Manchester City crowned Europe’s champion, a title years, and billions, in the making
THE pinnacle was reached a few minutes before 5am on Sunday (Singapore time). It did not come as Manchester City might have dreamed – at the fantastical climax of some wondrous, intricate move, but with something more arbitrary, more human: a minor error, little more than a technical fault, levered open and swiftly punished, at the doorway between one day and the next.
Fifteen years since City’s lightning-strike purchase by an investment vehicle fronted by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, the most ambitious project that global football has ever seen finally had found its ultimate form, its inevitable conclusion.
City had long ago established itself as English football’s dominant force. They have claimed five of the last six English Premier League (EPL) titles. They won the FA Cup this season too, beating their neighbours Manchester United, no less.
On Sunday, at the final hurdle, City broke the resistance of Inter Milan, the last of Europe’s grand old houses to stand in their way. Victory in the Champions League, the one trophy City had not yet claimed and the moment the club craved more than any other, was at hand.
As glitter fell and fireworks leaped into the sky, under the watchful gaze of both Sheikh Mansour – seeing the team he owns in the flesh for just the second time – and his brother, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan, ruler of the UAE, Manchester City was finally Europe’s champion.
More than that, in fact: City is now only the second English club – and one of only a select handful of teams across Europe – to have completed the “treble”. This is exactly what Abu Dhabi envisioned 15 years ago when it acquired City, a middleweight sort of a team at that time, and set out to make it a titan.
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That this aim has been achieved, given the scale of its investment, should not be a surprise. This was always going to happen, sooner or later. Football is a sport, but it is also a business. By even a conservative estimate, the Manchester City project, designed in the palaces of the Persian Gulf for reasons that have little or nothing to do with sports, has cost a couple billion dollars.
Nothing has been left to chance. City was dangerous, former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger once said, because they have both “petrol and ideas”. It is one thing having money. It is quite another knowing how to use it.
City most certainly does. They boast one of the finest training facilities in the world. There is a state-of-the-art academy, a global network of sister teams, a bespoke squad stuffed with players hand-picked by a vast, expert recruitment team, regardless of their cost. The manager is Pep Guardiola, the finest football brain in the world today, and he has everything he could possibly want.
The allegation remains that there is more behind its success: that City has not played by the same rules as everyone else, that they have used their web of sponsors in the UAE to circumvent the financial regulations of first UEFA and then the EPL.
The club denies all of it, of course, claiming there’s a conspiracy of the jealous and the threatened. The management claims to have a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence that will provide vindication. It has yet to produce it. UEFA’s charges did not stick. Whether the Premier League’s charges might, all 115 of them, may yet take years to discover.
City have done – or not done, as the case may be – it all in the service of this: not just victory, not just a form of domination that has rarely, if ever, been seen, but in the overturning of European football’s established order.
In the years to come, the manner in which City took the final step will be all but forgotten. It would, in fact, have slipped from the minds of City’s players and their fans almost as soon as the final whistle blew in Istanbul and Guardiola and his staff poured from the bench, euphoric and disbelieving and more than a little relieved. He was brought to the club for this express purpose. It has surely taken longer than he would have liked to deliver.
He certainly will not dwell for long on the nature of his triumph, his third Champions League trophy and his second European treble as a manager.
He might be a perfectionist, but he will not care in the slightest that City found only the slightest crack in Inter’s armour – a slip from the otherwise flawless Federico Dimarco sending Bernardo Silva scampering free, and Rodri placing an unerring shot in the corner – or that by City’s standards this was an underwhelming display in an underwhelming final.
There was, though, something entirely fitting about it. Inter had arrived in the Turkish capital as something of a surprise. The Italian club was expected, deep down, to play the role of sacrificial lamb, swatted aside casually by a City team that seemed, in every conceivable way, to be their superior.
City are England’s serial champions. Inter are the third-best team in Italy. City’s squad includes Erling Haaland, a striker who is football’s equivalent to the T1000, sent from the future to obliterate every goal-scoring record he can. Inter’s squad, on the other hand, is old, even by the gerontocratic standards of Serie A. This final was, in most reckonings, a mismatch, a procession, a fait accompli.
European football, though, has proved rather harder to conquer than Abu Dhabi might have envisaged. The EPL might have been bent, after a while, to City’s will, but the Champions League has always foxed it: full of vagaries and hazards and what must at times have started to seem like magic.
No wonder, then, that Inter’s obduracy and its conviction put City off its stride. There was no desperate rear-guard action, no black-and-blue Helm’s Deep. Instead, manager Simone Inzaghi’s Inter side drew deep from its well of experience to frustrate City in every way it could conceive.
The players dawdled over free kicks. They lingered in possession and indulged in petty, niggling fouls, robbing the game of its rhythm. It drew the pace, and with it the sting, from City’s fearsome attack. At times, it stood still, unwilling to be drawn from its positions. Proudly, Inter made the game as ugly as it could.
And they did it all to perfection, or something close to it. Guardiola raged on the touchline. “Relax, relax,” he barked at his players, his hands clawing at his cheeks, a pot pointing out as many flaws as possible in the kettle. There is more to football than beauty, skill and panache. There is also grit and grizzle, gnarl and nous, and Inter had them all in abundance.
Ultimately, though, it was not enough. That has been the story of Manchester City in these last 15 years, told from the perspective of everyone else. Nothing has ever been enough. City will not, in the end, be stopped.
It would be unfair to say Inter’s focus waned, even for a second. Dimarco simply put one of his feet in the wrong place. His body shape was wrong as he tried to intercept a pass. He stumbled. Silva was away. His cross deflected back into Rodri’s path, and in that moment, arbitrary and human, Inter’s resistance broke, and with it the last bulwark of European football’s traditional aristocracy, its grand old houses.
Manchester City, as they were always going to, had at last broken down the door. The referee blew his whistle. The glitter fell. The fireworks exploded. And in the middle of those wild celebrations, one day ended, and another began. NYTIMES
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