Bayern cashes in on Champions Cup
LISBON, Portugal — Breaking the silence beating a drum, his Bayern Munich jersey replaced by a “Champions of Europe” T-shirt, Joshua Kimmich wanted to savor the scene of glory.
Two hours after setting up the goal that secured Bayern’s sixth European Cup, Kimmich emerged from the tunnel to walk back onto the empty confetti-covered pitch where his team had beaten Paris Saint-germain 1-0 on Sunday night.
Soon he was joined, sitting in the center circle, by David Alaba, the winners’ medal around his bare chest, and Serge Gnabry in a Bayern hat, swigging from a bottle.
Before long the lights went out on the Stadium of Light.
In the near-darkness of the Lisbon stadium, the players remained in celebration and contemplation.
“When you win a title like this with brothers on the pitch,” Kimmich had said shortly after the fulltime whistle, “that’s the maximum you can ask for.”
On a continent where more than 200,000 have died from the coronavirus, the longest and most disrupted of peacetime men’s European football seasons ended in emptiness and near silence.
Just as it was for so much of a first Champions League final played without fans.
Only a few hundred people were allowed into the Benfica stadium, because of pandemic restrictions, to see PSG academy graduate Kingsley Coman head in the winner from Kimmich’s cross in the 59th minute.
While Bayern won its first continental final since 2013, PSG has yet to lift the European Cup despite more than $1 billion being spent on players in the nine years under Qatari ownership.
More than $500 million was spent on Neymar, Kylian Mbappé and Angel Di Maria, but PSG looked far from formidable or threatening against the Bavarian club that was more assured than the first-time European Cup finalists.
The European Cup will join the Bundesliga trophy — won for an eighth successive season — and the German Cup at Bayern.
“We all know where we’ve come from this season,” Müller said. “There are no secrets, we just kept moving forward. Obviously we have a lot of quality in the team, but we also have the spirit. The boys are prepared to suffer. “