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THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE final is the pinnacle of club football, a duel between the best sides in Europe. This year’s edition, which takes place in Istanbul on June 10th, will probably be a one-sided contest, though. Manchester City, champions of England’s Premier League, are the overwhelming favourites to defeat Internazionale (also known as Inter Milan), third-place finishers in Italy’s Serie A. The bookies give the English side a nearly 80% chance of winning the trophy. Data suggest their confidence is justified. According to rankings compiled by ClubElo.com, a website that tracks football teams’ performance over time using Elo, a statistical rating system, Manchester City are by far the best team in Europe.
With a rating of 2,073, City have a 182-point advantage over Inter, ranked seventh, according to ClubElo. It is the widest gap between two finalists since 1993, when the European Cup was rebranded as the Champions League. Part of the chasm between the clubs reflects the draw. Inter, the lowest-rated team to reach the final since Chelsea in 2012, benefited from a favourable path through the tournament. Their most challenging games in the knockout stages were against local rivals, AC Milan, and Benfica of Portugal, both of which ranked lower. City faced off against strong teams like Bayern Munich and Real Madrid in earlier stages of the tournament.
Manchester City’s dominance is not new. The team has featured among the top three clubs in Europe since 2020. They reached the Champions League final in 2021 (and lost to Chelsea in an upset) and were knocked out by Real Madrid in the semi-final last season. After securing a fourth Premier League title in five years and the FA Cup last week, the club is on course for a treble, a feat achieved only once by an English club (Manchester United in 1999).
Money is crucial to Manchester City’s success. In 2008 the club was purchased by a free-spending consortium from Abu Dhabi. The squad it has assembled is worth $1.1bn, based on players’ expected price in the transfer market, making it the most costly team in the world. Inter’s squad is worth roughly half that, $581m. City’s extravagance has attracted scrutiny. The club is being investigated by the Premier League for breaching more than 100 financial rules. But their spending has paid off on the pitch. Erling Haaland, a Norwegian forward signed for £51m ($64m) last summer, has scored 52 goals so far this season, more than any other European footballer.
But money alone isn’t enough for football success— just ask Chelsea, a London club that splashed out on players and finished mid-table in the Premier League. City’s other key ingredient is their coach, Pep Guardiola. Since arriving in Manchester in 2016, Mr Guardiola has made sure that City’s expensive footballers play as an effective team. He joined City after managing Barcelona and Bayern Munich, clubs that also dominated the Elo rankings. The data suggest that Mr Guardiola may be the greatest manager the sport has ever seen. Yet for all that coaching success, Mr Guardiola has underachieved in the Champions League in recent years. He last won the Champions League with Barcelona in 2011; his Bayern team never lifted the trophy. Critics say that at City he has overcomplicated tactics in big matches. Inter will be hoping that the match on Saturday reveals some such fatal flaw.■
