UEFA Champions League final by the numbers: Top scorer, assist leader and most clean sheets

Just 124 games after the competition began in Milan and Bern, the Champions League comes to an end on Saturday night at Wembley Stadium. With 374 goals scored and just 53 clean sheets, the 2023-24 season has been full of drama, plot twists and, certainly best of all, statistics. Even though there are only Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund left, there are still individual accolades to be won, history to be made and curiosities to be discovered.

Viewing information

• Date: Saturday, June 1st | Time: 3pm ET
• Location: Wembley Stadium – London, England
• TELEVISION: CBS | Live broadcast: Paramount+
• Chances: Borussia Dortmund +420; Draw +330; Real Madrid -165

Here’s a look at the competition’s individual leaders:

golden boot

A day that will undoubtedly be named the Cristiano Ronaldo award, this one appears to be done and dusted before the competition is even over. Two players occupy first place, Harry Kane, from Bayern Munich, and Kylian Mbappe, from Paris Saint-Germain, with eight goals scored. You have to remember that the semi-finals didn’t go as planned for either star and even a player with Mbappe’s quickness can’t take his move to Madrid that far. Contrary to FIFA’s curious insistence that the player with the most assists should win the World Cup’s top scorer award, UEFA does not apply tiebreakers to the race to score goals in the Champions League. It will have to be half a trophy for Kane.

With their closest rivals Antoine Griezmann and Erling Haaland arriving at the Champions League club’s home ground with six points to their name, it looks like this will be a prize shared by Kane and Mbappe. His eight goals will be the first time the Golden Boot has been won by a player who has not reached double figures since 2009-10, when Lionel Messi reached the high-water mark of eight, in José’s less than illustrious era. The ball of suffering by Mourinho.

Then again, this is the Champions League and there are honors to be doled out. Using words like “done and dusted” tends to have a remarkably restorative impact on Real Madrid. Three of their players – Vinicius Junior, Rodrygo and semi-final hero Joselu – have scored five goals so far. Three of the four players who have scored three goals in European Cup finals have done so in Real Madrid colors. I’m just saying.

Oh, as for Dortmund? Niklas Fullkrug has three. Probably not then…

Assistant leader

Now we have a fight on our hands! The man with his digits on the prize now typifies Borussia Dortmund’s timely spring warm-up. Marcel Sabitzer completed 213 passes, created 13 chances and provided 1.32 expected assists (xA) for the cause. This resulted in five assists, more than any other player in the competition so far. Mbappe and Achraf Hakimi must be asking themselves what they need to do to get shots like these from the opportunities they create.

Everything is still at stake at Wembley, with Vinicius and Bellingham just one assist away from drawing level with Sabitzer. The former, in particular, was on a creative roll in the New Year, rivaling David Bowie in Berlin. Eleven of the 19 chances he created came in high-risk knockout moments, as did 1.61 of his 2.58 xA. Whether he tops the scoring or assists charts, who knows, but maintain this form until Wembley and the Copa América and you could be reading about the next Ballon d’Or winner.

Golden glove

The football community is, for the most part, well enough informed to know that keeping a clean sheet is far from the best measure of a goalkeeper’s qualities. But look, what else would you like me to wear? To save money? This only favors busy players on bad teams. Goals avoided? Very nerdy. Possession value? What did I just say? It may not be perfect, it may reward the defense as a whole rather than the individual goalkeepers, but the clean sheet will do.

Fortunately, this occasion also highlights a player who is clearly the best goalkeeper in the 2023-24 Champions League. Gregor Kobel has it in hand anyway, with six clean sheets to his name, although, as Chuck Booth notes, having the best goalkeeper in the tournament is something of a double-edged sword. All credits to Alex Remiro, David Raya, Manuel Neuer and Yann Sommer, but it is the Borussia Dortmund player who takes this award. It would use many other statistical measures that you would like to name.

Kobel’s 42 saves are four more than any other player in the competition, his 7.09 goals prevented are almost double the second-best mark set by Anatoliy Trubin. Sommer has his compatriot Kobel beaten in save percentage and goals conceded per 90 minutes, but look, Inter came through a pretty quiet group before being eliminated by Atlético Madrid. Half of Dortmund’s 12 games have been against oil-state soft power vehicles disguised as football clubs. They beat both to go top of a group that also contained AC Milan… then knocked out PSV Eindhoven and Atletico Madrid before finding themselves faced with one of those sovereign wealth worries again. There could hardly be a tougher test for a team and, in particular, for a goalkeeper. Kobel nailed it.

Other Stats We Like

• The problem with defensive statistics is that some of the best work done without the ball involves preventing any meaningful action from taking place. How many times does an opponent fail to play a long pass into the channel because they know Virgil van Dijk or William Saliba will intimidate their center forward? Still, there is a world to celebrate the active side of defense: hitting the opponent firmly but fairly, shooting the ball, reading the pass before it arrives. Enter Mats Hummels, who leads the Champions League in tackles, interceptions and clearances with the second highest number of ball recoveries. Aaah, you say, but that’s just because he logged more minutes in the tournament. Adjust his numbers to 90, however, and the Borussia Dortmund defender still leads in tackles, ranks third in interceptions and sixth in clearances. His season was a master class in busy defense.
• Shot Goals Added (SGA) is one of those curious metrics. Evaluating the pre- and post-shot xG values, this doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is much more significant on a long time scale than xG itself could be. The best strikers are not necessarily those who hit corners every time – Heung-min Son could say otherwise – but those who keep putting themselves in finishing positions. Yet during the relatively brief lifecycle of a Champions League campaign, the SGA serves a different purpose, highlighting the men whose damn the games had an outsized impact on the tournament. Oh Lautaro Martinez (34 shots, two goals, 5.13 xG, -1.83 SGA), if you had maintained your Serie A performance in the big leagues, there could have been another Champions League final on the line. Fabian Ruiz, we really need you to practice heading.
• Are we seeing a new post-pressure approach at the top of the European game? Even Borussia Dortmund are no longer Jurgen Klopp’s heavy metal practitioners, returning to the promised land of Wembley thanks to tight defensive lines and immaculate off-the-ball form. Manchester City’s 92.4% pass rate is the highest in five years of Champions League football. Real Madrid’s 90.1% ranks third, while PSG, Bayern Munich and Feyenoord were among those who were notably more accurate than in previous years. For the competition as a whole, the pass completion was 83.6%, in pre-COVID 2019-20 it was slightly lower at 82.1%. Similarly, this year teams have won the ball in the middle third on 22.6 occasions per game. Five years ago, this value was 24.3.
• Perhaps this is partly explained by how long everyone has been waiting. Twenty players have made more than 150 appearances in the history of UEFA club competitions. Four of them – Sergio Ramos, Luka Modric, Thomas Muller and Ivan Rakitic – joined the club this season. With all those Champions League appearances, Muller is now level with the ageless Xavi Hernandez on 151 Champions League appearances, just one ahead of his compatriot Toni Kroos, who will retire from club football after Saturday’s final. For now, at least this means that of the 15 players with the most Champions League appearances, 10 are still active. Eight of the top 15 were led by Carlo Ancelotti. This era of football is over about!