Category: Football (Soccer)

• All the buildup to the Munich final

• Jonathan Liew: PSG v Inter is clash of styles on and off pitch

• You can email Barry | Kick-off is at 8pm BST

Comment: “The Champions League final is a jarring and stirring clash of styles in so many ways,” writes Jonathan Liew. “The relentless attack of Paris Saint-Germain and the relentless defence of Inter. One team built on the freehand wizardry of youth and one built on the weathered edifice of experience. Flying wingers against flying wing-backs, two strikers against none. But perhaps the biggest philosophical difference is between two radically different models of a football club itself: who it serves, what it can be, what constitutes success, and how to get there.”

Guardian Football Weekly podcast: Max Rushden was in the chair as the Football Weekly panel previewed tonight’s Champions League final. You can listen to our discussion here and if you’re not already a regular listener, what have you been doing for the past 19 years!?!? You can sign up for Football Weekly on all the usual podcast platforms.

Champions League final features opposing tactical approaches and two radically different ownership models

In 2021, Oaktree Capital quietly rebranded its “Distressed Debt” division as the “Opportunistic Credit” platform. For decades the LA-based investment fund had specialised in picking up what is known in the trade as distressed assets, a strategy it described as looking for “good companies with bad balance sheets”.

So let’s say your company is screwed. You’re deep in debt, severely short of cash, perhaps even at risk of bankruptcy or default. In sweep Oaktree. They have a mosey around, shake down some creditors, restructure your cost base, perhaps offer you a high‑interest loan to stop the bleeding. Once they’ve got you battle-lean they find you a buyer, you sell up, and they take a fat cut. Four years ago, as they cast an eye over the Covid-emaciated carcass of Inter, this was exactly the strategy they had in mind.

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With the 2024-25 season in Uefa-land drawing to its glamorous close, is there a better time to assess how the whole thing went down with everything considered in the round? Yes! But Football Daily doesn’t publish on Sunday morning, so let’s make the best of a bad lot. And it’s been a good year for English football all right. Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United went to the artistic and creative mecca of Bilbao and staged what can only be described as a dirty protest, a Chelsea squad worth £1,400,000,000 struggled against (though eventually steamrollered) a team collectively priced at 0.96% of a Mykhailo Mudryk, and it’s fair to say the rest of the continent will be extremely glad to see the back of us.

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Whatever the result of Champions League final, PSG’s owners have positioned club as game’s next superpower

Put a bisht on it. That’s a wrap. At first glance it might be tempting to see the 2025 Champions League final as one of the more obviously high-European occasions in recent football history.

Twenty thousand Parisians and Milanese will trace out a thousand mile right-angle this weekend, north from Lombardy, east across Alsace and the Rhineland, there to spend a long weekend wandering the white stone streets of Munich, with its reassuringly terrifying gothic cathedral, its pounded-meat cuisine de terroir, its altstadt boutiques selling wristwatches priced at roughly the same the cost as the average human arm, and finally on to the lighted dome of the Allianz Arena, dumped down in the green fringes to the north like a giant alien doughnut.

Simone Inzaghi’s talent-packed team will be underdogs against PSG but believe they have learned from 2023 agony

Taking part in a Champions League final is not a thing anyone should take for granted, but some players more than others at the Allianz Stadium on Saturday will recognise that this might be their last chance. Francesco Acerbi, at 37 years and 110 days, would become the third-oldest man to play in and win the competition’s showpiece if he can help Inter beat Paris St-Germain.

“I’m calm, but also agitated,” said the centre-back during the Italian club’s media open day at the start of this week. “The closer it gets the more tense I feel. We hope it will be a beautiful final but in the end the important thing is lifting the cup … It’s a thing that drives you out of your mind, gives you goosebumps. I would do anything to lift it.”