Manchester City’s European ascent is a total victory for politics in football

W ell, that’s that done. So. What now? Perhaps the funniest moment of the Champions League final at a distant, smoke-tainted Ataturk Stadium was the sight of the tuxedo-clad Hungarian classical musician Adam Gyorgy thundering his way through the tournament tune on a gleaming pitchside grand piano pre-kick-off, trying really hard to give this hammy faux-anthem some verve and twinkle.

All the while, a hundred metres off to his left, 10,000 blue-shirted Manchester City fans doggedly booed every flourish, every attempt to inject a little feeling into the occasion. No, Adam. Please. It’s really not you. It’s just, well, it’s kind of a long story.

It was that kind of evening, full of surprising tones and textures. Although in many ways this was also the perfect Big Football final. Here we have a global TV product staged inside a dictator-built stadium, featuring a dictator-owned champion team and another in a state of ongoing FFP-induced financial levitation. And in the middle of that lighted bowl the old familiar centrepiece, a game that is still capable of communicating beauty and pleasure, watched by a group of people still capable of being moved by the spectacle, still able to feel something, even if that something is the urge to boo an earnest Hungarian pianist.

The first lesson from Saturday is that City are fine and deserving champions. This is by some distance the best football team in Europe, a model of graft, team-building and creative tactics. City may or may not, as L’Équipe suggested in its report on the game, be “moral in the way in which the club has built its strength”, but the team itself is a model of aesthetics and good practice. Not to mention, as is often overlooked, “a generous and magnificent loser” in