In the end it didn't come easy for them. After the semifinals were decided and we knew that Manchester City would be facing Inter, the talk was all about, "What can Inter do to beat City?" The Guardian's Nicky Bandini acknowledged, when asked if Inter could win, that of course City's players were all, man for man, better than Inter's.
When the game arrived, Inter played without fear. They kept the possession relatively even - no 81% possession for City this time. But of course it wasn't enough. City's goal came on the 68th minute after over an hour of being frustrated. Inter didn't play the catenaccio that everyone probably expected (I was watching with an English friend, who teased me about that), taking the game to City whenever they could.
As I say, it wasn't enough. City's the champion, for the third time in a row, of Europe's most prominent league, while Inter came in third in a league that hasn't provided a Champions League finalist since 2017, and hasn't provided a Champions League winner since 2010... when Inter won it. When you have stats like that, you have to ignore talk of a hoodoo: City were always going to be too good for Inter, a team whose attack consists of a striker that City long ago deemed surplus to requirements and another striker who endured poor spells playing for City's biggest English rivals.
So City has its treble, becoming only the second English team to do that since one of those rivals, Manchester United, did it in 1999. They made heavy weather of it this season, given that they weren't even top of the Premier League for most of the season, despite Erling Haaland's record-breaking form. Yet they won that with a couple of games to spare, then saw off United in the FA Cup, and now have the one trophy that was missing from the cabinet.
The previous time City got to a Champions League final, they were beaten by Chelsea's street smarts (and by Antonio Rüdiger's shoulder breaking Kevin de Bruyne's orbital bone). The narrative around Pep Guardiola in the Champions League was that he was too given to tinkering, and that he'd created a mental block for himself, after those epochal teams that smashed United in 2009 and 2011. Back then he had Lionel Messi, at the top of his game, but of course Pep was never able to lure Messi to the blue side of Manchester.
Now he can say he didn't need him after all.
So what's next for City, and, y'know, for the rest of English football and European football more widely? The Abu Dhabi purchase in 2008 brought a few trophies, but it took the full reorientation of the club in Pep's image to bring the dominance that they craved. According to the Observer, City have won 17 major trophies since Abu Dhabi took over, but 12 of those have come in the years that Pep's been the coach.
Here's the list of those trophies:
- Five of the last six Premier League titles, including the record-breaking 100-point season of 2017-18
- Two FA cups
- Four consecutive EFL Cups
- And now one Champions League
It's clear that Pep's going nowhere, as long as City can keep paying for the players he wants. With his ability to construct teams consisting not only of the 11 men on the pitch but also the five substitutes, it seems unlikely that there will be serious challenges to City's dominance in the Premier League. It'll be a different story in Europe, as Real Madrid will probably still be able to treat the Champions League as its own fiefdom. At the very least, City and Real are probably the teams that'll dominate the honors for the next few years.
I'll leave it to someone else to talk about whether that's a good or bad thing for the sport more generally. I've been talking for years about their dominance and how it'd be nice to see them get challenged, but it's hard to see how the status quo at City changes for the moment. There's no bigger club that Pep can go to, and he doesn't seem the type to give himself a challenge by (say) going to manage a club with fewer resources.
I guess the one achievement left to Pep and City is to win all four trophies in a single season, and with the form they're in, you can imagine them achieving that goal sooner rather than later.
UPDATE: Of course, the moment I commit to paper the words "Pep's going nowhere", he announces that he's leaving when his contract ends in 2025. The article says he'd previously thought of coaching in Italy, to complete his set of the top 4 leagues, but "his thinking has changed", and that one option is to coach a national team. I wonder.
A criticism of Guardiola that I've read is that he's never been firmly tested: every club he's gone to has been dominant or set up expressly for him (Man City, for example, brought in his entire recruitment team from Barcelona before they hired him). I can imagine that maybe the glory of dominating Serie A isn't as apparent now, given that the Italian league is a bit of a mess. But also, I wonder if he's really interested in coaching a national side - after all, he won't have an extremely rich club hierarchy there to green light whatever purchase he wants, and he'll be stuck selecting eligible players.
No, my guess (for what it's worth) is that he'll end up at another Gulf petrostate-funded team. If not PSG, which has been held up as the mirror image of Man City, since they have all this cash but still can't win the Champions League, then he'll probably join everybody else and pitch up at one of the top 4 Saudi sides, who've been making some waves by buying Karim Benzema, N'Golo Kante, and pretty much everyone else who's old and out of contract.
Maybe I'm being mean? It just doesn't seem like Pep's style to take on a challenge by starting at a lower-level team and turning them into champions. But as with everything, we'll find out in due time.
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