Final Is Backyard Battle In Bayern’s Backyard!

MUNICH — To the rest of the world’s soccer fans, Saturday’s hotly anticipated match between Chelsea and Bayern Munich is the final of the Champions League, the top prize in European professional club soccer. Here in the capital of Bavaria it is known in the local dialect as the finale dahoam — the home final.

Through a fluke of scheduling, the neutral site for the winner-take-all match is anything but. Germany’s most successful club will play for the title on its own field. But the advantage also comes with no small amount of added pressure for a team that otherwise fell short of expectations this season.

The Yankees of German soccer, Bayern Munich has won more German championships — 21 in all — than any other team in the league. The Bavarians are loathed by other fans and must play under unequaled pressure from their supporters: Win the German championship, or the season is a failure. And this season it won neither Germany’s Bundesliga regular-season title nor the German Cup championship, the DFB Pokal — losing both to Borussia Dortmund.

The Champions League title would do more than make up for those losses — it would elevate players like Philipp Lahm and Bastian Schweinsteiger, mainstays for the German national team who have played for Bayern since they were juniors, to a place among the club’s greatest players.

“It’s my home turf,” Lahm said at a news conference on Friday. “I was born in Munich. I grew up in Munich. The F.C. Bayern is my home team. I joined the club at the age of 11. So this is definitely dahoam, my home.”

Watching Chelsea hoist the championship cup on its home field just one week after an embarrassing 5-2 loss to Borussia Dortmund in the Cup final in Berlin would be an especially bitter defeat, something both clubs know a little bit about.

Chelsea and Munich have each come close to winning the Champions League in recent years, only to fall short by losing in the final. Manchester United defeated Chelsea on penalty kicks in 2008, while Bayern fell to Italy’s Inter Milan in 2010.

What the Super Bowl claims to be — a global sporting event followed breathlessly around the world — is truer still for the Champions League final. Journalists from Arabic, Latin American and Japanese television stations jockeyed for space at the Bayern practice field Friday.

The match will feature some of the game’s biggest stars, including Chelsea’s Didier Drogba and Fernando Torres, and Bayern’s Arjen Robben and Mario Gomez, who trails only Barcelona’s Lionel Messi for goals scored in the competition this season.

The game is as notable for who will not be playing as for who will, with three Munich players and four Chelsea players suspended, including John Terry, the Blues’ captain, sometimes known as Mr. Chelsea.

For Chelsea Coach Roberto Di Matteo, the showdown might be his final game leading the squad. Although he shepherded the team to the biggest game this side of the World Cup final (and to an English F.A. Cup title), there is speculation that Di Matteo will be replaced, the latest victim of the owner Roman Abramovich’s coaching carousel. Abramovich has flooded the team with money since buying the club in 2003, but he has shown little patience with coaches in his pursuit of the only title that has eluded Chelsea under his ownership: the Champions League.

Neither team was expected to make the final. Chelsea had to get through Barcelona, widely considered the best team on the planet. Bayern had to play Barça’s Spanish league archrivals, Real Madrid, also contenders for that unofficial crown. Before the semifinals, talk had already begun of an all-Spanish final.

Instead, Chelsea supporters were already pouring into the city on Friday, where an Oktoberfest-in-May feeling had taken hold ahead of the big match. Fans roamed the streets with big brown bottles of local Augustiner beer in hand. Billboards and placards around the city feature pictures of the shiny trophy. “One city, one dream,” reads one such sign in a Munich subway station.

At the Bayern practice center, Christian Reisner, 46, of Rohrdorf tried to explain the depth of the connection between fan and team. He grew up listening to games on the radio with his grandfather. He said he watched the team win the Champions League in person in 2001 in Italy, “wildly kissing strangers.” Now his son plays for the club’s under-15 youth team.

The players practiced free kicks and scoring combinations while hundreds of fans, who gathered on the hillside overlooking the field, pounded drums, chanted and sang as if the match were already under way.

The Bayern fans were nervous but optimistic, pointing out that the French star Franck Ribéry had to sit out two years ago against Inter Milan, but this time would bring his dexterity and creativity to bear against Chelsea’s staunch defense. “This is the high point of the last 10 years and probably of the next 10 years,” said Christian Gallitz, 40, about the chance to not only win it all, but also win at home. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”