 "Paris Saint-Germain players celebrate after thrashing Inter Milan 5-0 in the final of the 2024-25 UEFA Champions League in Munich, Germany. Reuters")
Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) produced a five-star display in Munich to clinch their first-ever UEFA Champions League (UCL) title. Inter Milan, who arrived having conceded only 11 goals in the competition this season, shipped five on the night and were thoroughly outclassed from start to finish.
Achraf Hakimi opened the scoring for PSG, before Désiré Doué notched up a brace either side of half-time. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Senny Mayulu iced the cake further and added more gloss to an already eye-catching score-line, with Inter Milan handed an absolute humbling .
Here are the talking points from the game.
PSG blitz out of the traps and burn Inter along the way
Champions League finals are never easy to come to grips with. There are nerves, there is tension, that tingling feeling of what the opposition has up their sleeve, and restlessness over whether the evening of their dreams will turn into a nightmare.
Unless…you were PSG in Munich on Saturday. The Paris-based club, having never won the UCL before, played like a team that had won this competition more often anyone. They started off with an intense press, while also counter-pressing when losing the ball high up the pitch. That meant Inter could not establish a foothold in the game and were pinned deep inside their own half.
All of that materialised into two goals inside 21 minutes in a UCL final. For context, the last time a team managed to score within the opening quarter of an hour in a UCL final (Liverpool against Tottenham Hotspur in 2019), the world did not know COVID-19.
PSG were also incredibly superior in every area of the pitch. They won almost all of the second-balls, and barely allowed Inter a moment’s peace, encapsulated further by Hakimi, PSG’s right-back, popping up to press on the left wing in the 45th minute and inducing a mistake.
Inter, it must be said, were guilty of giving PSG too much respect and space, but take nothing away from PSG, who were irresistible. It was almost like watching Pep Guardiola’s sumptuously fluid and beautiful Barcelona side from the 2008-09 or the 2010-11 campaign. That may seem a bit of a hyperbole, but it is also praise of the highest order.
PSG were that good.
PSG’s right proves too wrong for Inter
Désiré Doué is 19 years old. Last summer, he was part of the France team that had to settle for a silver medal at the Olympics. Doué also arrived at PSG in the off-season, and despite his mercurial talent, was not expected to be such a hit in his debut campaign.
Try telling that to anyone who watched him on Saturday. Doué was magnificent, marvellous and all such superlatives against Inter. He started on the right, was a thorn in Inter’s side, and had their defenders on toast throughout by shimmying, shuffling, twisting, turning and teasing them into a trance.
His instinctive movement in the box, superbly found by Vitinha, pierced Inter like hot knife through butter, and helped PSG walk the ball into the net to make it 1-0. A few moments later, he bagged the goal his first-half performance deserved, albeit via a deflection.
In the second half, having been set free by Vitinha again, he coolly slotted the ball into the back of the net. Doué received a yellow card for taking off his shirt, but that will certainly not take the sheen off a performance that was probably beyond his wildest imagination.
Which brings us to Hakimi. Unlike Doué, the entire footballing fraternity knew what he could do. But as the season has progressed, he has taken his game up a level and that crescendo continued in Munich on Saturday.
His positioning was superb throughout the game and he created several overloads for his team – sometimes in midfield, sometimes out wide, and sometimes, as his goal showed, from just outside the six-yard box. He opted not to celebrate that strike, having played for Inter Milan previously, but it was a goal that would have been celebrated far and wide in Paris, and cherished by purists everywhere.
Hakimi’s pace, his trickery, his willingness to run himself into the ground and join every attack, offers PSG a threat very few teams (if any) in Europe can recreate, and on a night when the whole world was watching, he ensured that point was driven home. Literally and metaphorically.
Inter run out of ideas and steam, just as PSG find another gear
Inter, since the first match-week, seemed a team that could contain, cope and compete physically with any other team in the competition. Their three-man defensive shape gave them plenty of solidity, along with a stoic mindset. In the final, though, all of that went up in smoke. Inter were so far off the pace that PSG lapped them. Multiple times.
Their midfield trio, comprising Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Hakan Çalhanoğlu and Nicolò Barella, were overrun with alarming frequency by their younger counterparts in blue, and Inter just could not get close enough to the PSG midfielders, which seeped through to the rest of the team as well.
PSG, in contrast, hunted every loose ball like a pack of terriers and as if their life depended on it – a perfect example being Khvicha Kvaratskhelia chasing Denzel Dumfries for the better part of 60 yards in the 79th minute (when the score was 4-0), and winning the ball after going shoulder-to-shoulder.
Inter could maybe have tried to find their forwards quicker and by going longer to beat the PSG press, especially with whatever little joy they had in an attacking sense, arriving via that avenue. But all of that feels redundant because PSG, truth be told, ripped the Italian side to shreds and smashed them to smithereens.
And if this is the only time PSG ever scale the European peak (which is tough to imagine), they have ensured it was done in style. And it was done like it has hardly ever been done before. Or might ever be done by anyone else.
A night to remember. A season to savour. And a result that, for its sheer audacity, outrageousness and sublimity, will reverberate around the globe – today, tomorrow, and far, far beyond.