For 15 years, Manchester City have had one ambition above all others. Since Sheikh Mansour acquired the club, the Champions League has been their goal. They’ve quested over high mountains and through dark forests. They’ve lost in quarter-finals and semi-finals, once in the final itself, thwarted by heroes and monsters, undone often as much by themselves as by external opponents. They stand again one game from glory and in their way stands the ultimate test: Inter, the team lying third in Europe’s fourth-best league.
It’s often said at particularly dramatic moments in sport that you couldn’t write the script. Well, you wouldn’t write this one. The narrative demands the final stage, the apotheosis of Abu Dhabi’s City project, should have a finale rather grander than this, that the final boss to be overcome should be rather more intimidating than a ragtag squad of things that were popular in England several years ago: Edin Dzeko, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Romelu Lukaku, Goldie the Blue Peter dog and social democracy.
Can Inter win? Of course they can; football’s greatest quality as a sport is that shocks do happen, that the underdog can dig in and thwart the giant. Inter showed in beating Barcelona in the group stage and against Milan in the semi-final they are well-organised, adept, once ahead, at managing the tempo. Federico Dimarco and Francesco Acerbi have had fine seasons and excelled in the semi-final, but Kyle Walker, having seen off Vinícius Júnior, is unlikely to be fretting about the left wing-back, while nothing seems to trouble Erling Haaland, certainly not a 35-year-old central defender who spent much of his career at Sassuolo.
Inter were twice comfortably beaten 2-0 by Bayern in the group stage, and City disposed of Bayern straightforwardly enough in the quarter-final. The biggest challenge for them in Istanbul is likely to be their own neuroses – the accumulated scar tissue of Pep Guardiola’s disappointments and whatever traces of City-itis still remain. That, and, unless transport links have improved dramatically since 2005 when it last hosted the final, getting from the city centre to the Atatürk Olympic Stadium.
For Guardiola as much as City, this journey has been arduous, full of frustration. When he won his second Champions League with Barcelona at Wembley in 2011, it didn’t seem plausible it would be another decade before he reached another final. If City do beat Inter, he would become the fourth coach to win the trophy three times, while the 12-year gap between trophies would be the longest other than Jupp Heynckes (15) and Ernst Happel (13). That said, 19 years passed between Carlo Ancelotti winning his first European title and adding his fourth last season, so time remains for Guardiola to claim the record from the Italian.
In that period, Guardiola has been thwarted in part by ill fortune – those gameswhen his side had endless possession but somehow failed to convert sufficient of the countless chances they created – but also by his own anxiety about being countered against and the tactical tweaks he made to try to head off that eventuality, his ‘overthinking’. There has been no need to overthink this season.
If City secure the trophy, the 4-0 win will stand, like Ajax’s 4-0 win over Bayern in 1973 or Milan’s 5-0 win over Madrid in 1989, as one of those era-defining games when paradigms shift and a new reality emerges. This, perhaps, was the symbolic moment when the petrostate clubs finally surpassed the traditional elites and, by extension, the moment consequences of the hyper-capitalistic model unleashed on football by the inception of the Champions League came home to roost. A journey begun in 1987 by Silvio Berlusconi’s bewilderment that Napoli and Madrid, Italian and Spanish champions, could meet in a first-round knockout tie came to a landmark point in Manchester on Wednesday.
This has been coming for some time. Madrid have long defied logic. City could easily have inflicted a similar beating in the semi-final last season. For all the talk of the consolations of señorio, the self-belief of the old aristocracy, the individual feats of derring-do, cavalry charges have no place in modern warfare. Madrid have sufficient resources and prestige not simply to fade away, but it’s entirely possible that last season will come to be regarded as a final, barely explicable flourish of that caballero culture.
City, meanwhile, are not merely thoroughly modern but define modernity. Since the Premier League brought its 115 charges of financial irregularities against City, they have not lost. Guardiola has barely had to change the team. The doubts of the early part of the season about whether Haaland was unbalancing the side have faded. City have settled to become an awesome power, swatting aside all who stand in their way, even old superclubs such as Bayern and Madrid.
The goals help, obviously, but perhaps the greatest thing Haaland has brought City is clarity: there is no need to overcomplicate things. This team may not be a pure distillation of guardiolismo but it is an awesome, perhaps unstoppable blend of intelligence and power. This is what a state project looks like done well.
Perhaps football, capricious old goddess that she is, has one trick left to play. Perhaps Inter will do something miraculous in Istanbul. But it feels as though the long-deferred European coronation of City is upon us at last.
