Team Focus: Barcelona & Bayern 'Super Favourites' in Duel for Supremacy
Arsene Wenger raised his eyebrows, raised a chuckle, and that showed how much the stakes had been raised.
It was 2012/13, shortly before he came across the modern Bayern Munich for the first time, and the Arsenal manager was asked about his chances in that season’s Champions League. Wenger recalled two incidents from his past, one from his first ever season in the European Cup, the other just two years beforehand.
The 66-year-old spoke of how, in that debut campaign in the competition in 1988/89, his Monaco did feel they might have a chance… until he watched AC Milan in the quarter-final. Wenger then went back to his staff and pretty much said forget it.
“I know who will win it,” he told them. Milan were clearly the “super favourites”. He had identical thoughts about Barcelona over 2008 and 2011, and then Bayern again in 2013. They were all the “super favourites”.
There’s a similar feeling right now, except it’s rather hard to predict who will win it, because that feeling extends to two teams: the current Barca and the current Bayern. It is rare enough for more than one side to look so much better than the rest of the field in any one season, but then these two are performing at a rarely high level.
It is not just how they are battering everyone from Bayer Leverkusen and Olympiakos to other super-wealthy clubs and supposed rivals like Real Madrid and Arsenal. It is the lavish completeness of the wins.
When even close to on song, Bayern and Barca are not just dismantling sides. They are doing so with such decoration, with so many bells and whistles. It is as if, every few minutes, there is something to genuinely marvel at; the kind of magic that would have earned other teams legendary status for even a handful of such moments in the past.
In the second half of the blaugrana's destruction of Roma, Neymar pulled a long ball out of the sky by leaping up and flicking his right foot around his left leg to then set up an attack. It was the type of technique Dennis Bergkamp would have lifted an entire game with in his pomp, but here was just another sensational second of football alongside Leo Messi’s latest scarcely believable finish and Luis Suarez’s innovation.
Bayern don’t have a forward trio with that kind of magic trickery - very few sides in history have - but they probably have close to the same level of quality spread around the side. David Alaba, in fact, arguably personifies them more than any other player. He isn’t a Messi or even a Neymar, but he is a brilliant all-round talent capable of being that brilliant in almost any outfield position on the pitch.
That adaptability reflects the mobility of the team, how Pep Guardiola can reconfigure his midfield so often to also make opposition sides dizzy. In that regard, Messi aside, they are probably closer to his own Barcelona of 2010/11 than the current Barcelona of 2015/16.
The stats in that regard are telling. The rise of Guardiola’s first Barcelona heralded the rise of the super-clubs too, and the accumulation of more and more talent at specific clubs. It is perhaps no surprise that we have seen an increasing concentration of excellence in a few teams over the past half decade.
It is perhaps even less shocking, due to their complimentary club structures, that both of these clubs have provided the most complete teams in that time too; the teams that dominated on all fronts.
Both of these sides bear similarities to those. Bayern have a possession of 67.8% per game, and are thereby the only team to trump Barcelona 2010/11’s 67.5% in that time. The current Barca, however, are the only blaugrana side to get close to the previous Pep team in terms of interceptions, with 16.2 against 18.5, illustrating the intensity of their game right now. This is the combination of art and graft that everyone else is going to have to combat.
Of course, things can drastically change with a spate of injuries - as happened to Bayern in the last two seasons and arguably to Barca in 2012/13 - while the 180 minutes of a tie are short enough for shock results to happen. Luis Enrique himself emphasised that it’s only November, that things can change. It’s going to take a big shift, though, to prevent one - if not both - of these sides reaching the final.
Are Barcelona or Bayern better equipped to win this season's Champions League? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below
