Key events
34 min: … Marquinhos heads harmlessly wide left. But at the risk of belabouring the point: Inter can’t keep on like this. Their midfield is ludicrously easy to play through.
33 min: Again one simple ping out from the back and the PSG midfield is away. Ruiz sends a pass down the right for Dembele, whose shot-cum-cross is deflected out for a corner. From which …
31 min: There are huge gaps in the Inter midfield. One simple flick-on out of the PSG defence releases Hakimi to make big yards down the middle. Dembele wins a corner that comes to nothing, but Inter can’t keep on like this.
29 min: Dimarco nicks the ball off a snoozing Hakimi, and tries to execute a one-two with Barella down the inside left. It nearly comes off, but Hakimi regains his composure to return and barge Dimarco off the ball, and then the flag goes up for offside anyway. Inter are doing absolutely nothing up front.
27 min: Ruiz drifts in from the right and shoots through a crowded box. In the circumstances, Sommer does well to gather nervelessly. “From the goal line of one of end the pitch to the goal line (and a bit further) of the other, PSG’s second was as maximal a counter-attack as you can get,” observes Joe Johnson.
25 min: Inter try to take some of the sting out of the game with some sterile possession at the back. “I know it doesn’t have the same optics, but being that far deeper than the defensive line is a Karius level howler from Dimarco,” argues Hugh Molloy. And that was sent before the deflection for the second.
23 min: Çalhanoğlu whips the corner in at speed. Acerbi wins a header, six yards out, but plants it over the bar. He should have got that on target, surely. It should be 2-1.
22 min: Inter need to score the next goal, and with this in mind, Dumfries barrels down the right and wins his team their first corner of the game. From which …
GOAL! PSG 2-0 Inter (Doue 20)
Inter have a throw deep in PSG territory. The French side deal with it easily. Pacho ensures it doesn’t go out for a goal kick, hooking his leg around Barella, who was trying to shepherd it out for a corner. PSG counter at speed, Dembele racing down the left. He switches play to Doue, in acres on the right. Doue enters the box and shoots towards the left-hand side of the net. Dimarco turns his back, the ball pings off his ankle and into the bottom-right side of the goal, past the wrong-footed Sommer. PSG in total control already!
19 min: A measure of the task already facing Inter: the last team to win the Champions League final after conceding first was Real Madrid, conquerers of Atletico in 2014.
17 min: Dumfries wins a header down the inside-right channel and looks to have the beating of Pacho. The two come together and Dumfries goes down. It should be a free kick, but Inter aren’t getting one. PSG counter and nearly add insult to injury, but Kvaratskhelia’s long-distance shot flies harmlessly over the bar.
15 min: The PSG fans had been making the most noise before the goal. Now the volume is through the roof. Their side has enjoyed 63 percent possession up to this point.
13 min: Just over ten minutes in, yet that had been coming. What an assist by Doue, too. He was within his rights to shoot himself, but spotted the no-brainer option in the middle. Just a gorgeous team move.
GOAL! PSG 1-0 Inter (Hakimi 12)
This is a lovely team move. Kvaratskhelia speeds down the left. He cuts back for Fabian Ruiz, who in turn pulls back for Vitinha. He rolls a pass down the inside-left channel. Doue is in space. Hakimi, in the middle, is in even more. Doue rolls across to Hakimi, who can’t miss from six yards. Dimarco playing everyone onside.
11 min: Acerbi passes long but there’s nobody in yellow up front. Donnarumma takes up possession. Inter haven’t shown in attack yet at all. PSG have, though, and this time it’s Dembele shooting from the edge of the box, having cut in from the right. Sommer gathers again.
9 min: Mendes switches play from left to right for Ruiz, who nearly manages to free Hakimi on the overlap. Inter clear but PSG come again, through Doue down the left. He takes the first shot of the evening, towards the bottom left from distance, but that’s easy for Sommer.
7 min: Doue probes down the right only to be shoved over by Bastoni. A clear foul, both hands on the chest, but the defender acts innocent anyway. The resulting free kick causes Inter some bother, as Vitinha whistles it through the six-yard box. Marquinhos nearly meets it with his head, but is eased away from the ball by Acerbi. PSG have definitely started the better.
6 min: PSG are seeing more of the ball during these tentative early exchanges. “Right, settling in to savour some old-school Inter defending à la Giuseppe Bergomi,” writes Charles Antaki. “What he’d make of the current hairstyles – or the University Gold kit – is anyone’s guess. (Mine would be: not much.)”
