Liberté, egalité, Mbappé.
The French attacker scored his first home hat trick to lead Real Madrid to a 3-1 victory over Manchester City in the Champions League. The win brought Madrid’s aggregate advantage to 6-3 and eliminated City from the competition altogether.
Madrid will advance to face either Bayer Leverkusen or Atletico Madrid in the Champions League round of 16. Both matchups are fascinating: Leverkusen is coached by former Real Madrid star Xabi Alonso, while Atleti is Madrid’s bitter hometown rival.
City coach Pep Guardiola entered this match without much optimism following his team’s last-minute 3-2 defeat to Madrid in the first leg. “The percentage to go through? I don’t know,” he said in a news conference before the second leg. “We arrive at 1%, or I don’t know what.”
While he later admitted he’d exaggerated things, Guardiola’s starting lineup against Madrid didn’t do much to improve his team’s chances. He left prolific striker Erling Haaland on the bench due to a lingering injury and started new signing Omar Marmoush in his place.
Kevin De Bruyne, City’s one-time midfield maestro, was also missing in the starting lineup — but unlike Haaland, his absence wasn’t due to fitness. Guardiola appears to have dropped De Bruyne simply because he didn’t want to play him.
The decision adds fuel to the rumors that the De Bruyne will leave City this summer. His expected destination? Major League Soccer’s San Diego FC.
Guardiola also opted for Uzbek right-back Abdukodir Khusanov — a young player with zero Champions League starts to his name who arrived in Madrid mere hours before the match thanks to a visa snafu — in the heart of defense. Khusanov is an exceptional talent, but he’s still learning, and relying on on him to control Kylian Mbappé and Vinicius Jr. was a wild Guardiola gamble.
Khusanov wound up acquitting himself quite well against Madrid’s stellar attackers, but his appearance served to highlight just how big the talent gap between Madrid and City has become. The two teams have faced off in each of the last three Champions League tournaments, with the winner of each tie going on to win the trophy — Madrid in 2022, City in 2023 and Madrid again in 2024. For the past three years, the two teams have been as evenly matched as any in Europe. On Wednesday, they couldn’t have been further apart.
City will now focus its attention on the Premier League, where it currently sits in a distant fourth place. Its next opponent? League leader Liverpool, who enters the match hopping mad after settling for a 2-2 draw with ninth-place Aston Villa. If City had a 1% chance of victory over Real Madrid in the Champions League, it has an infinitesimal fraction of a chance at making a dent in the Premier League.
