‘The game of the season’: Weight of history adds to Champions League final shaping up to be a modern classic

Although the Liverpool players attempted to treat this like any of the many big games they’ve played, it took a mere step on the Stade de France pitch to change that. This is the club’s third Champions League final in five years, but there’s still that extra electrical charge to the air.

“It’s the occasion, it’s talking in a press conference here,” Trent Alexander-Arnold said. “There’s different things you do around the game. It’s the special game, the one that everyone wants to play in.

“It’s the game of the season.”

The hope is that it will also be the game of the season in terms of spectacle. That is one thing the Champions League has not really served up amid all its drama, and you arguably have to go back to 2005 for the last truly great showpiece, but there are little elements coming together that could set up a classic.

It is not just that it is again Carlo Ancelotti and Liverpool. Both managers are able to name full teams. Real Madrid have everyone fit. Jurgen Klopp confirmed that Thiago Alcantara and Fabinho are “looking good”.

It means, for this greatest of occasions, both will be able to play their best teams.

Whether they are actually the best teams in Europe is something else open to debate, and it is also rare enough that the final serves up a meeting between the two finest sides on the continent. The last time it happened was maybe 2017, or 2015.

Manchester City would argue it is impossible to be that without their presence, but the occasion is arguably richer for that.

A showpiece between two teams from different countries is what the Champions League final is really about, and there are few clubs that have enriched the competition as much as these two. Illustrating that, no other final has featured two clubs to collectively have as many European Cups, with a total of 19. Madrid are going for their 14th, Liverpool for their seventh.

Fittingly, it is also the first pairing to meet three times, with Ancelotti aiming for a record fourth Champions League as a manager.

History weighs over the occasion, most of all their contentious last final in 2018.

For all the talk of “revenge”, and renewed discussion about Loris Karius, that game is perhaps most interesting for how it reflects on the two clubs now. There has arguably been a reversal.

Back then, Madrid were still the most powerful club in world football, while Liverpool – and particularly Klopp – were dismissed as “losers”. A hugely admirable team, of course, but losers nonetheless.

The 3-1 defeat was Klopp’s sixth successive defeat in finals. Even Sadio Mane, the scorer of Liverpool’s only goal, seemed a second-tier player; not quite the top level. Liverpool felt much less imposing once Mohamed Salah went off, and had very little on the bench.

How things have changed.

The truth was that these games did not reveal what Liverpool were, but shaped what they would become.

“You have to learn to win,” Klopp said at the Stade de France on the eve of this final, as he reflected on the one from four years before. “I had to learn the hard way – the really hard way. I’ve lost a lot of finals in my life.”

It has all set up a season where Liverpool could win all three cups. They missed out on the title by a point, but that in itself emphasises just how strong they are; that they were able to go so far in everything. Mane has meanwhile become a contender for the Ballon D’Or, with interest from both Bayern Munich and Madrid, although it would no longer seem so damaging for Liverpool to lose one of that front three. A ready-made replacement is already there, and probably starting this game, in the electric Luis Diaz.

So much stems from 2018. That was the last final Liverpool lost, and they have since won five in a row, including the very next Champions League showpiece as well as competitions such as the Super Cup and Club World Cup.

Xural.com