Barça aim to seal superpower status in Women’s Champions League final

Three years ago, Barcelona were humbled in Budapest by a strong and athletic Lyon side powered by more than a decade of investment. By the half-hour it was 4-0, with Ada Hegerberg’s 17-minute hat-trick stealing the show. A late consolation goal by the substitute Asisat Oshoala would do little to ease the bruising. It was the Spanish side’s first Champions League final but Lyon’s sixth European title, their fourth won consecutively, and they added a seventh the following year.

As Barcelona players, with tear-stained faces, stopped to speak to the waiting media there was a feeling that the standard they needed to aspire to had been emphatically set. It was thrilling then last summer to see Barcelona dismantle Chelsea with an eerily familiar ruthlessness to lift the trophy for the first time.

That 4-0 defeat of Emma Hayes’s side in Gothenburg lifted the pressure on a club that had set conquering Europe as the number one goal. On Saturday, against Lyon in Turin, they have the chance in another final not only to exorcise the ghost of 2019 but to shift the narrative from it having been a crushing defeat to a moment of learning.

“For every team that has ambition and goals, when you lose a game you go back to the drawing board and ask yourself questions about why you lost the game, what happened, what went wrong,” said the Barcelona forward Oshoala.

“We lost to Lyon three years ago in the final in 2019, yes, but it was also a good defeat for us. It helped us open our eyes and see what we could improve as a team. We needed to play more together, we needed to stay together more, we needed to improve on our defensive activities, we needed to be faster – there were a whole lot of things that went wrong in the game.”

The defender