter-intuitive for many of us.
The idea here was that we distance ourselves from others, from strangers, just in case they were infected, which was sound common sense.
Who on earth – not that there were going to be many people left on earth – would disagree with the wisdom of taking precautions. Of seeing to it, when and where possible, that a stranger didn’t sneeze on you?
Some wellness gurus took it further. They saw the lockdown as an opportunity to – horrible word – de-stress. They advised spending quiet time and returning to basics, emotional and otherwise. You could regard your navel, and gaze upon it, as though it were an orange.
The wellness gurus might have had a point. It was a time of emptying out – and I’m not talking about the fridge and larder. If you lived by the sea, the beaches were suddenly touchingly pristine. We all saw those videos of animals returning to habitats they had once left because of the encroachment of man.
We looked at it all and couldn’t help feeling: This was what it was like before we were born, before us humans had descended like a plague upon the face of the earth to kill and eat the animals and bring death to the indigenous peoples and, for good measure, despoil the last of the wilderness in the name of progress.
But maybe the wellness gurus and soothsayers and magic-potion artists and assorted groovy charlatans, didn’t have a point. People I knew, were incredibly freaked out by spending so much time de-stressing. Spending quality time with themselves was stressful. They hadn’t spent so much time with themselves in years.
What did you say to yourself when you were alone together for all that time? Time you were spending trying not to catch the virus. People wanted to be busy. They wanted to be out-and-about. It became really alienating spending this much time with yourself.
You could watch TV – and many of us did – just to keep us from spending time with ourselves. But the Champions League quarter-finals, which is the time at which the competition started going south for most of us, just wasn’t the same watching by ourselves.
Point of fact. From the quarter-finals of the 2019/20 Champions League, the competition didn’t only figuratively go south. It physically went south, too. It went to Lisbon in actual fact, were the competition was played in quarantine-like conditions.
It was over in 11 days through the month of August, which is another reason why we don’t remember the 2019/20 Champions League very well – because it was all over so quickly. We were spending so much time with ourselves that we took our eye off the ball and missed it.
Going south had other ramifications. When watching the Champions League on TV, it often seemed like you were watching the reserve game as a prelude to the proper game to follow.
Except the practice game in an empty stadium was the game, the game itself. This meant that when we watched, we were forever caught in the expectation that there was something better to follow; but nothing did, nothing followed – except for the next round.
The quarters were followed by the semis which was followed by the final, a final played between Bayern Munich and PSG, by the way, two of the remaining eight teams in this year’s Champions League quarter-finals.
But even after the final – won 1-0 by Bayern – we were left looking round the edges of the match. Is that all, we asked? And it was. That was all; that was it. It was all over.
Which is the way the pandemic functioned for most of us. The hard lockdown wasn’t so bad. It was the accompanying sense that there was something intangible we were somehow missing. That was it! In the very act of getting in touch with ourselves, we were missing our life. Like the 2019/20 Champions League, it was passing before our very eyes.
And surely there’s some – possibly important – correlation between not really believing what we were watching and forgetting it all pretty much the moment it was over.
The tournament was so surreal, that we’ve not only forgotten about it in its entirety, but we’ve also forgotten how good Bayern Munich actually were that year. Now that the Champions League quarter-finals are upon us again, here in 2024, gives us opportunity to look back at the Covid-19 Champs League and marvel at it for a variety of reasons.
Excellence for Bayern in 2019/20, was predicated on many things, so a little back-story is in order. First, Bayern needed to cope with the absence of Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery (who headed off to Fiorentina) for the first time in years.
And with Mats Hummels’ departure to Borussia Dortmund, they also needed to shore up the defence, bringing in Benjamin Pavard and Lucas Hernandez from Stuttgart and Atletico Madrid respectively, for a combined fee of well over 100-million Euros.
They weren’t only cavalier with the green, Bayern were also alert to bargains. Within a week in August, they snapped up Inter’s Ivan Perišić and Barcelona’s Philippe Coutinho on loan.
