PSG v Inter Milan: Luis Enrique's exciting young team eye elusive Champions League crown

Parisiens one step from glory having ditched previous strategy of targeting superstar players

Paris Saint-Germain's Bradley Barcola celebrates scoring their second goal against Stade de Reims with Desire Doue. Reuters

At almost every big step that Inter Milan and their head coach Simone Inzaghi have taken to the Uefa Champions League final, some reference has been made to how low-budget the Italian club feel compared to their opponents.

Bayern Munich, Inzaghi reminded reporters when Inter, at the last-eight stage, removed from the German champions the chance of contesting the final in their home, the Allianz Arena, are far richer than his employers.

So are Manchester City, he noted, Inter having begun their European campaign with a goalless draw against City back in September. And, of course, megabucks Paris Saint-Germain, whom Inter meet in Munich on Saturday can call on far greater resources than Inzaghi does.

He is right about that. According to the last survey by Deloitte, respected auditors of football finance, Inter are indeed punching above their weight to have reached a second Champions League final within three seasons.

They rank 14th in the 2025 Deloitte Money League, a study based on club revenues generated in 2023/24 – that’s just behind neighbours AC Milan, the top-ranked Serie A club. Real Madrid, breaking the €1 billion mark for annual earnings, are top, City second, and PSG third, with revenues of over €800m, more than twice that of Inter.

PSG’s position in elite football’s economic hierarchy, like City’s, marks a rapid rise, and like City – remade by investment from Abu Dhabi in the period since 2008 – their ascent owes greatly to the impulse provided by backing from the Gulf.

Since Qatar Sports Investments took a majority shareholding in what was then a financially fragile French club and set about elevating Paris into a major force on football’s grand stage, they have turned into heavyweights. But unlike City, who beat Inter in the European Cup final in 2023, they have yet to mark that growth with the most desired of trophies.

Manchester City head coach Pep Guardiola looks dejected during his side's 4-2 defeat to Paris Saint-Germain. EPA

Erling Haaland of Manchester City after their defeat. EPA

Paris Saint-Germain's players celebrate their victory. AFP

Paris Saint-Germain's players celebrate. AFP

Paris Saint-Germain's Portuguese forward Goncalo Ramos celebrates after scoring his team's fourth goal. AFP

Paris Saint-Germain's Goncalo Ramos after his goal. AFP

Paris Saint-Germain's players celebrate. AFP

PSG's head coach Luis Enrique. AP

Erling Haaland of Manchester City scores to make it 2-0. EPA

Manchester City's English midfielder Jack Grealish is congratulated by teammates after scoring a goal. AFP

Should PSG achieve a maiden Champions League success in Munich, they will have completed a circle. Back in 2011, when their Qatari investors and strategists took control they looked above all to the city of Milan for guidance on championship calibre. They had Leonardo, the former Brazilian footballer and previously a head coach at both AC Milan and Inter, as their director of football.

The first coach the new bosses appointed would be Carlo Ancelotti, then boasting a series of medals from AC Milan. They brought in two Thiagos to lend expertise to the playing squad. Thiago Silva, signed from Milan to command the defence and Thiago Motta, the midfielder recruited from Inter, would form the spine of the team for many years.

Coaches have come and gone at quite a rate since Ancelotti, but in the PSG team that lines up against Inter on Saturday, you can still make out the past stripes of Inter and Milan. In goal will be Gianluigi Donnarumma, without whose excellence a tense last-16 tie against Liverpool may not have been resolved in PSG’s favour. He joined four years ago from AC Milan. At right-back, although filling many roles outside of that narrow definition, will be the player who has assumed much of the leadership once given to PSG by their Thiagos – the outstanding Achraf Hakimi.

Hakimi, whose career bestrides every one of the four Champions League finalists of this year and last - he started at Real Madrid, moved to Borussia Dortmund then to Inter – has left a huge imprint on the run to the final: eight goal-contributions, including goals in the quarter-final against Aston Villa and the semi against Arsenal, from his 16 Champions League appearances.

Uefa Champions League final: Is it PSG’s destiny or will Inter triumph?

01:29

Those are startling statistics for a full-back. Some of that attacking appetite can be attributed to the formative season Hakimi spent at Inter in 2020/21, thriving in a 3-4-3 formation. Inter then sold Hakimi to PSG, aged just 22, for a shade over €70m. That’s a startling amount for a full-back. And it’s one of the deals that has made PSG the club who, in the 13 years of their so-called ‘Qatar era’ have paid more than any other club into Inter’s treasury in total transfer fees. Inzaghi may envy the Parisiens their wealth and backers in Doha, but Inter have also benefited greatly from PSG’s activity in the marketplace.

Hakimi has been a terrific buy. He was described this week by his former coach with the Morocco national team, Herve Renard, as “the best right-back in the world”. If Inter’s Denzel Dumfries, a worthy inheritor of Hakimi’s wing-back role, might want to challenge that status, Hakimi’s importance to the dynamic PSG style, and to the second decade of the ‘Qatar era’ can hardly be understated.

When he and Donnarumma moved to Paris in the summer of 2021, they represented a long line of doing business with Serie A clubs but also an investment in youth.

Both were in their early 20s but already worldly. The simultaneous arrivals at the club of Lionel Messi, then in his mid-30s and Sergio Ramos, even older, may have kept up an old PSG habit of bringing in superstar names, but the tide was turning.

PSG are no longer so starry, but perhaps better for that. The squad who travel to Bavaria for Saturday's final will include no players of the cachet of Messi, or Neymar, or Zlatan Ibrahimovic or David Beckham, all of whom have drawn the limelight at the Parc des Princes during the Qatar era, and they are no longer the club of Kylian Mbappe, who left for Madrid last year – but they look closer than any previous version of PSG to achieving the Champions League dream.

“The star now is the team,” the club president Nasser Al Khelaifi says of a side that, post Mbappe, thrills to a trio of other young French forwards like Ousmane Dembele, Bradley Barcola and the prodigious teenager Desire Doue. It’s a side that needs no ageing Sergio Ramos to give panache to the back line when the tireless Hakimi can do that with no apparent symptoms of fatigue. The current PSG may still scour Italian football with a bulging chequebook, but in Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, signed from Napoli for around €70m in January, they have a long-term investment.

The Georgian winger, as watchable a dribbler as the €222m Neymar was at at his peak, is 24, the right fit for a PSG who registered the youngest line-up – average age 23 – of any team to have reached the knockout phase of this season’s Champions League.

Inter are designed in a different way. In their quarter-final tie against Bayern, Inzaghi fielded the oldest XI in this season’s competition – a shade over 31. Among his achievements has been to extend the career spans of players acquired at low transfer fees because they were well into their 30s. Men like defender Francesco Acerbi and midfielder Henrikh Mhkitaryan are in their upper 30s now but still influential and valued for their gumption. “We do not have the funds of clubs like Bayern, City or PSG,” said Inzaghi. “But we can match all of those with our heart and organisation.”

Luis Enrique, the PSG head coach, acknowledges that this final easily looks like a story of youth against experience. But he has built a PSG with momentum, drive and focus. “We’re a young team, yes,” says Luis Enrique, “but we’re also mature and we know how to resolve problems.”