🔍 The Wonder of Kvaradona

One more game to go. I’m heading to Budapest tomorrow for a mouthwatering Champions League final, even by the standards of Champions League finals. I remember seeing last year’s Europa League final described as the Stoppable Force against the Movable Object. PSG and Arsenal are the exact opposite.

Weirdly, there was a time when the UCL final was a.) played on a Wednesday and b.) not necessarily the last game of the European season. This is not ancient history, by the way. The first final to take place on a weekend was as recent as 2010. Three days after Barcelona beat Arsenal to the European Cup in 2006, the Catalan side had to play a domestic game against Athletic (Bilbao).

Given how wedded football is to tradition – even the slightest change seems to be met with an instinctive howl of disapproval – it’s amazing how bizarre both of those things appear now. This game obviously should be the climax to the season. It should clearly be on the weekend. We can, it turns out, adapt to the new when the new is so self-evidently a better idea.

There are worse ways to understand the problem facing Arsenal in Budapest than watching Khvicha Kvaratskhelia’s second goal against Bayern Munich last month. Not the first, the one in which he used Josip Stanisic as a mannequin and then as a human shield, but the second, placed into the far corner to make it 4-2 in the first leg of that breathless semifinal.

The goal starts with Achraf Hakimi hurtling down the right wing. Hakimi may or may not play in the final. He pulled a hamstring late on against Bayern, and has not featured since. On Tuesday, though, he was pictured in training alongside his PSG teammates. Maybe he has recovered. Maybe it is a feint from Luis Enrique. 

That sort of run is the Moroccan’s calling card. For a full-back, he is surprisingly often PSG’s most advanced player. More often than you might expect, the reigning European champion finds itself with a strike pairing of Hakimi and Nuno Mendes, a player who is in theory a left-back but is probably best thought of as everything, everywhere, all at once, a footballer-as-quantum.

When he collected the ball against Bayern, he had the time and space – and composure – to look up. He could see, in that instant, two of his teammates charging into the box, surrounded by a cluster of red shirts, all of them scurrying to cut off angles and close down lanes and seal up space. There is the makings of a maelstrom.

There is no point pretending I know exactly what Hakimi intended to do at that moment. We tend to assume that every single touch they take and pass they make is wholly deliberate, mapped out precisely, but at times footballers function more as a kind of percentage engine. 

That is not to diminish their skill. If anything, it is to accentuate it. They are making complex decisions about what might cause the most trouble as they are sprinting at full pelt, caked in sweat, in front of 40,000 people. It is the sort of intelligence that is the opposite of artificial.

Hakimi’s cross is that sort of cross. He seems to aim for the penalty spot, the place where he has worked out his teammates should converge as they bear down on goal. Watching it back, it feels as though he is not necessarily playing it to Ousmane Dembélé specifically. Instead, he has chosen that as the point of likeliest potential success. He is making the best available decision.

Dembélé, though, does not make it. Nor does João Neves. They are distracted, at the last, by a Bayern defender sliding across their line of sight. The ball runs past and through both of them. It dribbles out beyond the penalty spot. For a moment, a split second, it feels as though the opportunity might be lost. Bayern might have got away with it.

And then the camera pans out, just a little, and Kvaratskhelia comes into view. He is a little further back, cutting in off the left wing. He is completely unmarked. There is nobody near him. The ball is drawn to his right foot, as if by a magnet. There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever about what is about to happen.

The whole vignette is a snapshot of what it is that makes PSG so compelling and so potent. The idea of the right-back as a buccaneering attacking force illustrates the fluid, dynamic approach that Luis Enrique has crafted. Everyone plays everywhere. Defense and attack are not separated by firewalls; they are all one great conflagration.

The presence of Dembélé and Neves crashing into the box indicates the intent with which PSG play, the directness, what is often clumsily translated from Spanish as “verticality.” Football is a very complex game, an interplay of forces both physical and psychological. But it’s amazing how effective just running really fast into the penalty area can be.

But it is Kvaratskhelia who provides the crowning metaphor. His sudden appearance is a reminder, a chilling one, that no matter how many players a team commits to shutting PSG down, regardless of how many threats seem to have been seen off, no matter how well everyone involved has done their jobs, Luis Enrique’s team always seems to be able to find one more weapon. 

That manipulation of space – that ability, at the highest speed, to move an opponent around until they are punch-drunk and dizzy and helplessly exposed – is what made PSG European champion last season; it is the trait the club has rediscovered, against Chelsea and Liverpool and Bayern, after a sluggish start to the defense of its crown.

It is also what makes it so hard to identify which player carries the greatest threat. Last season, a lot of the credit went to Dembélé: he was the one who won the Ballon d’Or, the one who was seen as the franchise player, victory in the Champions League taken as the prodigal talent finally fulfilling his potential. At the same time, though, the emergence of Desiré Doué, with his gliding elegance, seemed to herald the arrival of a new superstar.

Both of those are entirely legitimate, and yet it is the other member of the trio, Kvaratskhelia, that I have always found infinitely more captivating. Not (just) because I met him, a few years ago, although that is probably part of it. Not just because his story has so much more texture, more unlikely settings and more odd little twists and turns, than that of most of the world’s best players.

