United's 1999 treble: two minutes inside the Camp Nou

On 26 May 1999, at the 90th minute of the Champions League final, Bayern Munich were beating Manchester United 1-0 at the Camp Nou. UEFA staff were already fixing the ribbons to the trophy, and they were red and white: Munich's. Ninety seconds later they had to be changed.

A match United were not playing well

Mario Basler scored a direct free kick in the 6th minute, and the game did not move for eighty minutes. Bayern hit the post through a Mehmet Scholl chip and the crossbar through a Carsten Jancker overhead kick. The referee was Pierluigi Collina. There were around ninety thousand people in the ground.

Alex Ferguson was without both his first-choice central midfielders. Roy Keane and Paul Scholes were suspended: both were booked in the semi-final second leg in Turin on 21 April, and both bookings ruled them out of the final. Keane knew his cost him the biggest match of his life and played on regardless; in fact he headed United level in the 24th minute of a 3-2 win that took them through 4-3 on aggregate.

Ferguson improvised: David Beckham moved inside alongside Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs shifted to the right, and Jesper Blomqvist started on the left. Not one of them was in his usual position.

90:36 and 92:17

Teddy Sheringham came on in the 67th minute for Blomqvist and Ole Gunnar Solskjær in the 81st for Andy Cole. Both goals came from Beckham corners taken on the left.

For the first — clock at 90:36 — Peter Schmeichel went up into the Bayern box. The half-clearance dropped to Giggs, whose mis-hit shot ran to Sheringham, who bundled it in. For the second, at 92:17, Beckham crossed again, Sheringham flicked it on at the near post and Solskjær poked it into the roof of the net. Less than two minutes separated them.

It was Schmeichel's last match for United, and he went up for the corner that produced the equaliser. Most supporters remember only the second goal.

""Football, bloody hell." Alex Ferguson, at the final whistle."

The other two trophies, in eleven days

The Camp Nou was the last piece. On 16 May United had won the Premier League at Old Trafford, beating Tottenham 2-1: Les Ferdinand put the visitors ahead in the 26th minute, Beckham equalised in the 43rd and Cole scored in the 48th, moments after replacing Sheringham at half-time, chipping Ian Walker. The final margin over Arsenal was a single point, 79 to 78, and the Gunners won their own match that same afternoon.

On 22 May, at Wembley in front of 79,101, came the FA Cup: 2-0 against Newcastle. And there is another oddity there. Keane went off injured after nine minutes and his replacement was Sheringham, who scored about ninety seconds after coming on and then set up Scholes in the second half. Sheringham came off the bench in two finals in a row and scored in both.

The European route had not been comfortable either. In the semi-final United drew 1-1 with Juventus at Old Trafford through a last-minute Giggs goal, then went 2-0 down inside eleven minutes in Turin to two Filippo Inzaghi goals before turning it round with Keane's header, Dwight Yorke's goal in the 34th and Cole's in the 84th.

The other side of it

One number measures how strange it was: in the entire history of English football, only two clubs have won the league, the FA Cup and the European Cup in the same season. United did it in 1999 and Manchester City repeated it in 2023, twenty-four years later. The great Liverpool sides of the seventies and eighties won Europe four times without pairing it with a domestic double in the same year, and Arsenal's Invincibles did not get past the last 16 in Europe. That United side, moreover, settled all three inside eleven days of May, with two of its first-choice midfielders watching the final from the stands.

Bayern had a bad month ahead of them. They had won the Bundesliga on 78 points, but on 12 June they also lost the German Cup final to Werder Bremen, 1-1 after extra time and 5-4 on penalties. Jancker scored — the same man who had hit the Camp Nou crossbar. Two finals lost in eighteen days, and a treble of their own that had looked all but complete on the hour mark in Barcelona.

"Only two English clubs have won the league, the cup and the European Cup in the same year. United were the first, in 1999."

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