Both were crucial to Bayern’s successful European season, both shrewd buys, both the kind of players others could have bought but were somehow missed because sporting directors and scouts were too pre-occupied staying alive during the worst of the pandemic. Maybe they weren’t too hot in the market-place because they were de-stressing?
With a squad intelligently assembled in the off-season, Bayern could now compete for the Champions League. They had only won it twice in the previous 20 years – in 2001 and 2013 – although they had twice been runners-up in the period, too, which is a pretty poor return for the aristocrats of Bavaria.
And, let’s be clear: being competitive in the most important cup competition in Europe wasn’t a sock-smoking exercise for Bayern. From the very beginning of the season in August 2019, they scored goals.
They were scoring them from everywhere, in all competitions, and the fine print backs this up. It shows us, for example, that they were scoring goals pretty much from the get-go, particularly when at home in Munich at the Allianz Arena.
At the end of August Bayern scored six against Mainz in the league and, three weeks later, belted four past Cologne. At the beginning of November, however, a reality check. They were beaten 5-1 by Eintracht Frankfurt in Frankfurt, as Eintracht pulled a Bayern on them.
The loss was too much for their manager, Niko Kovač, who resigned a day later. Looking back, you wonder if he wasn’t perhaps over-hasty, or did the boardroom politics and general Bayern huffiness all become too much?
Six days after losing to Eintracht Frankfurt, Bayern were back to their carefree, goal-scoring ways. Under new coach, Hansi Flick, they thumped Borussia Dortmund 4-0 in Munich. Dortmund weren’t a team of weed-smoking idlers reading Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. They were realistic title contenders.
In the group phase of the 2019/20 Champions League, Bayern were drawn with Spurs, Olympiacos and Red Star Belgrade. When Kovač resigned in early November, they’d already played three of their six group stage matches in Europe, two of them away, scoring 13 goals. This again suggests that the Croatian’s resignation was something of an over-reaction.
Under Flick the European goal spree continued, as they scored 11 more in their remaining three Champions’ League group matches. At the end of the group phase they’d scored 24 goals for five conceded, including a 6-0 defeat of Red Star in Belgrade. The fun was only just beginning as Bayern romped, quite literally, into the knock-outs.
As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a five-and-a-half month wait between Bayern’s first leg quarter-final tie against Chelsea in London in late February 2020, and the second leg, which was played in Munich in early August.
It was nil-all at half-time against Frank Lampard’s Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in February, in a scrappy match of half-chances created and half-chances spurned, half-chances created and half-chances spurned.
Chelsea’s Marcos Alonso was sent off in the second half for what appeared to be an elbow on Bayern’s striker, Robert Lewandowski and although Bayern weren’t fluent, they still won 3-0 away from home.
In the return leg in Munich they won 4-1 to run out 7-1 aggregate winners.
Having beaten Chelsea, Bayern were drawn against Barcelona with the tournament now taking place in Portugal, so chosen, I seem to remember, because the pandemic seemed to be less severe in Southern Europe than it did up north.
David Alaba, another crucial member of Bayern’s defence in the season, scored an own goal for Barcelona in the seventh minute of the quarter-final but that’s as good as it got for the Catalans.
Munich banged four past them in either half and, although Luis Suarez got a second for Barcelona before the end, it was one-way traffic.
There’s something marvellously professional about scoring eight goals against the opposition when there’s no-one in the stadium to see it because it suggests doing something for the pure pleasure of doing it well.
Bayern were even more impressive in that the goals were scored by six players. If he wasn’t worrying too much about the pandemic, Bayern’s former manager must have been having sleepless nights.
The rest of the world might have been huffing and puffing but Bayern were breathing deep. They were sucking air into their lungs and could run all day. At least that’s what it looked like, anyway. Here was a club in the portrait of health.
If you were being sniffy you would say of the Barcelona result that the Catalans were not the force of old. True enough. But eight goals? That was still something. The fact of the matter was that Bayern scored literally hundreds of them during the season.
In the Bundesliga they rustled up a square 100 goals in 34 matches, 16 goals and 13 points ahead of second-placed Borussia Dortmund, the side whom they’d beaten 4-0 back in November just after Kovač resigned.
