The last Wednesday in May will never be the same. What always used to be an annual highlight, the European Cup, now Champions League Final, has been brought forward to the weekend before — on the say-so of ever-tinkering Uefa chief Michel Platini so that more children, who won’t have to go to school the next day, can watch it. Whoever said sports bureaucrats didn’t have a heart? So at the end of next week (22 May) we can feast on a match of stupendous European pedigree, Louis van Gaal’s Bayern Munich against Jose Mourinho’s Inter Milan in Madrid. And though the head says pragmatic, brilliantly drilled, defensive Inter should win (certainly my head, as I invested in them at an appetising 7-2 just before the semi-finals), here is why your heart should rule and you should be backing the beery Bavarians of Bayern.
1) Talking of beer, the club gave out free ale to fans last autumn after a particularly dismal start to the season, six points off the top of the Bundesliga and with an embarrassing defeat to Bordeaux in the early rounds of the Champions League. Now of course they have wrapped up their 22nd German title.
2) They look after their own: the club is run by great former players, Uli Hoeness is president, Franz Beckenbauer is honorary chairman, and the great Karl-Heinz Rummenigge is chief executive. And these are all people who do real jobs: I know Bobby Charlton is attached to Manchester United, but I’m not quite sure what he does. And when the great striker Gerd Muller, ‘Der Bomber’, fell to bits after retiring from football and ended up a penniless alcoholic on the streets in Florida, Bayern were quickly on hand to rescue him, put him through rehab, and give him a coaching job.
3) Bayern have the most spectacular stadium in Europe — Herzog and de Meuron’s stunning 69,000-capacity Allianz arena — and also one of the cheapest. Basic tickets cost E10-20, and a season ticket for Bayern could cost less than one for Crawley. If Bayern can beat Inter, it will show that you don’t have to run your football club like the last days of Lehman Brothers. The whole Bundesliga is a model of good organisation, where fans take precedence and the financial sharks who circle the Premier League find little to feed on.
4) Mourinho is a great manager, but Louis van Gaal is even better (and of course, like the Portuguese, not plagued by self-doubt). Although a fairly lumbering semi-pro as a player, the one-time gym teacher has an extraordinary footballing brain. He built the marvellous Ajax side of the 1990s, with Kluivert, Seedorf, Davids and the de Boer twins, and took them to three Dutch titles and a Champions League, as well as assorted other silverware; at Barcelona he could only manage two Spanish League titles, where his captain was one Josep Guardiola, now Barca’s sharply-suited manager, and a certain Jose Mourinho was on hand for some casual interpretation and a few coaching reports. After a rough time with the Holland national team, van Gaal eased away from the limelight to manage little AZ Alkmaar, where again, needless to say, he picked up the Dutch league title last year. Now his Bayern plays free-flowing, attacking football, built around meticulous passing, and getting the best out of his talent: he realised quickly that Bastian Schweinsteiger was not a forward but the superb defensive midfielder he has since become.
5) ‘Typical Germans’ was Sir Alex Ferguson’s impressively demented and xenophobic reaction to losing to Bayern in the quarters. It was a surprise he didn’t throw in ‘Achtung, surrender’ for good measure. But typically German? Hmm… the aggregate score was 4-4 and Bayern had come back from 3-0 down at Old Trafford. Still, any team which can drive the doughty Glaswegian to such inspired lunacy is worth a cheer, no?
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