How good was Bayern Munich’s Champions League group stage? By the numbers...

Bayern Munich had a Champions League group stage to celebrate — laughing a group of death draw in the face and going a cool 6-0-0, 18 goals for, 2 against (both against Viktoria Plzeň) while blanking the likes of Inter Milan and FC Barcelona a combined four times.

But it isn’t just this season. Knockouts form and luck aside, the Bavarians are on some kind of tear. FCBayern.com gave a breakdown of the numbers:

• Bayern have their third perfect group stage — most out of any team in Champions League history! But more than that, it’s three out of the past four seasons — 2020/21 the only aberration.
• In the past 31 years, only eleven teams have done this, and aside from Bayern, only Real Madrid have done it more than once.
• Bayern already have a Champions League group stage unbeaten streak in the books, earned earlier this season against Plzeň — but of course extended now after successive wins against Barça and Inter. That number now stands at 34.
• In these past 34 games, it’s been 31-3-0 — with the current win streak at thirteen.

And there’s this:

That Bayern are managing this sort of form through changes of managers — Niko Kovač, then Hansi Flick, now Julian Nagelsmann — and turnover of key players, with Robert Lewandowski the most recent and highest impact of all the transfers away, is all the more a testament to the magnitude of this achievement. Bayern are a well-run club, functioning at an elite level and built to do so for the long haul.

It’s not a bad look for Julian Nagelsmann, either. His two wins with RB Leipzig to end the 2019/20 campaign puts him at fourteen wins in a row as manager, tying Louis van Gaal’s record as a manager — not bad company!

There’s hardly ever been a better time than this current era to watch Bayern in Europe. Now, if they could navigate the Knockouts a little better this year...

Interested in more analysis of the game? Why not check out our postgame podcast? We discuss how Inter stacks up against the big boys of the Champions League and how Julian Nagelsmann’s Bayern has shown some swagger recently. Listen to it below or at on Spotify.

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