Barcelona, Lyonnais take centre stage

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This article was published 20/05/2022 (1543 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was always going to happen.

At some point, having quickly risen to prominence in European club football, Barcelona Femeni would be compelled to face Olympique Lyonnais Feminin in a showdown to determine the undisputed queens of the continent.

They first got a crack at the French juggernaut in the 2019 Champions League Final but came up well short in Budapest as Lyon claimed a fourth consecutive title. Three years on, however, the only thing that’s changed in women’s football is everything.

For starters, the match in Hungary was played in front of 19,000 fans. Saturday’s Turin final between the same two teams (noon, DAZN) will welcome more than twice that number.

Over the course of this season attendance records have been shattered in both Spain and France, as well as England and Sweden. Barcelona and Real Madrid set an all-time mark when 91,533 supporters packed Camp Nou for El Clasico in March, and it was surpassed just a month later when Wolfsburg visited the Catalan capital.

DAZN, the Women’s Champions League rights-holder, tallies the current campaign’s overall viewership at almost 56 million.

Then there are the changes on the pitch — and in the standings.

When they lost the 2019 final, Barcelona had just concluded a schedule that saw them finish second in the Primera Division for a fourth season in a row. Atletico Madrid, champions again, were the dominant club in Spain, but even they had been trounced 15-2 by Wolfsburg in Europe.

One of the competition’s early powerhouses, Wolfsburg had passed the torch to what would become the Lyon dynasty in 2016, and now Barcelona are wanting Les Fenottes to hand it to them.

They’ll have to pry it from the grip of the seven-time European champions, whose string of five continental triumphs was broken last spring by Paris Saint-Germain. PSG also ended Lyon’s remarkable run of 14 successive Division 1 triumphs a year ago, although it seems French football’s status quo will shortly be resumed.

With two rounds to play, Lyon require just a single point to reclaim the title, and victory today would prove that their disappointing 2020-21 season was little more than a blip. Crucially, star forward Ada Hegerberg is back after missing nearly two years with an injured ACL, and the emergence of both Catarina Macario, 22, and Melvine Malard, 21, has the team well-positioned in attack for years to come.

Of interest to Canadian fans is the recent displacement of Olympic gold medal-winning defender Kadeisha Buchanan from the starting lineup. Griedge Mbock Bathy will play alongside captain Wendie Renard at Juventus Stadium, and Buchanan, whose contract will soon expire, is expected to join Real Madrid in the summer.

Mbock and Renard will find themselves more than occupied by the Barcelona attack, which scored 159 goals in 30 Primera Division matches — all of which they won — in the just-completed domestic campaign. Asisat Oshoala scored a league-leading 20 of them despite missing five months through injury and will likely start on the bench in Turin as the Blaugrana once again deploy a front three of Jenni Hermoso, Lieke Martens and Caroline Graham Hansen.

It was Hermoso’s switch from Atletico Madrid after its 2019 loss to Lyon that signalled the ascendancy of Barcelona, and now, with Ballon d’Or Feminin winner Alexia Putellas running everything in the centre of the park, there’s an argument to be made that this is the best club side to have ever taken the field.

It’s also an argument today’s opponents are determined to interrupt before it gains traction. Yes, Barcelona thumped Chelsea to win last season’s Champions League Final, but until they can beat Lyon on the grandest of stages, until they can wrestle away the torch they so badly want and think they deserve, it will keep burning in southeast France.

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UEFA, themselves, have built up this final as the most highly-anticipated match in the history of women’s club football. And they’re probably right.

It’s the establishment against the up-and-comer, the dynasty against the pretender to the throne.

It was always going to happen.

jerradpeters@gmail.com

Twitter @JerradPeters