Bayern Munich Did Not Believe In Magic

By any objective reckoning, Bayern Munich should’ve been considered enormous favorites to beat Real Madrid in their Champions League quarterfinal matchup. Bayern has been one of the two best teams in Europe all season long, while Real has been consistently bad. Bayern’s star-studded attack has been firing on all cylinders, cranking out flatly outrageous stats in both domestic and continental play, while Real still hasn’t figured out how to build an engine out of its assortment of top-of-the-line parts that unfortunately seem to each belong to completely different car makes. In the first leg of this tie, Bayern took home a hard-fought and well-earned 2-1 win, and had the benefit of playing the second leg at home, inside the cauldron that is the Allianz Arena. Coming into Wednesday’s decisive game, there was really no logical reason to think we’d see any other result than Bayern going through.

And yet, if there is one team and one competition where objectivity and logic hold no sway, it’s Real Madrid in the Champions League. History, especially of the recent sort, is littered with examples of Real having no rational basis for winning a tie that they inevitably win. Call it black magic, the Twilight Zone, the Spirit of Juanito, or whatever you want—there is real evidence to support the longstanding, widespread belief that some kind of mysterious force allows this particular club to pull off preposterous upsets and comebacks in this particular tournament. Real or not, the belief in this power can itself become a self-fulfilling prophecy, emboldening Blancos to keep pushing despite long odds, and heaping anxiety on opponents who might see in a single unlucky bounce an omen of impending, predestined doom. Indeed, Wednesday’s match in Munich opened with one such unlucky bounce that seemed to indicate that the old black magic was once again in the air. But, fortunately for fans of the German club, the Bayern players are not so superstitious.

The quasi-supernatural incident I’m referring to came at the very outset of the match. Just 30 seconds after the opening kickoff, before the TV commentator could even get through his scene-setting opening remarks, Real midfielder Arda Güler had somehow already put the ball into the back of the Bayern net. I’m sure most people in the stadium and watching at home didn’t even understand what had happened until the replays cleared things up. Legendary goalkeeper Manuel Neuer played an uncharacteristically sloppy pass that Güler easily intercepted. Demonstrating legitimately unbelievable amounts of confidence, composure, and presence of mind, Güler didn’t take a single extra touch when handed this most surprising of gifts, and instead immediately lumped a first-time long-distance shot into Neuer’s unattended goal. If the question coming into the match was whether the spirits would once again answer Madrid’s calls and descend upon Munich the way they have done so often before, you could forgive Bayern fans’ faces for turning as white as their opponents’ jerseys after what had happened less than a minute into the match.

Bayern’s players deserve a ton of credit for refusing to capitulate. It would’ve been easy to have been shellshocked by that opening goal, especially as it was an unforced error committed by their most experienced player. If even a world champion like Neuer was susceptible to Real’s dark arts, how could his teammates hope to resist? Well, they could do so by staying in the material world, where there are no such things as ghosts, and where they were still the better team, in the stronger position, in front of their own fans. By sticking with what had brought them to this point, Bayern was able to keep their heads and eventually come out on top.

Mind you, Real Madrid didn’t make it easy. Bayern quickly answered Güler’s stunning opener with a goal of its own five minutes later, with Aleksandar Pavlovic’s point-blank header off of a Joshua Kimmich corner kick. But right as the Bavarian crowd had maybe put aside all that superstitious stuff, Real hit back again, via another Güler wonderstrike in the 29th minute. The match was utterly frantic for almost the duration of the 90 minutes, following a consistent script: long Bayern possessions that usually led to decently threatening opportunities on Real’s goal, followed by razor-sharp Real counters. The visitors clearly had faith in their club’s traditional fate as inevitable victors, and played with the kind of intensity and determination needed to pull off an upset of this sort. After Harry Kane came up with another Bayern equalizer in the 38th minute, Kylian Mbappé restored Madrid’s lead in the match in the 42nd minute. The main weakness of both of these teams is on the defensive end, so it was no surprise that the game was an all-out attack fest. For the majority of it, Real gave more than they got, not getting into scoring positions quite as frequently as Bayern but creating far more danger when they did.

