Time catches up with everybody in the end. But not with Manuel Neuer. Not yet. Even at 40.
Bayern Munich’s 2-1 win over Real Madrid on Tuesday night was what it was meant to be. Football as theatre. Sport at its most compelling. Amid its subplots and dramas, the moment of the night might have belonged to Neuer, when he clawed a whistling Kylian Mbappe drive around the post.
Mbappe was turning to celebrate as he caught the ball flush, sending it thundering towards the corner. Madrid were 2-0 behind. The Bernabeu was heaving, the fans were longing their team back into the game.
Instead, Neuer plunged down, jutted out a wrist of steel, and Mbappe turned away, eyes wide in disbelief.
The last time Neuer played in the Bernabeu, in 2024, he suffered one of the worst moments of his career. With 87 minutes played of that Champions League semi-final, Bayern led by a goal and were in sight of another final.
In the 88th minute, Neuer fumbled a routine shot and allowed Joselu to equalise. A few minutes later, Joselu scored again, and Bayern were out.
It was ugly. At the time, there was a chance of that being Neuer’s final appearance in one of sport’s great crucibles, and players of his calibre deserve better endings. On Tuesday, he got one. Either side of the Mbappe save, there were all sorts of others: to his left and right, with his feet and with his body. Nine stops in all, not including his many ventures off his line to sweep up behind his defenders and defuse threat after threat.
It was enough to preserve Bayern’s win and their advantage ahead of next week’s return leg. It was worth a player-of-the-match award, too, and afforded him a curtain call at the Bernabeu and an opportunity to leave the stage on his own terms.
But this was far from inevitable. There was a time in Neuer’s career when he exuded security. He was dominant, commanding, and played the position with as much ego as anyone in history. He was the lighthouse standing tall in the wind and the rain. Invulnerable and immovable. Indifferent to the swirling pressures around him.
Manuel Neuer rushes out to head clear (Oscar Del Pozo/ Getty Images)
His great strength was never that he was perfect. Rather, it was that he could make mistakes and remain unaffected.
Those days are over. Since reaching his mid-thirties, the topic of Neuer’s succession has been on steady play in the German media. Instead of the occasional soft concessions being treated as an aberration, they now restart conversations about his longevity.
That happened against Arsenal in the only European loss Bayern have suffered this season. He dashed from his goal at the Emirates, as he had hundreds of times before in his career, only this time Gabriel Martinelli beat him to the ball and ran away to score and make it 3-1.
Too old, too slow.
It happened just last weekend. Bayern beat Freiburg 3-2 on Saturday, scoring a 99th-minute winner to maintain their nine-point lead at the top of the Bundesliga. But Neuer helped Freiburg build the 2-0 lead that Bayern had to overcome. He was beaten from distance for the first goal, moving sluggishly as a shot dropped into his far corner. Then he flapped helplessly at a cross, which led to a second.
Too old, too slow.
Neuer’s contract has three months left to run, and there is still no news on whether he will sign an extension. He has had a really good season, his best in several years, but his body is starting to betray the strain of more than two decades of professional football. This is his career’s twilight.
Neuer made his first senior appearance for Schalke’s second team in April 2004, two months after the iPod Mini was released and “TheFacebook” went live at Harvard University. Goalkeepers age better than technology, but he has been creaking.
Since breaking his leg in December 2022, Neuer has suffered seven significant muscle injuries. If his form has wavered, then so has a more literal kind of dependability. His latest injury, the third soft muscle tissue problem he has experienced this season, was the cause of a Bayern goalkeeping crisis that very nearly plunged a 16-year-old unknown into a Champions League game against Atalanta. That is not a situation that elite clubs can tolerate. Another injury is coming. At his age, it is a certainty. The end is coming. Even Manuel Neuer cannot go on forever.
But that is the context of a wonderful performance. It belonged in the conversation with any of those he has produced in the Champions League. It was spectacular and defiant. Brave, even, given what happened to him at that end of the Bernabeu, under those very posts, the last time he was there. Bayern Munich will take an advantage back to Germany next week and their goalkeeper is one of the reasons why.
Not too old. Not too slow. Not yet.