Barcelona lost the first leg of their 2017 Champions League tie 4-0 in Paris. The second leg at the Camp Nou was, by any reasonable reading, a formality.
The last seven minutes
Barcelona led 3-1 with two minutes of normal time left, which was not enough. Neymar scored a free kick on 88 minutes and a penalty on 91. Sergi Roberto, a converted midfielder playing at right back, scored the sixth in the ninety-fifth from a Neymar chip.
Why it is genuinely singular
Sixteen sides had previously lost a European Cup tie’s first leg by four goals. All sixteen went out. It has not been done since either, which suggests the result was not the start of a pattern so much as an outlier that everybody subsequently over-learned from.
Paris Saint-Germain’s response was to spend €222m on Neymar that summer. Their reasoning was that they had been eliminated by an individual rather than by a team, and the fastest correction was to buy the individual. It is a reading of the night that the ninety-fifth minute does not entirely support.
