Nowhere else is the eternal what-if-question asked as often as in football. It is the core of this sport because, compared to handball, the goals are not inflationary; measured against the operating season, they are rather rare – the exception are occasionally 8-2 wins against Barcelona. FC Bayern asked itself this hypothetical question frequently between 2010 and 2020. These are the cornerstones of a time when Munich played a dominant role in world football, picked up German titles via stamp card, but did not win as many trophies internationally as they did when all their capacities would have been possible. What if Schweinsteiger hadn’t hit the post on penalties in the 2012 final against Chelsea? Or what if Thomas Müller hadn’t missed the goalkeeper with the penalty kick in the 2016 semifinals against Atlético Madrid?
They have collected quite a few such key scenes with eternal memory value in Munich. That is one of the reasons why the Spaniards were clearly more successful between 2010 and 2020 – Cristiano Ronaldo’s Real Madrid won the Champions League four times, Lionel Messi’s FC Barcelona won it twice. And yet the people of Munich can now set the punch line themselves at the end of a decade that was definitely theirs.
It was initiated under the gnarled general Louis van Gaal with a final defeat in 2010 against Inter Milan (0: 2). It was crowned by the 2013 Wembley victory under Jupp Heynckes against Borussia Dortmund (2: 1). Now it is rounded off in any case on Sunday from 9 p.m. in a duel with the celebrity eleven from Paris. Under Hansi Flick, that quiet commander who, within a few months, breathed a modern spirit into an old principle: that the team, not the trainer, should be the star. Four finals, two titles, that could be the result of the Munich decade. It would be the second best in FC Bayern’s club history. Only in the seventies was the Gerd Müller team more successful with their national championship trilogy in 1974, 1975 and 1976.
However, despite the visually clear 3-0 win against Olympique Lyon, much of what had made the Munich team so strong recently, group dynamics and grip, was only rudimentary. In the end, the French even asked the fateful question of what would have been if: Only 59 seconds lay between Toko Ekambi’s sharp shot in the post and Serge Gnabry’s 1-0, the signpost after 18 minutes. So the lurching dramaturgy before the finale was also one thing: an acute warning.
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