Football

Read more It was that kind of evening, full of surprising tones and textures. Although in many ways this was also the perfect Big Football final. Here we have a global TV product staged inside a dictator-built stadium, featuring a dictator‑owned champion team and another in a state of ongoing FFP‑induced financial levitation. And in the middle of that lighted bowl the old familiar centrepiece, a game that is still capable of communicating beauty and pleasure, watched by a group of people still capable of being moved by the spectacle, still able to feel something, even if that something is the urge to boo an earnest Hungarian pianist. The first lesson from Saturday is that City are fine and deserving champions. This is by some distance the best football team in Europe, a model of graft, team‑building and creative tactics. City may or may not, as L’Équipe suggested in its report on the game, be “moral in the way in which the club has built its strength”, but the team itself is a model of aesthetics and good practice. Not to mention, as is often overlooked, “a generous and magnificent loser” in their previous defeats, which will make it even sweeter now to win with a bit of a grind. Rodri scores against Internazionale at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium in Istanbul. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian Pep went with the super-secure quadruple centre-back system in Istanbul, which has coincided with a powerful drawing down of the shutters. There is a tactical irony here. Signing Er...

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