So, a tournament that threatened to give us an underdog in the final has ended up with the two least liked overdogs in world football.
For all that, Monday’s (3am in Malaysia) Champions League final could be an absolute cracker and is not without its intrigue – both romantic and geopolitical.
Paris St Germain (PSG) against Bayern Munich pits the capricious against the juggernaut, nouveau riche against old money, sportswashing against vorsprung durch technik.
To call it French flair vs German efficiency would be to stereotype and oversimplify. PSG are managed by German Thomas Tuchel for a start. And whilst they possess plenty of flair, much of it comes from the world’s most expensive player, Brazil’s €222 million Neymar, amid an eclectic mix.
For their part, Bayern’s home-grown core is augmented by stars from Austria, Poland, France, Croatia and Spain as well as Brazil, and a Canadian kid whose backstory Hollywood might hesitate to script.
Alphonso Davies was born in a Ghanaian refugee camp to parents who ran for their lives from the second Liberian civil war. The family moved to Canada when the boy was five and he joined the Vancouver Whitecaps’ academy at 14.
Two years later he debuted in Major League Soccer and Bayern took a €10m punt on his potential in 2018. Now 19, this is his breakout season and he’s already being talked up as one of the next big things.
He showed why by combining the pace of Usain Bolt and trickery of Lionel Messi to create the fifth goal of the 8-2 evisceration of Barcelona. Yet he’s in the team at full-back! You feel he could play anywhere and may well do so.
Another threat with a story to tell is Serge Gnabry, son of an Ivorian father and German mother, who has suddenly morphed from West Brom reject to Champions League revelation.
Spotted by Arsene Wenger, he started well at Arsenal but lost his way. Loaned to West Brom, where he played only minutes as a sub, he was a bit-part player going nowhere. But Bayern saw something and offered him the big stage.
And in the Champions League, he can do no wrong. Four goals in a 7-2 rout of Spurs marked his return to London and he followed with two against Chelsea and one against Barcelona. Another brace in the semi-final against Lyon made it nine in nine matches.
To put Bayern’s firepower in perspective, Gnabry plays second fiddle to Poland’s goal king Robert Lewandowski, who has 55 in 46 games this season.
For all that glitter, their strength is in the team, superbly marshalled by new boss Hanis Flick, rather than individual stars – the polar opposite of their opponents who line up like an oil and gas Harlem Globetrotters.
Just to show they’re not a one-man outfit, PSG went out and bought French wonder boy Kylian Mbappe for €200m – so they have the two most expensive players in the world.
Notables among another ‘rojak’ of nationalities there’s Argentina’s Angel di Maria and Brazil’s Thiago Silva. So why are they not liked?
As tasty as their football can be, it’s the transformation of the club that many find offensive.
Wenger called it ‘financial doping’ but in the case of PSG, it’s more fashionably known as sportswashing – when a super-rich foreign state buys success at a football club to boost its own image in the eyes of the world.
PSG were already disliked by much of France for simply being from Paris but since Qatar, known for a dubious human rights record, used a sovereign wealth fund to buy the club in 2011 and lavish more than €1 billion on players, that antipathy rose several notches.
While they win France’s Ligue Un at a canter and regularly clean up the other domestic trophies as well, other fans have enjoyed more than a little schadenfreude at their increasingly desperate attempts to land Old Big Ears.
So far, a combination of cockups, misfortune and, some say, karma has denied them the big prize.
Even rival managers dismiss them as false interlopers. Marseille boss Andre Villas-Boas spoke of the game against them as “not being part of this championship because of the investments they’ve made over the years.”
Neymar’s antics haven’t helped and when little Dijon pulled off an upset earlier this year, it felt like a national holiday in France.
The antipathy to Bayern, despite being behemoths of the Bundesliga, is much less. Indeed, they are the shining example of the 50 + 1 percent home ownership rule that protects German clubs from such as the Qatari predators.
Their problem is they are too well-run. Besides monopolising the title – they’ve just won their eighth in a row – they are perceived as arrogant and often live up to their ‘Hollywood FC’ nickname for their internal shenanigans.
But the main bone of contention is that they gobble up the best players of their rivals – in particular, Borussia Dortmund. Lewandowski heads a list that includes the likes of Matts Hummels and Mario Goetze to have made the switch.
The rest of the world is less fussed about this, however, and we can look forward to a genuine clash of giants to climax this strange season. Indeed, if there’s a bitter taste in the mouths of purists, it doesn’t mean the feast on the field will be any less mouth-watering.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.