Instead, what makes Kvaratskhelia so eye-catching is that he seems so much more rough-hewn than almost everyone else. The very finest players, now, often feel a little like they were made in a laboratory. They seem to land, fully-formed, anointed for greatness from the time they are teenagers. Everything they do seems fine-tuned, deliberate, polished.

Kvaratskhelia is different. He does not execute. He interprets. He does things other players do not do, and might not think of, so complete has been their education. He gives the impression not just of being a virtuoso, but an autodidact. He feels like art in a world that has become obsessed with science, and he is all the more refreshing for it.

If there has been a central character in PSG’s run to the final this season, it has probably been Kvaratskhelia. That would, in an ordinarily great team, mean that Arsenal’s task in Budapest would be to stop him, to shut him down, to blunt his edge. But that is not the problem that PSG poses, the question it asks. This is a team that can always find another weapon, that always seems to have someone, somewhere, waiting in reserve.

One of the criticisms of VAR has always been that it dilutes the euphoric impact of a goal. A few years in, the joy is now immediately tempered by the worry that some minor infringement will mean that it will not count, that the officials will be able to find an arcane and invisible transgression that enables them to quash all joy.

As a consequence of what I’m going to call our polluted media environment, I had a similar sensation watching the global outpourings of delight at Arsenal winning the Premier League. Was the parade in Nairobi AI? Were the images from Ghana actually from a rally for something completely unrelated?

This is one of the consequences of the proliferation of slop and misinformation that has come to cloud first our feeds and then our brains, I think: the first instinct must now always be to try to work out how real something is; in the time that takes, and regardless of the conclusion, the wonder of the image itself is somewhat diminished.

What I can say with absolute certainty is that the scenes of jubilation in London have been entirely real: the capital has been a week-long street party, no doubt helped by the fact that the sun has been shining for the first time in about eight months. 

I’ve found this just as powerful as the footage of Arsenal fans celebrating from all four corners of the world. Those have been potent – and, I’m pretty sure, actual — proof of what a global phenomenon both the club and the Premier League are. But seeing London reveling in victory has shown that, at heart, even the most international of clubs are inextricably bound to their community, to their neighborhood, to their place.

It’s time to get your measurements, find your nearest rental, and ask nicely if they have anything gold at the back of the store, because the second-annual Baldon d’Or Awards have arrived! Sure, the Premier League’s best performers probably care quite a lot about what their peers think of them, and that’s why other, seemingly more official awards exist. But do they have categories for the really important things in football, like Best Sh*thousery, the Winston Wolf Fixer of the Year and Biggest Miss? No, they do not, so that’s what we’re here for: to highlight the ridiculous and magical moments of the 2025/26 Premier League season that all of us really care about.

Check out all 13 awards here

Rog and Rory preview the UEFA Champions League final, breaking down how both Arsenal and PSG could come away with glory, while discussing the most important questions ahead of Europe’s biggest football match. Plus, Rory’s top London food picks.

Watch on YouTube or listen here.

Probably not the hardest one to guess. All Champions League finals are special, but this one particularly so. There are, I think, four main reasons for this. The first is the contrast in approaches: PSG’s breathtaking attacking flair against Arsenal’s – and this is a compliment – fearsome organization and physical potency. Styles, as they say, make fights.

The second and third are the motivations: PSG is aiming to become the only team apart from Real Madrid, which in many ways does not count, to retain the trophy since 1990. Doing so would, I think, turn this into PSG’s era. Arsenal, on the other hand, is looking to right a historical wrong. It is very clearly the biggest club in Europe not to have won the European Cup. It remains an open wound.

And fourth: the pedigree. This marks the first time that two current domestic champions have met in the final since 2017 (we are not counting 2020, because France canceled Ligue 1 that year.) There has not been such an evenly matched game since, I would say, Real Madrid beating Liverpool in 2022. PSG probably starts as favorite, but not overwhelmingly so. It is as well-poised as a final should be.

We discussed, not long ago, which games might be regarded as the most consequential in football history. Zach Kelly has taken that idea and run with it. “There was a podcast series titled “Alternate Routes” that explored sliding doors moments in sports,” he wrote. “What if the U.S. women’s team lost the 1999 World Cup? What if Tiger Woods’ marriage didn’t fall apart in 2009?”

What, he wondered, would football’s equivalents be? “What if Roman Abramovich wasn’t forced to sell Chelsea? What if Steven Gerrard didn’t slip, and Liverpool ended their title drought in 2014? The possibilities are endless.”

Zach, I can’t tell you quite how much this is up my street, and it is something that if I was in the podcasting business I would be pursuing as a priority after the World Cup. In fact, only last week I was talking to someone about the latter. (And not in my usual context, which is that you cannot mock Liverpool for both The Slip AND Crystanbul. They are indivisible.)

You can, though, very much make the case that Steven Gerrard’s slip was – aside from the Champions League in 2005 and the FA Cup in 2006 – his greatest gift to Liverpool. It did not feel it at the time, of course, but in retrospect I think it is the moment that sets the club on the long road to all the trophies of the Jürgen Klopp era. So maybe he should have been given a winner’s medal, after all.

That’s all for this week. If you have suggestions for football’s great hinge moments – or any other queries, ideas, thoughts, recommendations, theories or whatever – then please sell them to [email protected]. Everyone is welcome!

Enjoy/survive the final, 
Rory

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