After eleven years of waiting, Borussia Dortmund returns to the final match of the Champions League in football, in a season whose brilliance was not expected during the era that followed the departure of the stars Erling Haaland and Bellingham from the ranks of the fifth German League.
During the period between July 2020 and the same month of 2022, Borussia Dortmund witnessed the play of two of the current jewels of world football under its colours, namely the Norwegian striker Erling Haaland and the Englishman Billingham, with whom the team dreamed of achieving European glory, or at least coronating the position on the local scene. An end to Bayern Munich’s dominance in the German League. However, Dortmund never reached the semi-finals of the prestigious continental competition, and the furthest they reached was the 2021 quarter-finals, and they were eliminated with two losses to Manchester City, then they were eliminated from the group stage in 2022.
In the summer of 2022, Haaland headed to join Manchester City and participate in crowning the “Citizens” with the continental title in 2023. Twelve months later, and at a high price (103 million euros, in addition to a 31 million euro bonus), Bellingham signed with Real Madrid, which he will face. Dortmund in the final.
Ultimately, during the first season without its two stars, Dortmund dreamed of its second European crown after 1997, and occupied first place in a very difficult group, with Paris Saint-Germain, Milan of Italy, and Newcastle of England, then eliminated PSV Eindhoven of the Netherlands and Atletico Madrid of Spain in the eighth and quarter-finals. , before defeating Saint-Germain in the semi-finals and returning to Wembley on the first of next June, where the final match will be held, as happened in 2013 when it reached the final for the second time, and lost to its compatriot Bayern Munich.
Dortmund’s German-Croat coach, Edin Terzic, said after his team qualified, “I faced many similarities before returning to the semi-finals in Paris. There is one thing we have not talked about yet: the last time we were at Wembley, we were also 25 points behind the league leaders.
Dortmund’s defence, which was impressively strong against Paris Saint-Germain and was accompanied by great success (their own three balls saved it six times), doubled its mistakes in the domestic league.
Finally, this qualification comes a year after the strong shock it suffered in the final stage of the league last season 2022-2023, when Dortmund, which led by two points, wasted a golden opportunity to win the Bundesliga title, its first since 2012, and put an end to a decade of dominance for Bayern.
With a wide smile, Terzic, who has been accustomed to the yellow wall in Dortmund since his teenage years, says: “We will all go to London together, and we will do everything in our power to bring the long-eared cup home.”
Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid will face off in the Champions League final at Wembley Stadium in England on June 1 next month. Will he perform something like a miracle and achieve fifth place in the league, one of the biggest titles in the world of football, if not the strongest?