Here is a team ready to rule Europe. In brushing aside Inter, Paris Saint-Germain already knew they were the best in the business. In colours that have seemed tortured by a decade-plus of failure on the big stage, this brilliant group of players knew how this final would be ending from the outset.
Even PSG’s kick off, punting the ball out midway down the right flank, was an act of swaggering authority. Take the ball, they told Inter. We’ll have it back as soon as we feel like it.
For Inter, what had long been obvious to PSG took 20 minutes to dawn. At two goals down they knew the game was up. By the 90th they had had the greatest defeat in the history of European Cup finals inflicted on them. It would be easy to paint Federico Dimarco as the fall guy, but he shouldn’t be wracked by questions about what might have happened if he hadn’t played Achraf Hakimi onside or had stood square against Desire Doue’s cannon. What would have happened is the same thing that happened anyway. Playing at this level, PSG were always going to win.
Their team was simply too multi-faceted in its excellence for anyone short of Barcelona to match them in 2025. This has never quite felt like a post-superstar age for PSG and the highest wage bill in sport. Kylian Mbappe might be gone but Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Ousmane Dembele and Achraf Hakimi are and always were world class talents. This will rightly be framed as a triumph for a team first mindset over star power but it should not go unremarked that Luis Enrique has hardly wanted for talent.
PSG’s recruitment has always been excellent, as it should be given the money Qatar is prepared to invest in this soft power exercise. All that has changed since losing Mbappe, Neymar and Lionel Messi they haven’t been team building to plug gaps behind a diffident front three. They have afforded Luis Enrique all the raw ingredients he needs.
Not that this has been a managerial cakewalk. A year ago the suggestion that Ousmane Dembele would be some pressing tyro would have seen you laughed out of Paris. And yet, there he was with PSG two goals to the good early in the second half, harassing Yann Sommer in his six yard box. He led the pack and the hunt did not stop until Inter were historically beaten.
Luis Enrique has imbued this side with some of the scrappiness he blended into his great talent during his playing career; that ultra-technical triumvirate in the engine room really should have been getting pushed about by Premier League big beasts far more than it was.
What Luis Enrique has is a side that can do it all: controlling possession in midfield, flying across the field on counters where their forwards have no fixed abode and dominating duels with their outstanding back five. Best of all, they may be years off their collective peak. At an average age of 24 years, 262 days they gave up more than half a decade on their opponents, who had been finalists en masse two years ago. Marquinhos was the last man standing from the PSG side who lost the 2020 final. In what can only be described as anti-millennial discrimination, he is also the only player over 30 to feature for Les Parisiens this season. They have used four teenagers, not that you would know Doue doesn’t turn 20 for another three days.
It is hard to believe there can be much room to grow for a youngster who goes about everything with impudence. Some players peak early but PSG have enough bright young things that they can plan for a few to get even better. That is saying something when 22-year-old Nuno Mendes is the best lockdown left back in the game. At 20, Joao Neves has been one of the best tacklers in the Champions League, achieving the remarkable in winning the ball back at volume and with a greater than 50 percent success rate. At 24, Kvaratskhelia probably lies in the middle of PSG’s age distribution, but early years away from the spotlight make him a young 24 with only three years of top level European football. In that time, by the way, he has three league titles and a European Cup.
All this youth should have meant one thing. PSG should have frozen, all the more so given that Ligue 1 is such a flat track for them. The moment just did not got to them. Take the incident in the 36th minute when, lodged in the nearest Inter could approximate to a pressing trap, Nuno Mendes found the ball bouncing up awkwardly towards him. A swing of his left boot and a pass volleyed across field, freeing Achraf Hakimi to drive up the field.
Like the Real Madrid team that dominated the Champions League in the 2010s, there is something about the way that PSG play football that makes the other team freeze. Their road to Munich took them through Anfield, Villa Park and the Emirates Stadium, each of which were girding themselves up for one of their great European nights. On every occasion, PSG stamped on the balloon at the very outset.
They did it as effectively as ever on the biggest stage. Those 12 minutes that led to Hakimi’s opener were PSG probing, reaffirming that Dimarco was indeed the weak link. It was already dawning on Inter, Alessandro Bastoni rollicking his team mate after Dembele blew past him and shot at Sommer. Against Barcelona, Dimarco had managed to fade some of those defensive issues by getting up high and dragging Lamine Yamal back with him. This time out, Hakimi needed no helping hand. It was the same experience right across the pitch for the Italians. Individual battles became routs.
Unlike that Real Madrid side that should serve as their benchmark, PSG have had a pretty robust case for being the best team in Europe during the business end of the season. The quality has been there right across the field from the minute that Kvaratskhelia rocked up. It is only going to improve what with the infinite money glitch.
That is no guarantee of repeat triumphs. This might have been a very different final if Barcelona had made it. Arsenal and Liverpool pushed PSG close before Munich. Great teams rarely repeat in this competition, Luis Enrique knows that as well as anyone.
There is, however, nothing within PSG’s that is stopping them from here on out. This could be the first of many, the fourth French empire. They are now the team to beat.
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