Man City’s European ascent is a total victory for politics in football

Who knows? Perhaps City can now take that same spirit into the domestic courtroom and complete an unprecedented double, taking down both Uefa’s in-house legal team and the 115 Premier League charges currently outstanding.

TREBLE DELIGHT: City manager Pep Guardiola kisses the Champions League trophy. 

Well, that’s that done. So. What now? Here we have a global TV product staged inside a dictator-built stadium, featuring a dictator-owned champion team and another in a state of ongoing FFP-induced financial levitation. And in the middle of that lighted bowl the old familiar centrepiece, a game that is still capable of communicating beauty and pleasure, watched by a group of people still capable of being moved by the spectacle, still able to feel something.

The first lesson from Saturday is that Manchester City are fine and deserving champions. This is by some distance the best football team in Europe, a model of graft, team-building and creative tactics. City may or may not, as L’Équipe suggested in its report on the game, be “moral in the way in which the club has built its strength”, but the team itself is a model of aesthetics and good practice. Not to mention, as is often overlooked, “a generous and magnificent loser” in their previous defeats, which will make it even sweeter now to win with a bit of a grind.