And goals weren’t confined to the Bundesliga. Serge Gnabry scored four goals against Spurs at the beginning of October in a 7-2 away thrashing in the second match of Bayern’s Champions’ League group stage. All told, Robert Lewandowski scored 15 Champions League goals that season. That sounds made up, but it’s not.
Crazy numbers. Crazy season. Crazy season, what with the pandemic, in so many – crazy – ways.
Against Lyon in the semi, Gnabry opened the scoring for Bayern. He ran powerfully at the Lyon goal with the Lyon midfield flat-footed and fired a rampant left-footed shot into the top of the net. Gnabry scrambled a second from close range and Lewandowski climbed high to head their third. They were into the final and it was nothing less than they deserved.
Lewandowski – there’s a player who doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Now at Barcelona, he’s one of the most horribly efficient strikers in the world game. Unlike others, who have faded away, he’s demonstrated remarkable longevity. He arrived at Bayern in 2014, arrived at Barcelona in 2022, and will turn 36 in August. That’s a good run.
Watch what he does. There is nothing superfluous to his actions, whether he’s making a run or firing the ball across the opposition’s goalmouth in the hope that a late-arriving midfielder will bury the ball in the back of the net.
He’s quick and strong. Good with both feet and good in the air. He never does anything which isn’t direct and calculated. There’s something leonine or cat-like about Lewandowski. He’s an absolute killer and because of it he expresses a rare kind of football purity.
Given that he had such a fine season overall and such a stellar season in Europe, it would somehow have been appropriate for the Pole to score Bayern’s one and only goal in the final against PSG. It didn’t turn out that way.
Bayern’s Kingsley Coman scored the goal before an empty stadium that won his side the 2019/20 Champions League final against PSG and that was it. The season was over. The Champion’s League knock-out had been squeezed into ten days after a break of six months.
Such interrupted continuities made it a season difficult to get a handle on. It was as though it never happened. And Bayern’s victory in the competition suffered as a result.
Second behind Lewandowski and his 15 goals as the competition’s top scorer that season was a young Norwegian with ten goals for two clubs – Red Bull Salzburg and Borussia Dortmund. His name, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, is Erling Haaland and that season he scored more one more goal than Gnabry, who played in four more matches.
The next highest scorers in the competition were Spurs’ Harry Kane and Napoli’s Dries Mertens, who each scored three less than Gnabry, four less than Haaland and, remarkably, nine less than Lewandowski.
Haaland has since gone on to make quite a name for himself at Manchester City, while Kane – injuries permitting – has only deepened his reputation by doing what Lewandowski once did at Bayern.
It’s crude and simplistic to suggest that Haaland, Kane and Lewandowski hold the keys to their teams’ various fortunes as this season’s quarter-finals unfold through the coming weeks, but it is tempting to suggest just that.
Haaland’s City play Real Madrid in a wonderfully spicy tie, while Kane’s Bayern go to English Premiership contenders, Arsenal, with the winners of the respective fixtures meeting each other in the competition’s semi-finals.
In the other half of the draw, Lewandowski’s Barcelona play PSG, the winner of that match playing against the winner of the Borussia Dortmund versus Atletico Madrid quarter-final in the semi in the other half of the draw.
The choice to conclude this week’s podcast with a discussion of strikers is apposite, I think, given the English media moaning about an England team who couldn’t score a goal in England’s 1-0 loss to Brazil in a friendly just over a week ago.
Kane, of course, wasn’t playing for England that day, and he was missed. He’s unlikely to miss for Bayern because he’s had a stellar season for them so far and has missed precious little.
Perhaps they’ll even do what they did in the Champions League of 2019/20, the competition that time forgot? It was, as we’ve heard – and as we’ve been reminded about – a strange and fabulous time.
If Bayern win this time round, people will have to give them the credit they deserve. It’s a credit that might be long overdue. It hasn’t been forthcoming since the last time they won in Europe and did so – here’s something else widely forgotten – with a 100% winning record in the competition. A rare feat indeed.
So far in this season’s competition they’ve lost once (to Lazio), drawn once (to Copenhagen) and won six times. They look handy. With a fit Kane in their midst, they’ll be even handier.