For anyone worried that Manchester City would erase Inter Milan like an AI-driven machine, that’s not how it turned out. Here in Istanbul’s Ataturk Stadium the machine got nervous. But City still clinched their first ever Champions League, and a historic third trophy in a season with an archetypal City goal, netted on the 68 minute mark by the Spaniard Rodri.
Manager Pep Guardiola’s team deserved it for the season they’d had, even the era, but not for tonight.
City’s problem was that they played almost the entire match without their two main attacking threats. Playmaker Kevin De Bruyne, who had left the 2021 final against Chelsea injured, limped off here after 35 minutes. The bigger mystery was the non-presence for 90 minutes of centre-forward Erling Haaland.
The 22-year-old Norwegian had dominated the season, his first in England, scoring 52 goals. He led City to the English title and FA Cup. But against Inter he played as if the team’s bus driver had accidentally pulled on the number nine shirt. The few times he touched the ball, he generally lost it, and he tested Inter’s keeper André Onana only once, with a shot straight at him early on. Indeed, his sleepwalking performance recalled the Brazilian Ronaldo’s dud night in the 1998 World Cup final. Haaland finishes the season with one goal in his last eight matches. Was this exhaustion, or a lack of big-match temperament?
Before Abu Dhabi’s ruling family bought and funded the club in 2008, City used to suffer from “City-itis” — a tendency to self-sabotage at decisive moments. In Istanbul that resurfaced like a forgotten genetic flaw, remarkable from a team that had made Real Madrid look like a veterans’ eleven in the semi. City’s owner Sheikh Mansour, watching his plaything in a competitive game for the first time since 2010, may have wondered what he’d been wasting his money on.
For Europe’s biggest club game, the atmosphere was underwhelming. In the vast bowl of the Ataturk in outer Istanbul, the crowd sat far from the field, almost like in an eastern European ground of the Cold War years. It seemed a suboptimal venue, especially as traffic jams forced thousands of fans to walk the last kilometres to the stadium by the side of the highway.
The match turned on a rare moment when City managed to lure the Italian defence out of position. On 68 minutes Phil Foden, who had replaced De Bruyne, intelligently dribbled away from Inter’s goal, taking defenders with him. He then found Manuel Akanji, who played forward to Bernardo Silva, who laid the ball back from near the byline to the advancing Rodri — a characteristic City attack. The Spaniard, alone in space, took his time and fired low into Onana’s left-hand corner. Uefa rewarded Rodri with the man of the match award, though by his own account, in the first half, “I was playing shit, to be honest”.
After going 1-0 up, a Guardiola team in their usual form would have defanged any opposition fightback by monopolising possession. Here City gave Inter repeated chances. Federico Dimarco looped a header over goalkeeper Ederson’s flailing hand on to the crossbar, and Ederson made excellent saves from Inter’s late substitute, Romelu Lukaku. Even on the last kick of the game, an Inter corner at the end of extra time, the Brazilian had to pull out an improbable stop. “It was probably a fifty-fifty game,” City’s captain Ilkay Gundogan admitted to TV channel BT Sport.
Winger Jack Grealish told the channel: “I was awful but I don’t care. This is what I’ve worked for my whole life. I said to the manager: ‘I want to thank you.’ He has put so much faith in me. He’s a genius.” That may be true, though not on the evidence of tonight.
City’s detractors accuse the club of assembling this brilliant team using “financial doping”. The Premier League has referred City to an independent commission, which will review over 100 allegations of financial rule-breaking over nearly a decade — charges that the club denies.
City’s fans in Istanbul didn’t care. This was the biggest night in the club’s history. Only one English team had previously won the treble of Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League, their neighbours Manchester United in 1999, the same year that City just avoided relegation to the third tier of English football.
Some of the older fans singing the traditional club anthem, Blue Moon, will have been there for that, too.
