Chelsea wins Champions League, its chaos killing City's plans

Porto, Portugal

MANCHESTER City's players did not seem to want to leave. Not right away, at least. They stood, as if frozen in place, as Chelsea's players heaved the prize that City craves more than any other into the air.

They could not go. To go, after all, would be to accept that it was real, that it was over. They had found themselves on the far side of the stadium in Porto, the runners-up medals draped around their necks. To get to the mournful safety of the locker room, they would have to walk past the seats that had, only a few minutes earlier, contained the massed ranks of their spectators.

Those same fans had hoped and willed that City might find a goal, that it might find salvation, that it might win a Champions League final at last. In the end, the team lost 1-0 to Chelsea, thanks to Kai Havertz's 42nd-minute goal.

The seats were almost empty now. The fans had not stuck around to watch. Slowly, the players mustered their last vestiges of energy and began their long, sorrowful march.

It was just as they started to move that the fireworks went off, crackling and glittering into the sky. Soon, City's whole team and its staff members were obscured, swallowed whole by a great cloud of cordite by fireworks that were supposed - were expected - to be for them. That is the thing about football, about sports. Sometimes, things do not turn out as they should.

In a lot of ways, Chelsea and Manchester City are two sides of the same coin. They are the vanguard of the money that has swept into the football world over the last 20 years, brought by hedge funds and vulture capitalists and oligarchs and nation-states.

They are, depending on one's perspective, either the great insurgents or the nouveaux riches. But they are, at the same time, fundamentally different.

The Chelsea under Russian billionaire-owner Roman Abramovich has always embraced chaos. The London club has now won the Champions League twice, both times in seasons in which it changed its manager at the slightest hint of disappointment, in seasons when its ultimate triumph made little sense. Chelsea's first triumph was in 2012. The Chelsea that repeated the trick in 2021 has a squad that is both vastly expensive and curiously incomplete. Its leading goal-scorer in the English Premier League is a defensive midfielder who only shoots, really, when he takes penalties. Its main striker does not score goals. He does not, at times, look like he knows how.

Manchester City, by contrast, is a monument to control. In the 13 years since it was taken over by a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi, it has sought to perfect every single aspect of being a football team.

Under Pep Guardiola, City has risen to become the dominant force in English football. For three of the past five years, it has probably been the best team in Europe, whatever that means, really: the most complete and the most consistent, the one with the highest ceiling.

For the final, Guardiola named a team full of attacking midfielders with the aim of starving Chelsea of first the ball and then hope. In the event, it was City that seemed frantic, uncertain, whizzing and whirling round the field at breakneck speed to try to slow down the game.

It lost because Chelsea was the precise opposite. Thomas Tuchel, its coach, was told to fashion order from chaos, and this was his ultimate, his irrevocable proof.

City barely laid a glove on Chelsea. As Guardiola's team grew more frenzied, Chelsea held its fire, bided its time, and waited for the moment to strike.

Its chance came just before halftime. For all those midfielders in Guardiola's lineup, not one of them was in the vicinity of Mason Mount as he picked the ball up in his own half.

Timo Werner, the non-scoring striker, darted into a channel, dragging City's central defenders from their positions. Havertz sprinted into the gap. Mount found him, and the 21-year-old bore down on goal, unencumbered, unaccompanied.

That was all Tuchel's team needed. It would be Chelsea's players, at the end, running to their fans, running on fumes and on adrenaline, running because that joy of a dream realised, is beautiful chaos. NYTIMES