Every UEFA Champions League Final Ranked From Worst To Best
11. Real Madrid 3-1 Liverpool (2018)
The 2018 Champions League final in Kiev provided the perfect showcase of the good, the bad and the ugly side of the beautiful game.
The good came courtesy of Gareth Bale who, two minutes after coming on for Isco in the 61st minute with the game tied at 1-1, scored one of the great European Cup final goals, an acrobatic bicycle kick.
Meanwhile, the bad can be attributed to Liverpool goalkeeper Loris Karius who was guilty of two catastrophic errors which ultimately handed the trophy to Los Blancos. The first, which came at 0-0, saw Benzema take advantage of a careless throw to deflect the ball into the empty Liverpool net.
Though Sadio Mane equalised to cancel out that error, there would be no redemption for his second mistake, which came at 2-1, when Karius let a speculative 40-yard strike from Bale slip through his hands and into the goal.
Before all of that came the ugly, when Liverpool star man Mohamed Salah suffered a dislocated shoulder, 23 minutes into the game, following a robust challenge from Sergio Ramos, who was shown locking arms with the Egyptian, resulting in a fall.
Despite the high drama of the occasion, the game itself left a sour taste in the mouths of many fans with Karius’s error and the early loss of Salah denying Jürgen Klopp’s dominant Liverpool side a deserved European Cup win.