Seventy years ago, the French sports newspaper L’Équipe created the European Cup. Their motivation was to generate content that would help them sell more papers in midweek, but they also no doubt expected French football would take its fair share of “la gloire”.
Instead, after France gave the Cup to Europe, Europe wouldn’t let them have it back. Only one French team ever brought the title home, and that was Marseille’s tainted vintage of 1993. As L’Équipe’s correspondent Vincent Duluc lamented on the morning of Saturday’s final, “We invented the Cup – for others to win.”
Not any more. On a sultry Saturday night in Munich, Luis Enrique’s brilliant Paris Saint-Germain crushed Inter Milan 5-0 in the most one-sided final in the history of the competition. Nobody has ever nailed a European Cup final performance quite like this.
A brutal night for Inter ended on the stroke of 90 minutes, as the referee ignored the usual minimum injury time to blow the whistle and put an end to their suffering.
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As PSG’s captain Marquinhos lifted the Cup, Enrique turned and applauded the Inter players who had stood waiting to watch the trophy lift. A gracious gesture from the victorious coach to the men his side had just put through hell.
This match was always going to turn on whether PSG, under the pressure of a final their fans and Qatari bosses expected them to win, could reproduce the free and flowing football that had destroyed Manchester City, Liverpool, Aston Villa and Arsenal on the way to Munich.
The Premier League teams had all discovered that pressing PSG’s midfield was like punching air. Disoriented and intimidated, they ended up retreating into a defensive shell.
Simone Inzaghi decided Inter would dispense with the preliminaries and start the game already in the defensive shell. Carefully, the Inter coach laid out his fortifications. Inter wouldn’t press Vitinha, instead sitting off and marking the men PSG’s playmaker might pass to.
The apparent hope was that Vitinha, in the biggest game of his life, would freeze in the spotlight. Inter’s whole plan really depended on this – that PSG would seize up, that the occasion and expectation would unnerve them, that the experience of Inter, whose starting XI was five years older on average than PSG’s, would make the difference in the end.
Instead, right from the start it was Inter who looked afraid. Their play was strewn with underhit passes, a telltale sign of a team that’s nervous and trying to be too careful.
Vitinha, allowed space to strut and swagger, transmitted calm, unhurried confidence to his team-mates. The French team swept the ball around with bold and adventurous passes as Inter shuffled and shuttled to cover. It takes patience to be so passive in a final. The risk is you end up looking – and feeling – timid and irrelevant.
In Istanbul two years ago Inter’s fans outsung Manchester City’s, here the noise was all Paris. You couldn’t really blame the Inter fans for being subdued. From the opening minutes there was a creeping sense of dread that their team had got themselves into a situation they could not handle. On 12 minutes, PSG proved the point.
The Italian defensive perimeter was first pierced by the aggression and daring of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, dribbling on the left and glancing up at the two covering Inter defenders, Denzel Dumfries and Benjamin Pavard. Dumfries pointed for Pavard to cover the outside, only for Kvaratskhelia to attack a gap the Inter players didn’t realise was there – darting suddenly between them and firing a pass through to Fabián Ruiz, who had infiltrated the penalty area unnoticed.
Fabián turned, paused, allowed three Inter defenders move towards him, then laid it back to Vitinha, unmarked outside the box. Acerbi, acting automatically according to the ingrained habits of 37 years of Italian defending, rushed forward as Fabián played the backwards pass, trying to push out the offside line.
His team-mates never followed him. Federico Dimarco on Inter’s left was the deepest, but Alessandro Bastoni, Pavard and Dumfries were all playing Désiré Doué onside as he sneaked into the space Acerbi had left in behind. Doué took Vitinha’s pass on the spin and in the same fluid movement stroked it sideways to Achraf Hakimi for the tap in.
So often scoring a goal can look like the hardest thing in the world, but in this moment PSG didn’t just make scoring look easy, they made it look natural, logical, inevitable.
The elegant simplicity of the move looked effortless, a demonstration of clear superiority, and the chilling effect on Inter was plain (as flies to wanton boys are we to PSG…). But even a scarily brilliant goal is still just one goal. Inter still had their game plan, and a big part of that game plan was set pieces. Like Arsenal in the semi-final, they had signalled as much by flinging some early long throws into the box. On 20 minutes, Nicolò Barella tried to shepherd a loose ball over the goal line for what he expected to be a valuable corner kick.
