Real Madrid won their 14th Champions League trophy in Paris — beating Liverpool 1-0 after Vinicius Junior scored the only goal in the 59th minute.
Due to fans from both teams being stuck outside the stadium, the match kicked off 36 minutes late. Photos and videos have emerged showing police pepper-spraying fans in the build-up to the game.
Here, The Athletic’s Oliver Kay dissects the final’s key talking points.
Put some respect on Thibaut Courtois’ name
One of the night’s enduring images will be that of Mohamed Salah pounding the turf in frustration with eight minutes remaining.
The Liverpool forward seemed to have done everything right, producing a sublime touch to bring the ball under control, then jinking past Ferland Mendy and into the type of position where a goal seemed certain.
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Salah struck a shot firmly towards the far corner with his right foot, but yet again Thibaut Courtois found a way to repel the ball. The former Chelsea goalkeeper sprang to his feet and let out a roar of self-congratulation — and quite right too. It summed up an extraordinary evening’s work by the Belgian.
In his 2018-19 debut season at Real, having been signed to replace the popular Keylor Navas, Courtois was questioned repeatedly. Over time, though, he has proved his worth again and again. And last night, in his first Champions League final since losing to Real with city rivals Atletico in Lisbon while on loan from Chelsea eight years ago, he was just fabulous, not least when diving low to his right to push Sadio Mane’s shot in the 21st minute onto the post and away.
“Back in England, I don’t get enough respect, so I showed it today,” Courtois said afterwards. “I wanted to put some respect on my name there.”
Is he right? Perhaps so. But a performance like this, in a game of such magnitude, will convince anyone who doubted him. Goalkeeping issues cost Liverpool against Real Madrid in the 2018 Champions League final — even if Jurgen Klopp was at pains to remind us in Friday’s pre-match press conference that poor Loris Karius was playing concussed in that game after a tangle with Sergio Ramos — and a keeper proved the difference here too.
The best goalkeeper in the world? Quite probably.
Has Liverpool’s season been a success?
Late last Sunday afternoon, Liverpool still harboured ambitions of completing a historic quadruple this season. Having won the Carabao Cup and FA Cup finals, they remained in contention to add the Premier League title well into the second half of their season finale at home to Wolves and had this Champions League final to look forward to.
They have no cause to reproach themselves for finishing runners-up to Manchester City. They won 92 points and performed to a standard that would have seen them acclaimed as worthy champions had Pep Guardiola’s team proved themselves worthy of that description by coming from 2-0 down with 15 minutes to go to beat Aston Villa, leaving a sense of deflation at Anfield where Liverpool had done their bit by beating Wolves, 3-1.
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This, remarkably, was only Liverpool’s fourth defeat in 63 matches in all competitions this season. They are, without question, a great team and have proved as much since losing that 2018 final.
Winning two trophies and coming so close in the other two competitions they entered has required a show of consistency arguably unmatched in Europe this season, but winning “only” the two domestic cups (emulating Arsenal’s unloved class of 1992-93, rather than making history with the quadruple they and their fans dreamt of) leaves a sense of anticlimax from a campaign that promised much more just a week ago.
Similarly harsh evaluations followed City’s dramatic semi-final defeat by Real after extra time at the start of the month.
In both cases it feels unfair to judge by an outcome which seems not to reflect a) the season as a whole and b) their performance in the tie in question. And we will come back to what that might say about a Real team who have lived a charmed existence in the Champions League this season.
Liverpool had nine shots on target to Real’s two, and 24 attempts to their opponents’ four. The xG was closer (Liverpool 2.1 and Real 0.9, according to Opta) but it still reflects a match Klopp’s team dominated. And the curious thing is that, in the three finals they have played this season, winning the previous two on penalties, Liverpool have not scored other than in those shootouts with Chelsea across 330 minutes of football.
That seems freakish. They attacked freely and incisively against Real, just as they had done in both domestic finals. There was no sense of a team fluffing its line or losing its nerve. Looking at the save Courtois made from Mane, as well as two from Salah, it is tempting to draw a straightforward conclusion: they played well and lost.
