Champions League team of the tournament: Barcelona's Lamine Yamal, Raphinha and PSG's Ousmane Dembele headline
Alessandro Bastoni is Inter's only representative in our best XI of the tournament
By
James Benge
•
8 min read
There might be one more Champions League match yet to play but with 188 already done and dusted, now seems as good a time as any to name our team of the season. The first year of a new format has delivered drama and surprises aplenty, from the near misses of Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain in the league phase to the latter's rapid rise from the playoffs to finalists.
It has also been a season that has delivered a host of star-making turns. Lamine Yamal has gone from bright young thing to a contender for the title of best player in the game before his 18th birthday while Raphinha, less than a year on from being made available for Barcelona, has swept all ahead of him. Meanwhile, few who witnessed it will forget Declan Rice's stunning free kick brace to eliminate Real Madrid.
Do those performances earn those players a spot in the team of the season? Let's find out:
GK: David Raya, Arsenal
Probably the most competitive spot in the XI what with the heroics of both Gianluigi Donarumma and Yann Sommer in the knockout stages. Both are eminently worthy of a spot in this team but did either of them save two penalty kicks across the Champions League? They did not, but David Raya did. The Arsenal goalkeeper was outstanding from the start of the competition to his own end, denying Mateo Retegui in Bergamo and Vitinha in Paris.
Raya lacks the sheer volume of saves that Sommer delivered, but the only goalkeeper to concede fewer goals than him per 90 minutes was Alisson, who didn't go anywhere near as deep into the competition. With a relatively small number of shots on goal -- he faced 41 to Donnarumma's 51 and Sommer's 58 -- the Spaniard still registered the most goals prevented, a metric that assess goals conceded versus the post-shot xG value of the attempt, of anyone in the tournament with 5.86.
RB: Achraf Hakimi, PSG
If you want a sense of how multifaceted Achraf Hakimi's value is to Paris Saint-Germain, watch the second leg of the Champions League semifinal. The first thing you'll see is a superbly taken goal coming from aggressive pressing up the field in the sort of underlapping area that the Moroccan exploits as well as any right back in the game. After that it might become apparent that he was winning the ball back a lot -- he has 20 more ball recoveries than anyone else in the competition -- and carrying it forward even more. He was doing it at pace too, covering more of the pitch through high intensity runs than anyone on either side (0.75 miles).
That was just a standard game for Hakimi, one of the best players in the Champions League this season.
CB: Alexsandro, Lille
Marquinhos can feel a little harshly done by here, but look, I've checked with the suits upstairs and they tell me we can't just have the entire PSG XI. There's one lock in Inter colors to fit in, after all. Before we get to him, the other center back position has a few tempting options, particularly given we're not worrying too much about playing two left-sided options. Nico Schlotterbeck's passing numbers are gaudy, Virgil van Dijk was rarely anything less than excellent while Antonio Silva proved himself to be a fearless defender at a young age.
Edging out those options is Alexsandro, who was certainly busy as Lille battled their way through trying qualifying rounds before making the round of 16 in impressive fashion. Their Brazilian center back was particularly impressive in the wins over Madrids Atletico and Real that turned this into a fairytale European season for Les Dogues and could hardly have felt he could have done anymore as Lille fell just short to Borussia Dortmund. Strong in the clearances and reliable with the ball at his feet, he seems bound for a Premier League move in the near future.
CB: Alessandro Bastoni, Inter
On his defending alone Alessandro Bastoni would merit a place in this team. The Italian international reads the game superbly, he won't set the stats sheet alight with his interceptions and tackles but he has a great sense for where an attack is heading and tends to be across long before he needs to do anything as gaudy as put a boot in.
What really makes Bastoni stand out is what he does with the ball at his feet. Registering about as many carries into the final third as high grade ball progressors like Theo Hernandez and Rodrigo De Paul in only a shade more minutes is particularly impressive, as is his ability to step up from the defensive line and receive the ball.
LB: Nuno Mendes, PSG
Just look at all those times when Nuno Mendes has got the ball back for PSG.
That is a lot of getting the ball back. Mendes might just be the most lockdown defender in the Champions League this season.