4 min: A slightly nervy start by Inter. Pavard bobbles a backpass towards Sonner, who then shanks straight out of play under pressure from Dembele.
2 min: There’s an atmosphere befitting the occasion in the Allianz/Fußball Arena. It’s a lovely balmy evening as well.
PSG get the ball rolling … and Fabian Ruiz, rugby style, goes straight for touch down the left! A slightly odd start to proceedings.
Linkin Park have just performed, and now fiddle player David Garrett is making an unholy mess of Seven Nation Army. Curse the moment the Uefa bigwigs first clapped eyes on the Super Bowl half-time show. (Having said that, here’s a performance to cleanse the palate.) And so the teams take to the pitch! Now it’s Zadok the Priest’s turn to get thoroughly worked over. Once hands have been clasped, coins tossed and pennants exchanged, we’ll be off at long last!
Pre-match postbag. “I look forward to following the mbm tonight for an exciting 0-0 aet. However I am worried that match may not happen as, per the pennants, one team will be at the Allianz Arena while the other will be a the Fußball Arena” – Ludovic Lemaignen
“I lived in Paris as a boy and one of the few things I took with me home to Iceland was an uncomplicated love for the blue shirt with the white and red stripe that the older boys wore who let play football with them in the park. During the last 15 years I’ve had considerably more complicated feelings about that club which I thought had beaten my affection into apathy. That said, I’m not saying I’ve been stressed, but I’ve spent all day cleaning my apartment and listening to history podcasts. I thought I didn’t care anymore, but somewhere inside there’s still that six year old who fell in love with football and Paris Saint Germain at the same time. Stupid boy, why didn’t he know that shirt would become the plaything of an absolute monarchy” – Kári Tulinius
“I’ve never been a fan of the Terry’s Chocolate Orange, but they brought out a mint version a while back, and it is dynamite. The Scotland 1978 Brazil 1970 of spherical, segmented, foil-wrapped chocolate confectionery. If tonight’s final is half as good we’re in for a classic. They won’t be talking about this on TNT Sports, I’ll bet” – Simon McMahon
Turns out that Inter kit isn’t yellow after all. In the pre-match blog, Rob Smyth suggested the strip “could be good news for Chris Martin’s bank balance should they win and a TV company find themselves in urgent need of a montage soundtrack.” Peter Oh initially thought the same, only to be quickly disabused from the notion. “I also hummed ‘… and it was all yellow’ when I saw the kit that Inter will wear tonight,” he writes, “but according to the kind folks at Nike, the colour is actually ‘University Gold’. I guess we’re about to witness a graduation ceremony of elite football.”
So should anyone in the montage department at TNT need digging out of a hole at 10.47pm tonight, we urge them to click below. Cue it up at 32 seconds and let rip. (The Aussie version at 1m 05s is an egregious disgrace, a gradually unfolding audio and visual horror-show of gargantuan proportion, affront piled on top of needless provocation, and yet so strangely catchy; good luck suppressing the desire to keep spinning it back and watching agog. And yes I am aware we’ve wandered quite a way off piste with kick-off fast approaching.)
Pennant watch. Here’s what PSG captain Marquinhos will be handing over during the pre-match niceties. A typically classy piece in the retro-poster style, here it’s the centrepiece of an enigmatic pop-art collage also featuring a fruit platter, several hundred toothpicks, some power bars, three toilet rolls, a carry case of assorted hardware, and what may or may not be a box of Terry’s Chocolate Orange in the top-right corner. If this was an LP cover you’d stay up half the night trying to decode it.
Inter are playing in their third-choice yellow strip this evening. So that means their pennant will clash with captain Lautaro Martínez’s shirt, but what a gorgeous thing it is anyway (the current Volkswagen-adjacent monstrosity of a crest, not half as good as the old interlapping FCIM logo, notwithstanding).
The head-to-head record. There isn’t one. This will be the first time these two clubs have met. This happened to Inter a couple of years ago, too, when they faced Manchester City for the first time in the 2023 final.
PSG make one change to the side that started the second leg of the semi-final against Arsenal. Ousmane Dembélé comes in for Bradley Barcola, who must make do with a place on the bench. It’s the same XI that started the first leg of the semi.
Inter make one change to the team that started both legs of their epic semi-final with Barcelona. Benjamin Pavard is back from injury so takes the place of Yann Bisseck, who drops to the bench.