Willian Pacho surprised him, nicking the ball away to Kvaratskhelia, and though the play was still 100 metres from Inter’s goal everyone could see immediately that they were in deep trouble. Kvaratskhelia found Ousmane Dembélé racing away down the left, a lovely curving pass picked out Doué arriving on the far side, and his powerful shot took a deflection off Dimarco that wrong-footed Yann Sommer. The contest was already over. The torture was not.
When Inter went in at half-time only 2-0 down, you felt they’d got away with it. The half-time message was clear: score the next goal and who knows what could happen? But when Marcus Thuram won a promising free kick early in the second half, Inter wasted it with a feeble delivery. Another bungle to reinforce the feeling that they just couldn’t do anything right.
On 63 minutes, Vitinha, Dembélé and Doué combined to score a brilliant third. As PSG celebrated in the corner in front of their fans, the Inter players waited to restart, standing spread out across the pitch in their prescribed 3-2-5 kick-off formation. There was something pathetically dignified in this dutiful observation of the formalities. They knew it would get worse and they could see thousands of their fans were already leaving, but they’d keep carrying the cross up the hill.
Kvaratskhelia scored the fourth, Senny Mayulu the fifth. In the end 5-0 flattered Inter. Such a historic defeat demands scapegoats and Simone Inzaghi, with colossal unfairness, will pay the price. La Gazzetta Sportiva marked his performance at 3/10: the lowest on the Inter side. It doesn’t matter that he has assembled this team from players other big teams didn’t want, not a single one of whom would make the PSG team.
Inzaghi is like a village carpenter who builds a wooden racing car in his workshop out of handcrafted clockwork components. Imagine the infinite care, imagination and ingenuity he has poured into such a labour of love. To general delight, the car wins some local races.
Then somebody organises a race between the home-made vehicle and a Formula 1 car. Swept away by the romance of it all, the whole village bets on the clockwork car, but the Inzaghimobile is left in the dust and the neighbours turn mercilessly on the tragic carpenter, now a disgrace to the village.
Those of us who don’t feel the sting of Inter’s humiliation as a deeply personal insult can accept an outcome like this was always on the cards. PSG, who have supposedly renounced the superstar culture, have spent €660 million on new players in the last two seasons. Inter are the second-placed club in Serie A, a league where MVP Scott McTominay tramples defences like a war elephant.
To allude to the Qatari billions that are the ultimate source of PSG’s power is not to deny the brilliance of their performance in the final and indeed in the whole campaign since January.
Everyone knows about their financial advantages, but in the autumn few were touting them as likely European champions.
Even within the club, important people doubted whether PSG had the tools to do the job. The sporting director, Luis Campos, wanted to sign a new centre forward in the last two transfer windows – but Enrique refused, insisting they would do better with flexible forwards capable of playing anywhere across the front line or just behind.
If that decision shows Enrique’s football insight, the lunatic intensity in the eyes of Dembélé proved his powers of leadership and motivation. Every time Sommer prepared to play the first pass, Dembélé was crouching a few metres away in a starter’s stance, primed to explode after the ball. This was more than mere pressing, it was a performance designed to intimidate. Who before Enrique believed Dembélé had such competitiveness in him?
The coach, determined never to appear satisfied, could be seen during the game screaming at Dembélé in apparent frustration, but afterwards he had only praise.
“Everyone always talks about the Ballon d’Or. I would give it to Ousmane Dembélé. Just think about how he defended today. He was a leader, he was humble, he got down and he worked: he deserves it not only for the goals he has scored but also the pressing. He was exceptional in this final,” he said.
Was Enrique having fun at the expense of Kylian Mbappé, whom he so often criticised last season for failing to do what he was now praising Dembélé for doing? Maybe it was just the coach in him, unable to resist the opportunity to teach Mbappé one last time, as if to say: “See? I was right, but don’t be downhearted, it’s not too late for you to change.”
PSG, whose expensive failures in this competition entertained Europe for years, might now stand on the brink of a new era of domination. Later this month they go to the United States to play the Fifa Club World Cup, and it’s hard to see who can stop them.
Unlike most people in football, Enrique sounded genuinely excited about that tournament as he looked ahead to it on Saturday night. There are always new fans coming to the game, and PSG believe that victory in the US will mean imprinting themselves on the minds of these people as officially the best club in the world.
The English were sceptical about the European Cup too. If a newspaper’s midweek content generator can grow into the biggest prize in the club game, then maybe there’s hope for this Fifa nonsense.
