2019–20 UEFA Champions League Best XI
I'd 8-2 be a Barca fan...
With massive delays, postponements, one-legged knockout rounds and a complete change in location, the 2019/20 Champions League will always stand as one of the strangest and most unforgettable editions of the tournament.
From start to finish, 386 goals were scored across 118 games as Bayern Munich romped to their sixth European win in their history following a 1-0 win over Thomas Tuchel's PSG. Bayern became the first team in history to win a European tournament with a 100% win rate, scoring forty-three goals in just eleven games. As well as registering ten goals alone in London with big wins over Tottenham and Chelsea, they were also responsible for inflicting one of the most embarrassing defeats ever witnessed on Barcelona with an 8-2 win in the quarter-final.
No side in Europe deserved the win more than Bayern, and the likes of Alphonso Davies, Joshua Kimmich, Thiago Alcantara and Robert Lewandowski have all bagged the recognition they deserve for helping the Bavarians surge to the top of the tree again.
However, plenty of other players managed to carve out a name for themselves during the course of the campaign.
11. Manuel Neuer - Bayern Munich
Already talked about as being one of the great goalkeepers of the modern era, there were a couple of murmurs at the start of the 2019/20 campaign that Manuel Neuer was over the hill and starting to decline.
Fast forward to his man of the match display in the final against PSG and those murmurs have been well and truly put to bed. Hailed as 'taking goalkeeping to a new level' by opposition boss Thomas Tuchel, Neuer didn't put a foot wrong over the course of ninety minutes. He made three saves inside his own box, including an unbelievable stop when Kylian Mbappe was a yard offside, and even chipped in with fifty touches, thirty accurate passes and eight successful long balls.
The final might have been labelled as a battle between two potent attacks pre-game, but it was Neuer's performance that really stole the show.
However, all of this isn't to say that Neuer was anything short of exceptional across the rest of the campaign. Playing in all eleven of the Bayern's European games Neuer kept six clean sheets in total, with two of them coming in consecutive games against Lyon in the semis and then against PSG in the final. He's also only the third keeper, after Peter Schmeichel and Iker Casillas, to lift the Champions League as the captain of his side.
With the foot injury that saw him ruled out of an entire season now firmly behind him, Neuer looks set to reclaim his title as the world's best keeper.