Category: UEFA Champions League

PSG finally became champions of Europe after routing Inter as they recorded the biggest margin of victory in any European Cup or Champions League final

Pennant watch. Here’s what PSG captain Marquinhos will be handing over during the pre-match niceties. A typically classy piece in the retro-poster style, here it’s the centrepiece of an enigmatic pop-art collage also featuring a fruit platter, several hundred toothpicks, some power bars, three toilet rolls, a carry case of assorted hardware, and what may or may not be a box of Terry’s Chocolate Orange in the top-right corner. If this was an LP cover you’d stay up half the night trying to decode it.

Inter are playing in their third-choice yellow strip this evening. So that means their pennant will clash with captain Lautaro Martínez’s shirt, but what a gorgeous thing it is anyway (the current Volkswagen-adjacent monstrosity of a crest, not half as good as the old interlapping FCIM logo, notwithstanding).

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• 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.

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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.

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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.”

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Liverpool’s penalty shootout hero in the 2005 Champions League final against Milan reflects on the ‘Miracle of Istanbul’ and how it changed his life

Twenty years on from that double save, those spaghetti legs and the miracle of Liverpool’s fifth European Cup triumph and Turkey has not lost the capacity to make a champion out of Jerzy Dudek. “I won the Turkish Open golf last week and it reminded me a bit of Istanbul,” the former Liverpool goalkeeper says. “It is my favourite place, my lucky place, and it stays with me all the time. If I go on holiday to Turkey I always go with a big smile.”

Sunday promises to have the same effect on everyone associated with Liverpool. The presentation of the Premier League trophy to Arne Slot’s champions at Anfield coincides with the 20th anniversary of the “Miracle of Istanbul”, when Liverpool overcame a 3-0 half-time deficit to defeat Milan on penalties in the Champions League final. Not that any Liverpool fan needs reminding of the details. The sights and sounds of Ataturk Stadium remain as vivid to Dudek now as they were on 25 May, 2005.

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PSG and Inter will play for the crown at the end of the month but there were plenty of twists and turns before the finalists were decided

Inter

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Gianluigi Donnarumma made two awesome saves as PSG withstood an early onslaught to beat Arsenal in a pulsating game

A relaxed Mikel Arteta talks to TNT Sports

It’s our biggest night for a long time. But this isn’t where we want to be – we want to make the final. We are very close. We learned a few things from the first game, about the level of the two teams and the small margins. We have a big conviction that we’re gonna do it tonight.

This is where this club deserves to be. We still have so much to do – so much to win, so much consistency to show – but hopefully we are on the right trajectory.

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Teenager was a revelation across an incredible semi-final tie and Spanish side have much to be proud of in defeat

On the afternoon before the most extraordinary Champions League semi-final anyone could remember, Lamine Yamal said he had left fear behind in the park in Mataró years ago. Everything else he left behind at Montjuïc and San Siro, a statement stronger than any he had delivered in the press room. If that line was a promise, a demonstration of personality, it was kept, but Barcelona couldn’t reach their first final in a decade so he made another. “We won’t stop until this club is where it deserves to be: at the summit,” he wrote in the dark moments after defeat.

Here Barcelona had been stopped within touching distance. Lamine Yamal departed the pitch in silence holding Marcus Thuram’s shirt, Inter’s players coming to embrace this boy they had survived, a child born every 50 years in the words of their manager, Simone Inzaghi. There has been something revelatory about the 17-year-old’s performance over two astonishing nights and at the end of it all there was almost a kind of reverence, a respect towards him. Inter had reached the final again and will talk of this forever, their everything; one day, they knew, he may be part of the epic stories they tell.

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The oldest man on the oldest Champions League team delivered when it mattered to show they can go all the way

What was he even doing there, in the 182nd minute of a two-legged tie, a 37-year-old centre-back attacking the opposition’s six-yard box, the furthest man forward on his team? Francesco Acerbi had not scored a goal in more than a year. Heck, he had not scored one in 65 appearances across Uefa club competitions. This is not his job, not the thing he trains for, not a defining moment anyone had predicted for the most entertaining Champions League semi-final ever to unfold.

Or maybe this is the only way it could be. “Pazza Inter Amala” runs the line from Inter’s club anthem. “Crazy Inter, Love Her”. This is not Real Madrid, where “being successful is part of our DNA”, nor Juventus lecturing you that “winning is the only thing that counts”. Inter make sense when they stop making sense. Acerbi – yes, that Acerbi, who overcame cancer twice and who has won all seven major trophies of his career since turning 30, smashing a striker’s finish into the top corner to make it 6-6 on aggregate and force extra time? Of course. How else did you imagine this could go?

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There is a fair chance Mikel Arteta’s team won’t beat Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League. If they must lose, lose right

Is this thing … still on? After last week’s strangely enervated first-leg performance against Paris Saint-Germain at the Emirates Stadium it has been tempting to get a bit ahead of things, to see Arsenal’s season as already a zombie entity, still out there walking around the place, limbs twitching, skinny hands rattling the perimeter fence, not exactly dead, but not too far from undead.

On Monday night, even, Paris police declared Wednesday’s return leg at the Parc des Princes an event “of no particular concern”, as in no great flashpoints, no obvious tension. Just don’t tell Mikel Arteta that. And not just because rumours of the death of Arsenal’s season are widely exaggerated. There is even a nightmare scenario available to the club’s supporters, a product of the deep banter-verse, where Arsenal don’t make the Champions League next season but Tottenham do. All they need to do is keep losing while others win, and while slack, stitched-together Spurs bundle through Bodø/Glimt and a beta Manchester United, thereby banking their £100m jackpot while finishing 16th in the league.

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After both legs produced 3-3 draws, Davide Frattesi struck in extra time to send Inter to the final

20 secs: Inter started quickly in Barcelona; Barca nearly return the favour here. Torres is found in space in the Inter box down the right, but the flag pops up for offside before he can roll a pass across for Raphinha to tap home.

Inter get the ball rolling. Another 3-3 draw, please! We’ll have extra time and possibly penalties if so.

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• Polish striker back from hamstring injury for second leg
• Inter have fitness doubts for Champions League tie

The Barcelona striker Robert Lewandowski has been declared fit to return from a hamstring injury but is set to start on the bench in their Champions League semi-final second leg at Inter on Tuesday, the Barça manager, Hansi Flick, confirmed.

The 36-year-old Polish international, who has scored 40 goals for Barcelona in all competitions this season, had been sidelined for his club’s last four games. After sustaining the injury during Barça’s 4-3 victory against Celta Vigo on 19 April, he missed the Copa del Rey final victory against Real Madrid and the first leg of the semi against Inter.

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We’re down to the last four teams, and the semi-finals didn’t disappoint, even if they were played in contrasting styles

Paris Saint-Germain

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