Substitute gives Manchester City something they lacked and starts the move that led to Rodri’s winner against Inter
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.
