The 'Mia san Mia' spirit has reached Bayern Munich's UN connection: bring on Real Madrid!

The fact that the two goalscorers, Tom Bischof and Lennart Karl – members of the infamous ‘Uno Connection’, which also includes Aleksandar Pavlovic (the youngsters at the record champions actually prefer playing the card game Uno, which is hugely popular not just with children and grannies, to playing Fortnite) – are among Bayern’s youngest players was certainly noteworthy, but not exactly surprising. Enough has already been written about Vincent Kompany’s obsession with youth. What was surprising, however, was that three of the goals were foreshadowed. 

In the case of double goalscorer Tom Bischof, it had taken a nudge from the midfield boss. “Before the game, Jo Kimmich told me to please finally have a crack at goal,” Bischof said afterwards to DAZN. He would do that regularly in training, but in matches he had so far rarely found himself in the right positions for his long-range shots, explained Bischof, revealing why it took until his 33rd competitive match of the season for Munich before he could score his first goals for the record champions.

In Freiburg, Bischof – nominally deployed as a left-back – had in fact found himself in promising spaces very early on in the match; whenever the Munich side, who had been rather tentative and imprecise at the start, did pose a threat, it was usually through him and with him. 

For Lennart Karl, who had just turned 18 and was therefore a good two and a half years younger than Bischof, but had already scored four goals for Munich and had always been blessed with an abundance of self-belief, sheer self-belief was enough. "Yes, it really is a very, very incredible feeling for me. Scoring in the last minute is something quite special. I’d actually been thinking the whole time about taking my shirt off, and then somehow it really happened. Luckily my right foot did the job in the move, the ball went in and it was just an indescribable feeling,” he told Sky, adding in response to the somewhat incredulous question of whether he’d somehow foreseen his goal: “Yes, I somehow had the feeling that I’d score a goal today. Then, of course, it was perfect that it turned out exactly like that. I came on, scored, and it just worked out.”

Speaking to DAZN, Karl, who scored Munich’s 100th Bundesliga goal of the season, had even mentioned that a sense of invincibility currently prevails at Bayern. “We’ve just been talking about it in the dressing room – that we can beat any opponent with this. Whether it’s the Bundesliga or the Champions League. Just go full throttle and then we can beat any opponent,” he said. 

This works out well, given that their next opponents are Real Madrid, and the days when the Munich side – and Oliver Kahn in particular – were regarded as the ‘Bestia Negra’ for the Madrid side, a final opponent who was extremely difficult to beat, are now a few years behind us.

In their last meeting in the semi-finals of the 2024 Champions League, Real came through rather fortuitously after a 2-2 draw in the first leg; Bayern had taken the lead through Davies, but Joselu turned the game around with two goals in the 88th minute and in stoppage time. Real had done what Real do and went on to win the trophy with a 2-0 victory over Borussia Dortmund in the final.  

Back then, for Bayern under Thomas Tuchel, the Champions League was really just about salvaging a rather botched season. Now the Munich side are travelling to Madrid not only as mental giants, where the ‘Mia san Mia’ ethos has even reached the young stars, but also as the most efficient and in-form team on the continent. As a side that not only scores goals on the conveyor belt and can steamroller their opponents, but as a team that has recently also learnt to suffer – and still win in the end.