Champions League final 2022: where is it being played, time & date and who will face Liverpool?
Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool side beat Villarreal and will now play Real Madrid in the UCL final after they came back against Manchester City.
Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp said reaching his fourth Champions League final as a coach felt almost like a new experience as his Liverpool side came back from two goals down against Villarreal to secure a 5-2 aggregate win in their semi-final on Tuesday.
Liverpool, leading 2-0 from the first leg in England last week, were rocked by two first half goals from the Spanish side. However, three second half strikes secured their third Champions League final in five seasons under the German.
“It feels like the first in 20 (years),” Klopp, who led Borussia Dortmund to the final of the competition in 2013, told BT Sport. “It’s outstanding, because we obviously made it a little tricky for ourselves, but we knew these kind of things could happen.”
Liverpool head to the final in Paris to face Real Madrid, who played their second leg in Madrid on Wednesday night facing Manchester City, with the visitors holding a slender 4-3 lead on aggregate. Despite being 1-0 down on the night, Madrid conjured two goals in last three minutes, and went on to win in extra-time thanks to a Benzema penalty.
Paris switch for final
Following Russia’s attack and invasion on Ukraine at the end of February, UEFA moved the Champions League final which was scheduled to be staged St. Petersburg, Russia on May 28 in a stadium which was built for the 2018 World Cup and which was financed by one of UEFA’s major sponsors, Gazprom (a Russian energy company).
UEFA made the decision to strip Russia of the hosting a day after the invasion, moving it instead to Paris at Stade de France in Saint-Denis. “The UEFA Executive Committee today held an extraordinary meeting following the grave escalation of the security situation in Europe,” the official UEFA statement read. In addition to the move, UEFA said Russian and Ukrainian teams as well as national teams for those countries would play all their home games in neutral territories.
UCL final: time and date
The showpiece final will go ahead in the Parisian capital on Saturday 28 May at 21:00 CEST (local time), that’s 3:00 pm (ET) or 12:00 pm (PT) with Liverpool looking for UCL win No. 7 as Real Madrid search for a fourteenth European triumph.