It felt fitting, in the end, that Phil Foden should have a decisive hand. On a taught, sweaty, occasionally indigestible night at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium Manchester City finally turned the whole world a shade of sky blue, reaching the end point, the final high, of this extraordinary 15-year football-industrial project.
City are champions of Europe. If this always seemed inevitable in the abstract, it still feels like moment of double-take, of pure sporting vertigo. A team playing in the same clothes as the one that seemed for so long the embodiment of gallows humour, familiar underachievement, a roll of the eyes in human form, are now indisputably, and by some distance judged on the season as a whole, the greatest football team on the planet.
It was fitting that the only goal in this win should come not from some rapier thrust, or the more direct route to goal of the last few months, but from a kind of old-school infiltration. This was a goal made out of the rhythms and shapes of classic Pep-ball, fashioned by a pair of scuttling inside forwards and finished in Guardiola-gold style by a defensive midfielder.
Mainly though there was a soft, fond note in the fact that the night should be rescued just as it started to wander away from them by an hour-long intervention from a homegrown asset who started on the bench but ended up leading the charge from the front.
The most obvious moment of jeopardy arrived with half an hour gone, and City already fighting to impose their rhythms, as Kevin De Bruyne abruptly sat down outside the Inter box, got up, tried to walk a few steps, then sat down again, face already drained.
Pep Guardiola felt it straight away, felt that fissure starting to open up, leaping and suddenly, arms whirling, eyes boggled, a man seeing shapes, shadows, patterns. Guardiola had dressed for the occasion in a shimmery black suit and black T-shirt, striding his touchline like a celebrity magician, or an elite jazz drummer. But he looked suddenly small and tender and skinny out there in all that air, pate gleaming under the Ataturk lights, a man feeling the day start to slide just a little. At one point he seemed to be screaming “Relax, relax, relax” at his players. OK. How does that work? Should we relax, like, really angrily?
It might have been a moment to reanimate the ghosts of Porto, when De Bruyne was body-checked out of the game by Antonio Rüdiger. It might have raised the clanking chains of Spurs 2019, when he was left out of the team and City contrived to lose a vital first leg.
Instead something else happened here. Foden was already prowling, hanging from the dugout roof, skipping about like a restless puppy, when he was finally sent on to change the day.
Istanbul had been a baking, dry, airless place all afternoon. This is a city in a constant state of gridlock, where the journey from city centre to the Ataturk is an hour-long Bourne-style chase scene through endless swarming traffic. The stadium is a huge open gravy boat of a thing, dumped down on a plateau in the distant suburbs. In the hours before kick-off the air had been lent a toxic rubbery tang, a gift from a nearby factory fire.
There was the usual shameless fudge around the edges of the day with logistics, travel and basic care of supporters. It is extraordinary that Uefa can arrange the televised part of this event, the bit that fits on the screen, with such minute attention to detail, but will take so little care with the experience of actual match-going fans. Here there were horrendous delays for anyone taking the massive trek from their accommodation with anything other than a five-hour margin.
And City did seem a little drained, a little eaten up by the occasion early on. Inter were feisty and forceful in the collisions. Rodri was blitzed in possession a couple of tines, Simone Inzaghi’s men clearly briefed to shut him down. Lautaro Martínez closed down Rodri, won a goal kick and there were huge approving cheers from the Inter end.
It was Foden who provided energy in that period, if not always precision. He has such a light, easy way of moving, lunging and scything into space like a fencer wielding the blade, always leading with his left, and never really seeming to sprint but covering the ground in tiny gliding steps, barely touching the grass. He gave City something they had lacked, energy, vim, urgency, a sense of hunger.
City had already begun to press in their favourite spaces, the flanks, 40 yards out. The goal came first from Foden’s diagonal run to the byline, drawing the Inter defenders out of their holes, opening up odd spaces. Next it was Bernardo Silva, making the same run, drawing more bodies his way. The cutback was deflected into Rodri’s path, body already angled, sending the ball outside the post then into the net behind André Onana.
And so City have completed the ascent of that golden ladder. Is this a fairytale? Do fairytales always involve the strategic deployment of funds by a repressive monarchical state? Perhaps not. But football does like to find a way, and of all City’s players it is Foden who presents the most obviously uplifting story, a player who has been at this club since the age of four, and who was there to help drive it on to the natural end point of this extraordinary, industrial-scale pursuit of the sun.