As the match reached the final half hour of regulation, and both teams began to visibly tire from the pace of the match and the accumulated fatigue of the long season, it seemed like the next team to score would win it. As specialists in capitalizing on those exact circumstances, Real felt thrillingly close to sealing the comeback. Still, Bayern never panicked, and continued to play it’s usual game. They kept putting the ball at the feet of Kimmich and Michael Olise, the team’s two most patient and clear-eyed possession stewards, who didn’t let the team down.

Olise in particular was key. As has been the case for his entire career, even since making the huge jump from Crystal Palace and the Premier League midtable to Bayern Munich and the tippity top of everything, Olise was the main man trusted to lead the way. The Frenchman had the kind of Champions League tie that cements reputations and creates Ballon d’Or candidacies. On a pitch alongside titans like Mbappé and Vinícius and Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane, Olise was the single best player across the two legs of the matchup. It takes a special talent and also a special personality to feel comfortable having so much of the ball in the moments of highest pressure and to be able to do something with it, and Olise certainly is special. However, in contrast to the UCL quarterfinal stage’s other standout player, Lamine Yamal of Barcelona, Olise is fortunate that he doesn’t have to go it alone.

Indeed, it was Luis Diaz who finally found Bayern’s breakthrough, though before that, it was actually a Real player who killed whatever Blanco magic remained and made it easy for Bayern to finish the job. Eduardo Camavinga, who not too long ago was considered one of the most promising young midfielders in Europe, has had an awful season to go with an underwhelming couple years. The 23-year-old was a second-half substitute for Real, but rather than giving his team fresh legs, he doomed his teammates by picking up two yellow cards, the latter an unforgivably bone-headed time-wasting caution. His red card in the 86th minute was the first moment since probably Pavlovic’s goal in the sixth minute that it truly felt like Bayern was going to slay the beast. Sure enough, three minutes later Diaz finished a nifty team move by uncorking a banger that deflected past Real backup keeper Andriy Lunin and into the net, tying the match at three goals apiece and restoring Bayern’s aggregate lead.

Real was out of options, ideas, and legs after the Camavinga red, so they never really even gave Bayern a scare in the match’s late stages. To cap a performance that deserved a shining moment, Olise picked up the ball on the counter in the final seconds of stoppage time, and rather than running toward the corner flag to bleed out the clock, he charged straight at his defender and toward the Real penalty box, unleashing a trademark curler that smacked in off the far post and ended the match with an exclamation point. If Real Madrid is like the villain in a horror movie, one that is never dead even when the good guys are certain they’ve killed them, then Olise’s goal was Bayern fully chopping off the head and displaying it to the crowd before the credits rolled.

The thing about Real Madrid’s relationship with the Champions League is that it’s not actually magical. The Blancos are almost always in possession of several of the very best players in the world, generally of the attacking variety. Those kinds of superstar attackers are the precise types of players best suited to making the difference in the biggest, hardest games. Even the poorly constructed, underperforming Madrid of this season still has Mbappé, Vini, and Bellingham, three of the most talented players on the planet. The former two in particular are unsurpassed in their ability to bend a match to their will single-handedly. Any team’s performance depends on context, and so while these Blancos consistently struggle to maintain possession and elaborate attacks patiently, they can be the scariest team in the world when they eschew possession and run into space—the exact scenario they were likely to face in the Bayern tie. So even though they may be clearly inferior as a collective when compared to Bayern, the Blancos still have the pieces to tip the scales in their favor. That same dynamic is generally the case regardless of the season, which is why Real so often finds itself beating its “betters.” After all, the best way to pull off miracles is to have a bunch of miracle workers.

But Bayern this year wasn’t afraid of Real, neither in the real or mystical senses, and kept believing that their own stars, in a setup more conducive to maximizing their skills than Real’s great players are in theirs, would eventually outdo their opponents. Whether or not you believe in the Boogyman, Bayern proved definitively that no amount of alleged magic can compete with simply being better.