ISTANBUL, Turkey — This city straddling Europe and Asia (you can literally drive across the bridge from one continent to the other) is a fitting venue for a UEFA Champions League final. It’s the European Cup, yes, but the finalists are two Asian-owned teams (Manchester City majority owned by Abu Dhabi; Internazionale by Chinese investors) with a global appeal and this city, founded nearly three millennia ago, is used to being both a nexus and melting pot. When you exist in the place where people, religions and creeds collide and ferment, change is a constant … which might be why Istanbul has changed its name three times.
Even today, it’s a crossroads. Look out over the Bosphorus Strait and you might see ships carrying Ukrainian grain escorted by Turkish warships. If you had Marvel superhero eyesight you could stand on the banks and see Ukraine and Russia in the distance. Turn West, and it’s the European Union; South, and it’s Egypt and the African continent; East, and it’s Syria, then Iraq and Iran and then, the Gulf.
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It’s no surprise that the national carrier, Turkish Airlines, boasts that it flies to more destinations than anyone else. Other than Australia and the Americas, nothing seems particularly far away.
Maybe that’s why so many foreign players have made a home here. Newly crowned champions Galatasaray, whose red and yellow pennants festoon many of the city’s streets, count Juan Mata, Mauro Icardi, Dries Mertens and Bafetimbi Gomis in their ranks. Rivals Fenerbache have Michy Batshuayi, Enner Valencia and Joshua King. Besiktas, whose imposing stadium overlooks the Bosphorus, as well as the Dolmabahce Palace, from which the Sultan ruled over the Ottoman Empire, boast Nathan Redmond, Dele Alli and Vincent Aboubakar, the man who lost his job at Al Nassr when Cristiano Ronaldo rocked up.
Football-wise it’s also the city of last hurrahs. Inter should enjoy a fair amount of neutral support at the Ataturk Stadium on Saturday night and they have no shortage of old-timers and guys looking for a second chance: ex-Premier League veterans like Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Edin Dzeko and Matteo Darmian; Premier League refugees like striker Romelu Lukaku (on loan from Chelsea); two-time cancer-beater, turned unwanted free agent, turned defensive stalwart, Francesco Acerbi; and goalkeeper Andre Onana, who served a nine-month doping ban after inadvertently taking his wife’s medication.
Plus, neutrals generally love an underdog. And Man City are very much favourites. They stand 90 minutes away from hitting the Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League trifecta (or, treble, as they call it in England), a feat achieved by only seven clubs in the history of the game.
Inter finished third in Italy’s Serie A, a whopping 18 points off Napoli at the top of the table (though they did win the Italian Cup.) City have won five of the last six Premier League titles; Inter have won one league title in the past 13 years.
City are owned by members of the Abu Dhabi royal family, who have spent lavishly since their takeover in 2008. So lavishly that UEFA punished them for breaching Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules in 2014 and actually banned them for two years for false accounting in 2020 (a ban that was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which found that some charges were not proven and others were outside the statute of limitations). They now face similar charges, this time from the Premier League, but continue to maintain their innocence (and, in fact, say they “welcome” the chance to clear their name.)
Inter are owned by the once-mighty Suning Corporation who, in 2021, had to sell nearly a quarter of their shares to the Chinese government after running into liquidity problems. Before that, they too had been found in breach of FFP and between that sanction and Suning’s liquidity issues they’ve been run on a relative shoestring budget since then, with the owners issuing bonds to cover debts.
City are undefeated in the Champions League, having dispatched RB Leipzig, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid in the knockout phase. Inter, who lost twice in the group stage, had a distinctly more downhill run to the final, getting past FC Porto (though, in their own Inter way, they nearly threw it away), Benfica and crosstown rivals AC Milan.
I could go on, but you get the point.
