


MUNICH — Paris Saint-Germain, Champions League winner.
At long last the club that was transformed by Qatari billions and bought and sold a succession of the world’s greatest players in an extravagant bid to get to the top has its hands on the big one.
European club soccer’s grandest prize has a new home after PSG thrashed Inter Milan 5-0 in Saturday’s final in Munich.
“It’s in the bag, it’s coming home with us to Paris tomorrow,” coach Luis Enrique said. “My first day at the PSG campus I said the ultimate goal was to fill the trophy cabinet. The only trophy missing was the Champions League. Here we have ticked that box.”
It was the trophy that not even Lionel Messi, Neymar or Kylian Mbappe could deliver to the French club. Luis Enrique has achieved it after overseeing PSG’s shift from the era of galactico signings to one of genuine team-building.
Fitting then that Désiré Doué, the 19-year-old French forward, emblematic of the club’s new generation, was the chief inspiration and player of the match as PSG recorded the biggest win in a final in the competition’s 70-year history. In a scintillating performance, Doué and substitute Senny Mayulu became the third and fourth teenagers to score in a Champions League final following Patrick Kluivert in 1995 and Carlos Alberto in 2004.
“It is wonderful, it is magical, we are rewriting the history of this club and French football,” Doué said after scoring twice and set up another goal in little over an hour on the field before being substituted.
Achraf Hakimi and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia added to Doue’s double.
“It’s exceptional,” striker Ousmane Dembele said. “It’s especially good since we did it in style. We went to Liverpool, to Aston Villa, and played great games. We deserve it and so do the fans.”
Now PSG can truly sit alongside the royalty of European soccer. Not by virtue of turnover or merchandizing but on the merits of its achievements on the field. The Champions League is the ultimate barometer of the continent’s elite clubs and up until now PSG has been a flashy contender that always came up short.
That all changed at Allianz Arena, the home of Bayern Munich, one of the titans of Europe, and a fitting stage for PSG’s crowning moment. Not least because it was against Bayern that it lost its only other Champions League final in 2020, leaving Neymar in tears in an empty stadium in Lisbon where fans were locked out because of the pandemic. On this occasion, thousands of PSG supporters were there to revel in the moment, waving flags, lighting flares and drowning out their rivals from Inter, many of whose supporters left the stadium long before the final whistle. They’d been partying in the streets of Munich throughout the day, but that was nothing compared to the scenes of joy when captain Marquinhos held the trophy aloft with fireworks and golden confetti exploding behind him.