As I do every year, I watched the Champions League final this morning, and watched Paris St-Germain beat Arsenal on penalties to win its second Champions League in as many years. Like last year, it was a little depressing to see PSG beat a team I have some appreciation for - the only consolation is that at least this year Arsenal gave the French champions more of a game than Inter did last year.
Much was made of the fact that this marked the first successful title defense by a team since Real Madrid won three on the hop in 2016-18, but that's not that impressive, if you remember that Milan, Nottingham Forest, Liverpool, Bayern Munich, Ajax, Inter, Benfica and Real Madrid (again) have all done it too, going back from the 1950s to the 1980s. Every team that won the European Cup in the 1970s (apart from Feyenoord) did it multiple times in a row.
What's more interesting to me is that this win marks only the third time a French team has won Europe's biggest club tournament, and that PSG is only the second French team to win the tournament. Whenever I talk about the Champions League on this blog, I always refer to the Top 4 leagues (England, Spain, Germany and Italy) and France, which reflects the dominance of those leagues and their much higher UEFA ranking coefficients than that of France.
That is to say, France is the fifth-ranked league in Europe, but even with PSG's dominance of the Champions League of the past two seasons, its score is almost as far from fourth-place Germany as it is from sixth-place Portugal. Another way to look at the gulf between France and the Top 4 leagues is that France has never qualified for one of the two European Performance Spots that give a league a fifth participant in the Champions League - those have gone to England and Spain (twice each) and Italy and Germany (once each).
Well, here I need to admit something. When I started writing this blog post, I was going to argue that maybe it's time to start counting France as among the Top 5 leagues, and that Italy should start looking over its shoulder lest it drop out of the Top 4. Instead I find myself decrying the closed shop that means serial underperformer Italy, which hasn't had a Champions League winner since 2010, remains in second place, ahead of Spain, which feels like it's dominated in recent years.
Of course, it also confirms my belief that the only reason the French league is overperforming at the moment is because PSG keeps doing so well in the tournament. But it's the only French team that seems to challenge for anything, thanks to its massive financial clout, so there's no reason to give the fifth-place French team an extra Champions League spot.
But what of poor Arsenal? This is their second tilt at the Champions League final, after they lost to Barcelona in 2006. Incidentally, that was the last final I missed entirely, for the reason that I was graduating from grad school - my Arsenal-supporting friend, with whom I watched today's match, was there to see me walk and still holds missing the game against me.
The Gunners will feel hard done by, given that they scored first and held the lead for about an hour. And while they admirably held off PSG's attack, which has to be the best in Europe overall, they also weren't able to break through the PSG defense to score again. And then came the penalties, which exposed Arsenal's nerves, with two players missing their kicks.
It could have been a dream season for Arsenal: winning the league for the first time since 2004, seeing their North London rivals Spurs almost get relegated (and how hilarious would that have been), and getting to the final of the Champions League. What has to be even more agonizing is how close Arsenal came to winning this time - if a couple of shots had been taken better, if a few refereeing calls had gone their way (the ref was shocking btw)... if, if, if.
All these narratives, around coefficients and individual teams' seasons and whatever else, are part of what makes me love the Champions League so much. I may be a little sad that an English team I like lost to a cynical petrostate sportswashing project, but the occasion still delivers overall. It may not be the Super Bowl in terms of pageantry and cultural heft (the Champions League final isn't a place where companies debut their new ad campaigns), but it's my favorite yearly sporting event, but a wide margin.
So, dusting ourselves off from the 2025-26 season, we can look forward to the World Cup and the 2026-27 season after that. We go again, as the saying has it.
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