Bayern Munich at FC Barcelona promises Champions League fireworks, intrigue

Comet C/2023 A3 passes Earth once every 80,000 years. But Bayern Munich and FC Barcelona remain locked in Champions League orbit.

Theirs is a celestial drama that has never burned brighter. As Bayern travels to Barça this week, the stage is set for a showdown of cosmic proportions.

A star-crossed combination

Barça and beating Bayern, that is. Hate to beat a dead horse — IYKYK — but in the current era, Barça’s nightmares have tended to be Bayern’s dreams.

Bayern put Barça to the sword en route to its last two UCL triumphs, winning 4-0 and 3-0 in the semifinals of 2012/13 and then 8-2 in the 2020 summer tournament in Lisbon. That was the match that cemented the legend of one Hansi Flick, Bayern head coach.

And it hasn’t gotten better for the Catalans since.

Flick departed Bayern in dramatic fashion a year after his Lisbon triumph but his replacement, Julian Nagelsmann, drew Barça twice in two seasons in the UCL group stages. Bayern won all four of those games with a combined score of 11-0, with Barcelona relegated to the Europa League both years.

But the times, they change.

Long used to being an imprint underneath Bayern’s heel, Barça has gone the route of trying to beat Bayern by being Bayern, entrusting none other than Flick himself with the task. And what does Flick find at his disposal but his most lethal hitman?

Lewandowski and Kane

Robert Lewandowski’s Bayern departure, in the summer transfer window of 2022, was no less messy than Flick’s.

The Bavarians wanted to extend, Barça didn’t seem to have any money, and at one point Bayern CEO was left exclaiming Basta! in exasperation as the saga dragged on.

Photo by Thomas Hiermayer/vi/DeFodi Images via Getty Images

“With ‘Basta’ you end a discussion,” Kahn later explained, but somehow the cash-strapped Catalans got the deal done.

Both club and player may have found that the grass was not always greener on the other side, though. Bayern tried to play striker-less football with Sadio Mané, and that lasted less than one Hinrunde. By the next spring, Nagelsmann was out of a job. Lewandowski, meanwhile, went scoreless and winless against his former club in his first year, and endured a FC Hollywood-worthy will-he won’t-he saga that saw the exit of the coach that brought him to Spain, Xavi Hernández, in his second.

2023/24 brought a reprieve for the clubs from each other, and each used it to recuperate.

Where Barça went to the Bayern well to solve its coaching problem, Bayern resolved its striker issues in the biggest way imaginable: a near-€100M signing of former Tottenham Hotspur superstar and England captain Harry Kane.

Kane didn’t miss a beat in his transition from the Premier League, challenging Lewandowski’s old Bundesliga single-season goal-scoring record — which had stood for 40 years, long held by Bayern and Germany great Gerd Müller — in his first season.

And so Lewandowski and Flick are back together, and Bayern has themselves a lethal No. 9 again.

The more things change, the more they stay the same?

Big Flick energy back in Bavaria

Flick’s explosive but brief tenure at Bayern was characterized by his gung-ho approach: an impossibly high line, all-out attack, and relentless pressing. At Flick’s Bayern, you lived by the sword and sometimes you died by the sword. It was a ruthless ethos that seemed to resonate with the Bayern players perfectly, rousing them from the stupor of the Niko Kovač days and propelling Flick — a relative unknown at the time — to the footballing stratosphere.

Bayern tried to evolve in the years since, Julian Nagelsmann’s minimum-width philosophy and Thomas Tuchel’s emphasis on control both standing in contrast to the more unbridled chaos of Flicki-Flaka. But if Bayern thought it was clambering towards safety, it found out instead that it was brutal out there — the tumult of the past two seasons in particular something the club seems eager to leave behind.

Photo by David Inderlied/picture alliance via Getty Images

Now Bayern is back in its comfort zone with Vincent Kompany: another relative unknown, another proponent of unalloyed aggression.

“Even when we are leading 1-0 or 2-0, [Kompany] wants three, four and five goals,” Harry Kane quipped early in the season, adding: “We want to push the opponents to limits they cannot maintain.”

“This domination of the opponent is something new,” added Thomas Müller of the new, old Bavarian ways.

Refreshing. Long absent. Now back. This is Bayern as Bayern is meant to be, at least in the eyes of its squad — relentless, ruthless, unyielding.