It happens. It certainly happened to Real’s coach Carlo Ancelotti in this very fixture in 2005, when his vastly superior AC Milan team played Liverpool off the park in Istanbul and were 3-0 up at half-time, only to be pegged back to 3-3 in six crazy minutes and then get beaten on penalties.
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Teams — even great teams — don’t always get what they deserve. Only one team can win the Champions League in a season. Only one team can win the Premier League.
Klopp and his players will feel that one of those two big prizes should have gone their way. Maybe they are right.
It is hard to know what more they could have done this season. And that is one reason why the pain of Paris will linger so much longer than it did after Kyiv four years ago.
Was Karim Benzema offside?
Was it really only three minutes and 22 seconds? It felt longer, looking up to the giant scoreboard to see that the VAR review, la verification du but, was still going on.
The tension was palpable and certainly some of Liverpool’s players looked anxious, wondering whether their first real lapse in the game had cost them a goal.
Karim Benzema thought he had scored, just before half-time. Yes, he had been in an offside position when he clipped the ball into the net, but wasn’t it a combination of Ibrahima Konate and Fabinho that had put it on a plate for him as the two Liverpool players, in desperation after a mix-up, closed in on Fede Valverde?
“The ball comes off a Liverpool player and it’s deemed offside?”
“If I’m a Real Madrid player, I’m going bananas in that changing room!”@rioferdy5 isn’t convinced by the explanation as to why Karim Benzema’s goal was ruled out 🤷♂️#UCLfinal pic.twitter.com/S8GnqoUk2f
— Football on BT Sport (@btsportfootball) May 28, 2022
Yes it was, but Liverpool were reprieved, because the VAR believed the Konate/Fabinho touch that set Benzema up was unintentional.
The laws of the game are typically ambiguous when it comes to this, but essentially a player receiving the ball from an opponent cannot be considered offside if the opponent has played the ball intentionally — ie, “a conscious action” with “control of his actions”.
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It comes down to a question of interpretation, but essentially, because everything happened so quickly, in a congested penalty area, the Konate/Fabinho touch that seemed to come off the latter’s knee as he slid in was considered unintentional.
Quite why it took over three minutes to reach that conclusion is unclear.
Perhaps most of it was spent looking up the latest revision of the offside law, which has become so unnecessarily complicated.
Real’s relationship with the Champions League
Maybe Ancelotti is right. Maybe it really was history that propelled Real Madrid to yet another Champions League title, leaving Liverpool with regrets at the end of a season that promised so much more.
The celebrations inside the Stade de France were so familiar, as Ancelotti smiled, Benzema punched the air and the outstanding Courtois was mobbed by his team-mates, including Vinicius Junior, who scored the night’s only goal.
After three seasons of frustration, Real were champions of Europe for a record 14th time, the glorious decimocuarta and double the next best total by AC Milan, and for both their elder statesmen and the new kids on the block, success must have tasted so sweet.
By contrast, Liverpool’s players looked distraught.
It was the same outcome, a Real victory, as when the two clubs met in Kyiv but if the reasons for their downfall four years ago were obvious, they will wonder how this one, a game they dominated from start to finish, slipped through their hands.
Real being propelled by their history, as Ancelotti suggested at his pre-match news conference on Friday evening. Is that really… a thing?
It has felt so at times over the past decade, when Real’s extraordinary run of success in the Champions League — winners in 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018 and now 2022 — has at times papered over the cracks in what was an ageing squad and is now a team that appears to be in a rare state of transition between one generation (Benzema, Luka Modric, Toni Kroos) and the next.
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This triumph is one that might confound UEFA’s technical committee when they compile their latest report.
Real were outplayed by Paris Saint-Germain for much of both legs in their round-of-16 meeting, by Chelsea in the second leg of their quarter-final and by Manchester City in the first leg of the semi-final, a tie in which Ancelotti’s team only seemed to rouse themselves in the 90th minute of the return at the Bernabeu, trailing 5-3 on aggregate before snatching victory in the most dramatic circumstances.
