Who Deserves to Win the UEFA Champions League?

Are PSG and Inter the best teams in this year’s competition?

This year’s UEFA Champions League final will see perennial French champions PSG face Serie A runners-up Internazionale. Once the game finishes at the Allianz Arena (confusingly renamed ‘the Munich Football Arena’ for this match, due to UEFA sponsorship rules), we will have a champion, another name on the trophy, and new legends written into respective fandom.

One question that will inevitably be asked during the build-up is whether or not these two sides actually deserve to be in the final, and if not, which team(s) should really be there instead. With that in mind, let’s try and figure out the two best teams in this year’s Champions League.

The UEFA Champions League (league)

The easiest way to compare how teams have fared over the competition is to display the results in a league table. Obviously, knockout football is played very differently to league, but it gives a pretty decent visual representation of overall performance.

For obvious reasons, we’ll only be looking at teams that reached the quarter-finals, as well as including Liverpool, who finished top in the ‘League Phase’ of the tournament.

PSG’s position if the 10-0 aggregate victory vs Brest is removed

If this were a competitive league (some kind of ‘Super League’, perhaps?), then Inter would’ve won fairly comfortably, especially if you remove PSG’s fixtures vs Brest (who finished ninth in Ligue 1) in the play-off for the last-sixteen. Interestingly, the Parisian side would also finish behind Aston Villa, despite Unai Emery’s men playing two fewer matches. This is in part due to PSG losing five matches on the way to the final, and no team has lost that many games in the history of the European Cup/Champions League and still won the tournament. The current record is four losses, held by: Real Madrid (99/00 & 21/22), AC Milan (02/03), and Liverpool (18/19).

Inter, on the other hand, have only lost a single match in the entire campaign, and even that was due to a ninetieth-minute winner from Bayer Leverkusen’s Nordi Mukiele.

Inevitably, the semi-finalists finish third and fourth, but it’s interesting that many people’s ‘preferred’ finalist, Barcelona, would be behind Arsenal in the table. Yes, the Catalans have been one of the most dynamic and exciting attacking units in European history (scoring the most goals at this stage of the competition since, well, Barcelona in 2000), but Arsenal’s goal difference points to a greater balance between attack and defence.

Another thing of note is that, despite only playing ten games, Liverpool would still finish above Real Madrid, reminding us of how good they were in the early stages of this competition, before losing to PSG on penalties in the last-sixteen.

The Champions’ Path

There’s another metric that we can look at to see if a team ‘deserves’ their place in the final, and that’s strength of opponents faced. Firstly, here’s the average UEFA co-efficient ranking of all teams faced.

At first glance, you’d think that PSG have been handed the easiest path to the final, but this number is inflated due to several of their opponents not having a co-efficient ranking before this season: Girona (ninety-fourth) and Brest (one hundred and eighth) were playing in their first ever Champions League campaign, while Stuttgart (one hundred and second) hadn’t appeared in the competition for fifteen years. Likewise, Aston Villa had a poor co-efficient ranking (forty-sixth), despite reaching the quarter-finals.

You could look at the average position opponents finished in the Champions League ‘league phase’, though one issue with this metric is that teams that qualified via the play-off round (Dortmund, Bayern, PSG, Real Madrid) were always going to play against teams that finished higher than them, just because that’s how the draw works.

What this metric does do is put PSG’s five losses into context, as they consistently played against teams that were competitive throughout (in fact, out of the twelve opponents faced, eight finished in the top half of the league phase). The average position faced is closest to fifteen, and the team that finished fifteenth in the league phase? PSG!

The Big Moments

PSG have been single-handedly taking down the Premier League in Europe, defeating Liverpool, Aston Villa, and Arsenal en route to the final. In those six matches, they scored nine goals from an xG of 10.73 (underperformance of 1.73), but conceded just six goals from an xG of 9.19. This overperformance can be placed directly at the feet/hands of PSG ‘keeper Gianluigi Donnarumma, who made several world-class saves in each of the ties. This was particularly essential against Arsenal, who out-performed PSG in both xG and xGAgainst in both legs, yet the Parisians won three-one on aggregate. After the second leg, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta claimed his side were “much better” than the winners, and the numbers seem to back him up.

Speaking of numbers, there’s an astonishing one that may well show how Inter could have the advantage ahead of the final: across all fourteen of Inter’s matches in this year’s competitions, they have only been behind for a combined total of sixteen minutes.

Inter are Ready

One thousand two hundred ninety minutes of football (+ stoppage time), and they’ve trailed for sixteen minutes. That’s 1.24% of their game time. Not only does this go some way to explain why Inter have only lost one match in this competition, but also shows the importance of ‘game state’ in the final. There’s a reason why no team has led Inter for more than six minutes, so a young, partially inexperienced side in PSG will have to be careful not to force the issue. Most of this Inter team played in the Champions League final vs Manchester City in 2023, and it seems like that experience is steering them towards the trophy.

If you asked neutral fans who they wanted to be in the final before the conclusion of the semis, they almost universally would’ve chosen PSG and Barcelona. Fast, dynamic, electric, attacking football, high-tempo and chaotic, like a frenzy. This Inter side is not a frenzy: they are careful, deliberate, calculated, and very, very clever. Less frenzy, more surgical precision.

This may not be the final everyone wanted, but it’s certainly the one we deserve.