At Barça they have gone the way of change. Flicki-Flaka is not tiki-taka, just as the German style of 2014 was not Spain’s of 2010. Flick’s task has been to install a new identity, one that is explosive rather than safe, incisive rather than merely possessive.

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images

It is a task Flick is executing with aplomb. Barça has been wrecking opponents with scorelines that will feel familiar to Bayern fans — 5-1 over Sevilla, 5-0 over Young Boys, 5-1 over Villarreal , 7-0 over Vallodid.

And 2-4 the other way at Osasuna, because sometimes, you die by the sword (of a Bayern loanee, no less).

But the Catalans are three points atop the league, with Lewandowski, at 36, back to the goal-scoring heights of his Bayern days. Flick looks like a man who never missed a beat, whose Germany misadventure and the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup group stage exit never happened.

It almost has Bayern looking over and wondering what might have been, had it managed to lure its former manager back to Bavaria this summer.

Instead, in this stare-down, each fighter will see shades of its own reflection in the mirror.

Germany and Spain

Bayern and Barça are traditionally the biggest clubs in their respective countries when it comes to national team representation — and the dynamics of the Germany vs. Spain contests in recent years are of course in the mix, too.

Both national sides are on the ascendancy again after some time in the wilderness. Spain fell apart in 2014 — Bayern’s Arjen Robben helping the Dutch take revenge for a loss in the 2010 World Cup Final in the opening game of 2014, which ended with a Robben brace and a 5-0 scoreline. Germany won the World Cup that year — Hansi Flick as assistant coach — but descended to unimaginable depths in the years following, culminating in a 6-0 Nations League trouncing at the hands of Spain in 2020.

Photo by Harry Langer/DeFodi Images via Getty Images

That humiliation was the beginning of the end for Flick’s mentor, Jogi Löw, and the beginning of the paving of Flick’s way out of Bayern and to the national team post that was soon to open. In Flick’s one and only major tournament with the DFB, he squared off against a Spanish side led by former Barça coach Luis Enrique — and played out a 1-1 draw that, while tactically spectacular, did not produce the decisive result the Germans needed. When Enrique’s side lost to Japan on the final matchday, Germany was out at the group stage, and Flick’s future with Die Nationalmannschaft seemed all but sealed.

What could EURO 2024 bring but another Germany-Spain classic? This time both sides had evolved. Flick was gone, and Germany, hosting the tournament on home soil, turned to Julian Nagelsmann — who quickly fashioned his bedraggled troops into one of the most enterprising and enthusiastic sides in the tournament. Spain had gone with a long-time youth national team manager, Luis de la Fuente, who initiated an evolution beyond the tiki-taka days of its past.

The Spain-Germany clash this time took place in the quarterfinals, and the hosts lost in heart-breaking fashion in extra time. Spain wound up hoisting the trophy while Germany was left to rue missed chances — and missed refereeing decisions.

But it is high tide once more for both teams, and it is Bayern and Barça stars — from Jamal Musiala and Joshua Kimmich to Lamine Yamal and Pedri — helping to light the way.

The Pepfather, too

Somehow, Pep-altine returns to the picture.

Photo by Naomi Baker/Getty Images

The most singularly influential manager of this era, Pep Guardiola has his fingerprints all over this matchup. The Manchester City coach was Barça boss in Spain’s heyday, when Barça stars headlined Spain’s incredible 2008-2012 run on the international stage. He landed at Bayern Munich right as Thomas Müller and Germany were ready to seize the mantle.

His lasting influence on these two teams endures, and it is his shadow that his past clubs have spent years trying to, or deciding whether to try to, escape.

Barça did it with Flick. Bayern — well, Kompany may be positively Flick-like. But he was a Guardiola protegé too, from his City playing days.

Now what?

Photo by Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images

A generation on from Pep for both Bayern and Barça, each club is more different from what they’ve been but more similar to each other than ever.

Barça is…good. In Flick, they have reached towards something new, and seem to have captured some of that old Bayern magic. Bayern, wounded by the failures of Tuchel-ball, is reaching towards the old, and roaring back to life.

There may not be a more intriguing contest in the Champions League league phase this year. What will this year’s clash produce? Tune in with us right here at Bavarian Football Works this Wednesday to find out.

Could Bayern Munich actually lose to FC Barcelona? What happens if we do? How do the two teams stack up? We discuss those questions and more in the newest episode of our podcast! Listen to it below or on Spotify.

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