Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund meet again tomorrow, just four months after the Champions League final they contested at London’s Wembley Stadium.
A lot has changed since then.
That was Madrid midfielder Toni Kroos’ last game in club football before the 34-year-old retired from playing altogether after representing Germany at Euro 2024 later in the summer. Dortmund’s coach Edin Terzic left his role, by mutual agreement, less than two weeks after their 2-0 defeat to Madrid, with his assistant and former Dortmund player Nuri Sahin taking over.
The Bundesliga side have underwhelmed this season, recording big wins against Club Bruges (3-0) and Celtic (7-1) in their first two Champions League matches but sitting a lowly seventh in the domestic table after seven games.
Madrid have also failed to hit the heights since lifting their 15th European Cup that night in June. Superstar summer signing Kylian Mbappe has blown hot and cold up front, they dropped points in three of their first nine La Liga games and their 1-0 loss against Lille in their most recent league-phase match was their first in the Champions League since May last year.
So how easy is it to maintain momentum after an appearance in a Champions League final? And what, if anything, can Madrid and Dortmund learn from how the competition’s past five sets of finalists performed the following year?
2018-19: Liverpool 2-0 Tottenham Hotspur
This was the first trophy of the Jurgen Klopp era at Liverpool. It was a crucial hangover cure after losing the Champions League final to Real Madrid a year before and then earning 97 points in the 2018-19 Premier League, only to finish one point behind champions Manchester City.
European Super Cup success against Chelsea followed at the start of the next season, with backup goalkeeper Adrian the hero in a penalty shootout. But he would become the villain in their Champions League campaign for an error-strewn performance (Alisson was out injured) in the round of 16’s second leg against Atletico Madrid, who knocked the holders out at Anfield in the March in what was the last game for the two clubs before the Covid-19 pandemic shut football down for three months.
Not great, of course, but the 2019-20 season will always be remembered as the season Liverpool lifted their first league title in 30 years.
Klopp’s men were made to wait until June 25 to finish the job due to the lockdown and had to do so in empty stadiums because of government restrictions on crowds gathering designed to limit the spread of the virus but overall they were imperious — only losing once before the season was paused (against Watford in the February) and finishing 17 points clear of City.
Caoimhe O’Neill
Mauricio Pochettino had long talked of the need for a “painful rebuild” of his Tottenham team following that loss to Liverpool in Madrid’s Metropolitano stadium, but the Argentinian didn’t last long enough to oversee it.
The aftermath of the final seemed the perfect time to overhaul a squad that was starting to look dog-eared in the Premier League despite their European run. But Kieran Trippier was the only first-team regular sold, returning to the Metropolitano with a move to Atletico, and though Spurs did land three of their key summer targets — Tanguy Ndombele, Giovani Lo Celso and Ryan Sessegnon — all failed to match expectations.
The result was that Spurs took their erratic late-season form into 2019-20, suffering embarrassing defeats to League Two side Colchester United in the Carabao Cup, Brighton & Hove Albion (3-0) in the Premier League and Bayern Munich (7-2) in the Champions League.
They were eventually eliminated 4-0 on aggregate by RB Leipzig in the latter’s round of 16 just before lockdown started but Pochettino was long gone by then, sacked in the November with his side 14th in the Premier League and without an away win in the competition for 10 months.
Jose Mourinho’s appointment briefly threatened to get things back on track, but it wasn’t until Ange Postecoglou’s arrival as head coach — and star striker Harry Kane’s exit for more than €100million (£83.3m/$1086m at current exchange rates) — in the summer of 2023 that it felt like the rebuild Pochettino wanted had come even close to completion.
James Maw
2019-20: Bayern Munich 1-0 Paris Saint-Germain
Superficially, there was no real hangover for Bayern the season after beating PSG to claim their sixth Champions League title. The final was held in August, the culmination of a pandemic-enforced eight-team mini-tournament of one-off ties in Lisbon.
But while 2019-20 was powered by Hansi Flick’s promotion to full-time head coach in April after an initial interim role following the sacking of Niko Kovac the previous November, the next season delivered three more trophies — the European Super Cup, Club World Cup and the Bundesliga — without Bayern showing the same degree of dominance.
There were moments of actual embarrassment, too.
In the DFB-Pokal, Germany’s domestic cup competition, Bayern were eliminated by second-division Holstein Kiel on penalties in the middle of a January snowstorm. And while they were only beaten once at home all season — 3-2 to PSG in the first leg of a Champions League quarter-final the holders would lose on away goals — they were a team on the wane.
Their transfer activity — Bouna Sarr, Marc Roca and Leroy Sane were the only senior players for whom Bayern paid fees — is better remembered as a continuation of the slip in recruiting standards and, ultimately, the argument between sporting director Hasan Salihamdzic and Flick that led to the latter, now the manager at Barcelona, leaving the club.
Seb Stafford-Bloor
That defeat by Bayern in Lisbon is still the closest PSG have come to Champions League success. It was a pivotal moment for the French club — but did not, it turned out, prompt a move in the right direction.
Long-standing key players, including Thiago Silva and Edinson Cavani, left at the end of their contracts and the 2020-21 season was disruptive for more reasons than the ongoing pandemic.
Thomas Tuchel, the architect of that Champions League run, was gone by the turn of the year after a familiar Parisian power struggle, notably with former sporting director Leonardo, who had sanctioned the exits of Silva and Cavani. Pochettino was appointed in January 2021, his first job since leaving Spurs, and tasked with imposing a tactical identity on an increasingly imbalanced squad.
He helped a team led by attacking stars Neymar and Kylian Mbappe to the Champions League semi-finals in the spring, but Lille ended their run of three successive Ligue 1 titles. PSG doubled down on their galacticos tribute, with Lionel Messi signing on a free transfer from Barcelona in the summer of 2021 to usher in a period of indulged player power.