The teams
Paris Saint-Germain: Donnarumma, Hakimi, Marquinhos, Pacho, Nuno Mendes, Neves, Vitinha, Fabian, Doue, Dembele, Kvaratskhelia.
Subs: Safonov, Tenas, Kimpembe, Goncalo Ramos, Lee, Hernandez, Mayulu, Barcola, Zaire Emery, Lucas Beraldo, Mbaye.
Internazionale: Sommer, Pavard, Acerbi, Bastoni, Dumfries, Barella, Calhanoglu, Mkhitaryan, Dimarco, Thuram, Lautaro Martinez.
Subs: Di Gennaro, Josep Martinez, de Vrij, Zielinski, Arnautovic, Frattesi, Asllani, Carlos Augusto, Bisseck, Darmian, Zalewski, Taremi.
Referee: Istvan Kovacs (Romania).
VAR: Dennis Higler (Netherlands).
How Inter got here. They finished the league phase in fourth spot, before seeing off Feyenoord, Bayern Munich and – quite sensationally – Barcelona. Fancy reliving that glorious nonsense again? Of course you do.
League stage (fourth out of 36)
Round of 16
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Feyenoord (a) 2-0
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Feyenoord (h) 2-1
Quarter-final
Semi-final
How PSG got here. Trouncing everyone from the Premier League, basically. They only scraped through the league phase in 15th place, thanks in no small part to a remarkable comeback against Manchester City. Then in the knockouts, Liverpool, Aston Villa and Arsenal were dispatched with varying degrees of drama.
League stage (15th out of 36)
Play-offs
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Brest (a) 3-0
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Brest (h) 7-0
Round of 16
Quarter-final
Semi-final
Inter are the last Italian club to win this trophy. You can relive their 2010 win below (and there’s a special treat within for modern-day fans of PGMOL). This is the Nerazzurri’s seventh European Cup final; their hit-rate so far is 50-50, so no clues.
1963-64: Inter 3-1 Real Madrid
1964-65: Inter 1-0 Benfica
1966-67: Celtic 2-1 Inter
1971-72: Ajax 2-0 Inter
2009-10: Inter 2-0 Bayern Munich
2022-23: Manchester City 1-0 Inter
This is PSG’s second European Cup final. They’re one of five French clubs to make it this far, along with Reims (1956, 1959), St-Étienne (1976), Marseille (1991, 1993) and Monaco (2004). They’ve already got one European title to their name: the 1995-96 Cup Winners’ Cup.
2019-20: Bayern Munich 1-0 PSG
This will be the fifth European Cup final to be played in Munich, and the historical precedents strongly favour PSG tonight. Every final in Munich has produced a first-time winner. One of those was the only previous occasion clubs from France and Italy have met in a final … and that game was the only time a team from France has won the trophy. If Inter are to win tonight, they’ll need to do some serious trend-bucking here.
1978-79: Nottingham Forest 1-0 Malmö
1992-93: Marseille 1-0 AC Milan
1996-97: Borussia Dortmund 3-1 Juventus
2011-12: Chelsea 1-1 Bayern Munich (aet; 4-3 pens)
Preamble
The two clubs contesting the 70th European Cup / Champions League final are cut from very different types of cloth. Internazionale are European royalty, the defensive masters of the mid-Sixties under Helenio Herrera, the similarly staunch usurpers of 2010 under Jose Mourinho, six-time finalists across the ages. Herrera’s team were known as La Grande Inter, which gives us some idea of status. Paris Saint-Germain are parvenus by comparison: the club were minus six years old when La Grande Inter were winning their first European Cup. Just the one unsuccessful appearance in the final for PSG, whose main mark on the competition to date has been historic collapses in earlier rounds. But times change, and they’re the favourites today.
The teams themselves are a study in contrast too. PSG are a gang of thrusting young bucks: Désiré Doué and Warren Zaïre-Emery are 19, João Neves 20, Bradley Barcola 22, Willian Pacho 23, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia 24. Inter’s average age is 31, with 37-year-old Francesco Acerbi at the back and Henrikh Mkhitaryan in midfield a sprightly 36. PSG were crowned French champions nearly two months ago and have been able to grab some R&R since then; Inter are smarting from their failure to win Serie A just last week. Yep, PSG are the favourites today all right.
But then look what Inter did to hotly-tipped Barcelona in the semis, and tonight’s final in Munich is very much up for grabs. Will Inter win their fourth title? Or will PSG finally get their name on the biggest prize of all, ascending to become European royalty at long last? Kick-off is at 9pm in Munich, 8pm BST. It’s on!