It has led to Real being portrayed as a team with some kind of superior power — as if they are being driven forward by the ghosts of Gento, Di Stefano, Zidane and Ronaldo, imbuing their descendants with the kind of knowledge and ardour that ordinary teams don’t possess.
It is an appealing narrative, but it doesn’t always seem to fit. They rode their luck against PSG, Chelsea and City, and they certainly did so against Liverpool last night.
The golfer Gary Player used to say that the more he practised, the luckier he got. But does that apply with Real?
They don’t always look like a team who are coached and drilled the way Klopp’s Liverpool and Pep Guardiola’s City team are. There were times against City in particular when their perceived know-how and composure seemed to be severely exaggerated because their opponents kept missing chances.
What can be said with great certainty is that Benzema, Casemiro, Dani Carvajal, Eder Militao and others battle hard and know how to win big, big matches, even if they seem to have spent longer on the ropes in this Champions League tournament than a great team conventionally would.
Carvajal merits a special mention. This was his fifth Champions League final and, if there were times in the past when opponents might have looked at him as a potential weak link, it certainly wasn’t the case here.
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Luis Diaz relishes a physical confrontation as much as he does a big occasion, but this was possibly the first time since joining Liverpool in January that an opposition full-back got the better of him. Carvajal played him brilliantly.
If anyone embodies the spirit of this Real team, of a club which has a love affair with this competition. It is Carvajal.
Trent Alexander-Arnold can do things with a football that Carvajal cannot dream of. He was a constant outlet for Liverpool in his third Champions League final at age 23. He did wonderfully to cut his way through the Real defence in the early stages, setting up Salah for a flicked shot that was expertly saved by Courtois.
But there are times when Alexander-Arnold needs to be more Carvajal. And it wasn’t about being too high up the pitch — that is where Klopp wants him, and where he is so integral to his team’s play— and leaving Liverpool vulnerable to the counter-attack. It was about letting Vinicius get away from him to score the only goal on 59 minutes.
He wasn’t the only player culpable. For just about the only occasion all evening, Real got through Liverpool’s midfield easily and Valverde found himself with the space to play a dangerous ball across the penalty area. But Alexander-Arnold lost his man and Vinicius, having timed his run to perfection, scored at the far post.
It was the kind of ball with which Liverpool — and Alexander-Arnold in particular — kept playing at the other end. So often, Carvajal or another Real defender managed to get the vital touch or close down the space. Alexander-Arnold, on that one occasion, did not and it will gnaw at him all summer.
An hour and 20 minutes after the final whistle, Courtois was still on the pitch, loving every moment of an evening that will etch his name indelibly in the history of European football’s most illustrious club.
These are the nights where legends are made. Klopp and his players have already achieved that status at Anfield, having won the club’s sixth Champions League title in 2019 before ending the 30-year wait to be champions of England the following season.
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At Real Madrid, though, a different standard exists. Different to anywhere else.
It was one thing to win the first five European Cups after the competition was launched in the 1950s, but to win it five times in these past nine seasons in the Champions League era is something truly special — particularly for those like Carvajal, Modric and Benzema who have contributed to all five.
The great Real team of the mid-2010s seemed to be reaching the end of its cycle by the time they beat Liverpool in Kyiv. Four years later, there is no Ramos, no Raphael Varane, no Cristiano Ronaldo, but some of the old campaigners remain and now there is a new generation emerging, led by the prodigiously gifted, 21-year-old Vinicius.
For a club of such stature, it was a blow last week to learn that Kylian Mbappe will not be signing up for the next stage of Real’s evolution, preferring to stay at Paris Saint-Germain. He was the trophy signing Real wanted this summer and, regardless of their victory in his backyard last night, a rethink will be needed now.
But if there is one thing Real love more than trophy signings it is actual trophies. And this one in particular.
Whether or not they are driven on by history, they are certainly intent on making it time and time again.
(Top photo: Harriet Lander/Copa/Getty Images)