CM: Vitinha, PSG
Luis Enrique calls him "the perfect midfielder". Yeah, that's about right. Throughout this outstanding season it is hard to remember Vitinha breaking a sweat or bursting out into a sprint. And yet he is always where he needs to be, showing for a pass or functioning as the sweeper behind the initial line of the PSG press. No one has made more passes in this competition and while plenty of them are about control he is always capable of firing a cross into an undefendable spot when the moment takes him.
For 89 minutes his is the invisible hand controlling the flow of the game. Then he will do something to blow the other team away.
CM: Joshua Kimmich, Bayern Munich
Most of this team names itself before you even go digging around the statistics. Of course Vitinha, Bastoni and *spoiler alert* Raphinha are getting in here. And it is not a shock per se that Joshua Kimmich joins them. He is one of the outstanding midfielders of the past decade. It just might not be apparent how important he has been until you see it sketched out in numerical form.
Kimmich, primarily used in a double pivot, created as many chances in this season's Champions League as any player. Per 90 minutes he betters the likes of Kevin De Bruyne and Angel Di Maria, sitting just behind Raphinha in 10th. Kimmich averaged 15.3 passes into the final third. No one else even reached 14. No one got the ball into the box more frequently either, just look at how accurately he is passing the ball in those spaces too.
Thomas Tuchel once doubted Kimmich's worth as a midfielder. Consider those doubts dismissed in emphatic fashion.
CM: Pedri, Barcelona
You'll be looking at this team and thinking "this blithering idiot has forgot to name a proper DM". To which I'll say, what a fool you are. Look again and tell me who leads the Champions League in blocks. Pedri, the sort of player who demands to be labelled diminutive playmaker, has more tackles than all bar four players in the competition. And yes it helps that he has played 1117 minutes (a lot but not more than some quarterfinalists), but this is one of the best creative midfielders in Europe also offering outstanding defensive numbers.
And as is apparent from the graphic above, Pedri still is bossing it creatively.
RW: Lamine Yamal, Barcelona
I'll tell you now, there's going to be no surprises in the attack. There was half an argument to jimmy a center forward out of position to get the competition's joint-highest scorer into the side, but Serhou Guirassy's 13 goals include five penalties. They still count sure, just not for as much in this exercise. Also, in pure output, Bukayo Saka matches the player who gets the nod here.
At some stage, however, adjustments have to be made for when that output comes and the age at which it comes. Compared to most, Saka would come out the better but not Yamal, who at just 17 years delivered some of the best individual performances the Champions League has seen in years and did so at the most critical moments. For his performances against Inter alone, he deserves this.
ST: Ousmane Dembele, PSG
Eight Champions League goals since the turn of the year, all of which were in de facto knockout games for PSG after their slow start: how unlikely did this seem when Ousmane Dembele was dropped from the side that went to the Emirates Stadium for the first time this season? Even the player who had started to pick up form since leaving Barcelona never profiled as an elite scorer but perhaps that has to change. As Thierry Henry said after his second trip to north London, the game where he broke Arsenal hearts,
"I'm starting to take that seriously," he said. "He's going to have to prove it season after season now, but before people were just asking him to hit the target. We went from can you hit the target to scoring that number of goals. It's crazy, ridiculous."
It might also be the norm for him too. After all, it is not like Dembele has been out over his skis in terms of output this season. He averages 0.66 xG per 90 and 0.67 goals in Champions League play. Alongside Ademola Lookman he is one of only two players in the competition to take over five shots per 90, a number that has held relatively firm since the knockout stages began. The second half of this season might seem like the ultimate purple patch for Dembele but perhaps we need to get used to this.
LW: Raphinha, Barcelona
I mean obviously. When Ronaldo and Lionel Messi left the European stage it seemed impossible that the output they hit at their peak would ever be matched. Instead, with 13 goals and eight assists, Raphinha matched Cristiano Ronaldo's record for the most goal involvements in a Champions League season. Admittedly his 14 games was three more than Ronaldo needed but it seems churlish in the extreme to in any way denigrate the guy giving a goal involvement and a half of output per game on the biggest stage.
Given that he was also not playing in a Real Madrid superteam but a budding, talented but vulnerable Barcelona side, this could have gone down as the greatest Champions League campaign ever if the Blaugrana had just found their way past Inter and into a final they won. Instead, he is hands down the player of the season.
