Real Madrid vs SS Lazio Tickets

A simple illustration of Real Madrid’s dominance in the European game comes from this one telling statistic. As of 2023, Los Blancos have won the European Cup/UEFA Champions League on 14 occasions, and the next nearest challenger to their undisputed crown has just seven, that side being AC Milan.

The Spanish giants won the European Cup in each of the first five years of its existence and made it six wins out of ten when they beat Partizan Belgrade in the 1965/66 final. That era is remembered fondly by Real Madrid fans and came off the back of astounding attacking talents like Alfredo Di Stefano, Ferenc Puskas, and Francisco Gento.

Gento is, indeed, up to 2023, the only player to have won the competition on six occasions.

The team then spent a great deal of time in the wilderness in terms of actually picking up another triumph. They went 32 years without adding to their six titles, albeit regularly getting to the latter stages of the competition, losing to Liverpool in the 1981 final.

A 1-0 win over Juventus in 1998 brought that run to an end, and just two years later, they won again, this time thumping Valencia in the 2001 final. In the 2002 final, it took a Zinedine Zidane wonder volley to see off a strong challenge from Bayer Leverkusen in Glasgow.

Zidane returned to Real Madrid as a manager and duly picked up three successive UEFA Champions League triumphs, those coming against Atletico Madrid, Juventus, and Liverpool.

Carlo Ancelotti also picked up two titles as Real boss, those coming in 2014 and 2022.

Lazio are the visitors to the Spanish capital, and fans of the Biancocelesti will hope to make more of an impact in the UEFA Champions League than they have in the past.

The Rome-based club are no strangers to the tournament, having first appeared in the competition in 1999/2000; however, they don’t often find themselves in the final rounds of Europe’s premier club competition.

Indeed in their first campaign under Swedish boss Sven-Goran Eriksson, Lazio got to the Quarter-Finals before being beaten by Valencia.

In their next six seasons in the competition, the best they could manage was a Round of 16 exit at the hands of Bayern Munich in 2020/21.

Real Madrid vs SS Lazio Head-to-Head

These two teams met for the first time in 2001 in the second group stage phase. At the Bernabeu, Lazio battled but were undone by an 89th-minute Luis Figo penalty that earned Real a 3-2 win.

At the Stadio Olimpico, the two teams played out an exciting 2-2 draw, with Pavel Nedved and Hernan Crespo scoring for Lazio and Santiago Solari and Raul netting for the visitors.

In 2007 they were once again in the same group, and in Rome, the two teams played out another 2-2 draw, Goran Pandev and Ruud van Nistelrooy both scoring twice. In the return game, Real Madrid eased to a 3-1 victory thanks to goals from Julio Baptista, Raul, and Robinho, with Pandev once again scoring for Lazio.

Real Madrid vs SS Lazio Connections

Not many players have played for both Real Madrid and Lazio, but one individual who has done so is Danish attacker Michael Laudrup. The free-flowing star moved to Lazio from Brondby in 1983 and spent two years with the club, making a name for himself in, at the time, the biggest league in Europe.

He made 70 appearances for the club, scoring 12 goals, before he moved to Juventus. He spent four seasons in Turin before FC Barcelona came calling, and in 1994, he made the switch to Real Madrid.

He stayed with the club for two seasons, playing 76 times, scoring 15 goals, and winning La Liga in his first year before he moved to Japan.