On the pitch, individualism meant PSG drifted further away from their Champions League dream, with Pochettino and then successor Christophe Galtier unable to implement any cohesion. Now, Luis Enrique is having a go.
Peter Rutzler
2020-21: Chelsea 1-0 Manchester City
Chelsea went into 2021-22 with genuine belief a sixth Premier League title was within their grasp. Coach Tuchel had momentum, a lucrative new contract and had also been presented with a £97.5million ($127.2m at today’s rates) striker in Romelu Lukaku, back for a second spell at Stamford Bridge, but things went awry quickly and in unexpected ways.
Lukaku gave an explosive interview to Sky Italia around the turn of the year that destroyed his relationships with both the club and Tuchel. Chelsea had already fallen well behind Manchester City in the Premier League, leaving their best hopes of more silverware to the cup competitions.
Tuchel won the Club World Cup in February 2021 and delivered final appearances in both the domestic cups, but Chelsea lost to Liverpool on penalties in each one.
The man appointed England head coach this week also led Chelsea to a third-place finish in the league, albeit almost 20 points adrift of both City and Liverpool, and came closer than anyone else to knocking out eventual Champions League winners Real Madrid — his side surged into a 3-0 lead at the Bernabeu in the quarter-finals, putting them 4-3 up on aggregate, before running out of steam.
It was a creditable campaign, particularly when set against UK government sanctions related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that forced owner Roman Abramovich to put the club up for sale in March, but mounting player unrest foreshadowed Tuchel’s departure just a month into the next season.
Liam Twomey
The thing about Manchester City over the past four or five years is that they have essentially performed at the same level every season in the Champions League.
The catalyst for that was reaching that final, the club’s first, in 2021. It was almost like proof they had finally arrived in continental terms and belonged at that kind of level, mixed with a sensation of trying to get back there and go one better after that single-goal defeat to Chelsea in a near-empty stadium in Porto as the pandemic-related restrictions on crowds were only slowly lifted.
The following season, they won a group containing the PSG of Messi, Mbappe and Neymar, demolished Sporting Lisbon 5-0 in the round of 16, battled past Atletico Madrid in the quarter-finals after extra time and then got the better of Real Madrid over about 178 minutes — only to be undone by two late Rodrygo goals that sent that tie to extra time, too.
They were out on their feet by that point, though.
Despite a fine season that also included retaining the Premier League title and getting to the FA Cup semi-finals, they were outdone by Madrid being Madrid.
Sam Lee
2021-22: Real Madrid 1-0 Liverpool
Real Madrid’s run to their 14th Champions League title was so remarkable that you wondered who could stop them the following season.
Their progress was serene compared to that campaign, with convincing wins against Liverpool — beaten 5-2 at Anfield — and Chelsea in the round of 16 and quarter-finals. But they met their match in Pep Guardiola’s team, who thrashed them 4-0 in the second leg of their semi-final at the Etihad to banish the ghosts from the previous year.
Madrid’s personnel had barely changed, but perhaps that was the problem. The midfield pairing of Luka Modric and Kroos looked second-rate in that game against City without the protection of Casemiro and, for once, they could not rely on magic moments to bail them out.
The gloom didn’t last long: Jude Bellingham joined that summer, Carlo Ancelotti turned to a more youthful midfield and Madrid won a 15th title in similarly impressive circumstances after losing their first-choice ‘keeper and centre-back pairing to injury for much of the season.
Tomas Hill Lopez-Menchero
They say what goes up, must come down — and Liverpool’s 2022-23 was quite the crash landing.
The previous season, they had won the Carabao Cup and FA Cup, missing out on the Premier League title on the final day to Manchester City yet again and then losing to a Thibaut Courtois-inspired Real Madrid in Paris — a hard-hitting end to an unbelievable campaign.
Liverpool picked themselves up again by signing Darwin Nunez and, in January 2023, Cody Gakpo, but Klopp’s team began to break up as fans said goodbye to James Milner, Naby Keita, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Divock Origi and Sadio Mane.
The season’s high point was a 7-0 demolition of Manchester United but their league form was so inconsistent that it cost them Champions League qualification as they finished fifth. In the Champions League, they took a 2-0 lead against old rivals Real Madrid in the round-of-16 first leg within 15 minutes, but were stunned by five goals from Ancelotti’s team.
It summed up a season to forget.
Caoimhe O’Neill
2022-23: Manchester City 1-0 Inter Milan
City’s defence of their maiden Champions League title ended up being their worst showing, by round, since their quarter-final exit to Lyon in 2020. In reality, it was just a case of losing to Real Madrid on penalties at the same stage.
Memories were fresh of their 4-0 semi-final second-leg win against Madrid, but they could not get near those levels a year later. They probably did enough on the night to go through but failed to take their chances.
Before that, they became only the second English side to win all six of their group-stage matches and disposed of Copenhagen in the round of 16 in their usual style. But then it all came to an abrupt end against familiar opponents.
Sam Lee
Inter returned from Istanbul with an aura.
How close they came to beating City made the players believe anything was possible. They ran away with the league the following season, winning the Serie A title with five games to spare. The only regret was the Champions League.
Inter were good enough to go back to the final. They dominated Atletico Madrid in the first leg of their quarter-final and should have won by a greater margin.
They took the lead in the second leg but those missed chances at San Siro cost them late at the Metropolitano, when Atleti leveraged the crowd and some understandable jitters to knock out Inter on penalties.
But, as was the case with Juventus in 2015 and 2017, it would not be surprising if Inter learned from that experience and went deeper this time around.
James Horncastle
(Top photos: Getty Images)
