Here is the only prediction you can be confident in for Saturday’s Champions League final: Paris Saint-Germain will have more possession than Inter Milan.
Across their 16 matches this season, PSG averaged 60.1% possession — more than all but Manchester City and Bayern Munich. Inter Milan, meanwhile, controlled just 47% of the ball — less possession than 22 of the 36 teams that qualified for the league phase.
But possession doesn’t equal wins. See: Manchester City. And possession doesn’t even necessarily equal better chances or more attempts on goal. The odds reflect this, too. Based on what’s currently posted at ESPN BET, the betting markets give PSG a 60% chance of lifting their first European Cup and Inter a 40% shot of doing it for the fourth time. For context: the odds are quite similar to the 2022 final, when Liverpool were favored over Real Madrid.
Of course, Madrid won that game by sitting back and trusting that their goalkeeper, Thibault Courtois, would have the game of his life. And Saturday’s match will probably follow a similar pattern: PSG will keep the ball, Inter will try to counter, and the winner will be determined by a couple of moments of individual brilliance.
So, ahead of the final, let’s do what we did last year and rank the 30 best players who will decide who wins the UEFA Champions League final.
In mid-March, I said that Dembélé was the best player in the world at that moment. Whether he’s been the best player in the world for the whole season or since I wrote that piece is an open question, but he’s absolutely still the best player on either of these teams.
He’s world-class with both feet. He’s an elite passer, an out-of-this-world dribbler, an above-average finisher and a lovely off-ball runner. Oh, and under manager Luis Enrique this season, he’s turned into a top-tier presser, too. There’s no one else in the world who you can say all of those things about.
With only 12 goals in Serie A, he had a down year domestically. And a couple more goals would’ve probably pushed Inter ahead of Napoli for their second straight league title. But pretty much all of his decline comes down to finishing: over his seven seasons with Inter, Martinez has scored nine goals more than his expected-goals tally, but this season he was 1.5 behind the pace.
I’ve been trying to think of ways to describe what makes Martinez so good, since nothing he does on the field really jumps off the screen, grabs you by the collar and says, “Hey, watch this guy.” And I think that’s because his truly elite skills are his ability to get on the ball in the most dangerous areas on the field, and then to make the right decision nearly every time he gets there.
One simple way I like to use to determine player value is to combine traditional and advanced stats. While a stat like expected goals (xG) is great for predicting future performance, actually kicking the ball into the goal provides more in-the-moment value than any other individual action a player can do. To value everything else that happens on the field, though, Stats Perform has their expected possession value stat, which estimates how much every action increased or decreased a team’s chances of scoring.
Mash that up with goals, and we have a decent, crude little number for how much value a given player provided in a season: how much he capitalized on the value his teammates created for him and how much value he created for his teammates. Across the league and the Champions League this season, only four players on these two teams rate higher than Hakimi does — and they’re all forwards.
PSG’s transformation into an unstoppable-seeming juggernaut coincided with two things: Dembélé moving to center forward and Kvaratskhelia joining from Napoli.
The high-usage, dribble-and-create winger is the most in-demand player type in world soccer, and we’d already seen Kvara do it at an elite level in a top-five league for multiple seasons before his 24th birthday. This is the kind of player that should command a triple-digit transfer fee, but PSG nabbed him for €70 million from Napoli. He probably was headed to PSG no matter what because of the wages on offer, but everyone other than Real Madrid should’ve been trying to sign this guy.
Why do we love him? He’s a world-class defender, ranking in the 99th percentile among center backs across the Big Five leagues for both progressive passes received and assists. Usually, coaches will give positional freedom to maybe one player — that player is typically an attacker and that player isn’t required to do much defending. But Inter coach Simone Inzaghi pretty much lets Bastoni run wherever the heck he wants when Inter are in possession, as long as he’s able to recover and defend.
Here are all the passes Bastoni’s played this year that increased Inter’s chances of scoring by at least one percent:
There’s no one like him in world soccer right now.
He might not even start the final, but he’s only 22 and his numbers are ridiculous. Here’s the top 10 for expected possession value added in open play for Inter and PSG’s domestic and Champions League matches:
On top of that, he’s also scored 17 goals across the two competitions. Now, it’s hard to judge PSG’s players statistically because of how much more money they have than everyone else in Ligue 1, but Barcola also leads this list if we only look at Champions League matches. If I’m Inzaghi, I’m hoping that Désiré Doué gets the nod over Barcola on Saturday.
You just saw that chart, right? Among these two teams, Barella ranks second in xPV from passes, third in xPV from crosses, fourth in xPV from defensive actions, and sixth in xPV from take-ons. (Hilariously, Kvara leads all players in take-on value … and he didn’t play for PSG until Jan. 25).
Along with Bastoni, Barella might be the most important player to the system that Simone Inzaghi employs.
It’s a back three, with wingbacks, three midfielders, and two forwards. Except, two of the midfielders are Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Hakan Çalhanoglu — the former is 36 years old and the latter is a converted and immobile 31-year-old attacking midfielder. By providing value in just about every area of the game, Barella gives this lopsided system just enough balance to prevent it from falling apart.
On the one hand, Thuram generated fewer than 10 expected goals across Serie A and the Champions League this season. He’s a striker. On the other hand, Thuram does just about everything else that a striker can do.
Per PFF FC data, he sprints more often than any other Inter attacker. And among these two teams, only Barcola, Hakimi, and his teammates Denzel Dumfries have recorded a higher max speed in the Champions League so far this season. Not only that, his size and aerial ability allows Inter to simply just boot the ball up the field when the pretty little buildup patterns just aren’t working.
Inter’s two-striker system definitely seems like it’s caught teams off guard in the Champions League. Well, maybe not off guard — they know they’re doing it — but their opponents aren’t used to playing against the patterns that two central strikers can create since most clubs play with one central player and two wingers. But I also think that teams have simply been caught off guard by Thuram. There aren’t many forwards these days who are going to test both your speed and your willingness to get into a wrestling match in the same way that Thuram will across a single match.
With Kylian Mbappé now gone, manager Luis Enrique has been able to turn PSG into the best pressing team in the world. They have a super-aggro press like Barcelona, but it’s not as vulnerable to balls over the top, quick counter attacks, or just, like, a guy dribbling straight down the center of the field as Barcelona’s is. It works because the forwards have all bought in, the fullbacks are some of the best athletes in the world, and Joao Neves is some kind of unholy combination between a piranha, a pitbull, and Mousa Dembele.
Per PFF FC, with PSG out of possession in the Champions League, Neves has covered 55.31 kilometers and made 674 high-speed runs (between 20 and 25 kilometers per hour). Among everyone else who could play in this game, no one else is within 100 high-speed runs of Neves, and no one else has even hit 52 kilometers covered without the ball. He’s listed at 5-foot-9 and probably only weighs about 155 pounds but his physical impact is closer to someone who’s 6-foot-1 and about 40 pounds heavier.
He came as close as you can to shutting down both Mohamed Salah and Bukayo Saka in PSG’s matchups with Liverpool and Arsenal. That’d probably be enough to sneak him into the top 10, but he also played vital, line-breaking passes against both teams that ultimately created the moves that led to PSG’s winning goals at Anfield and the Emirates.
As is becoming a theme of this list — and perhaps is a larger theme or where the sport currently is — Mendes is capable in just about every phase of the game: defending, ball carrying, build-up passing, chance creation, transition recovery. Along with his teammate on the other side, Mendes is one of the last remaining endline-to-endline fullbacks.
T-11. Yann Sommer, goalkeeper, Inter MIlan
If kicking the ball into the goal is the most valuable action a player can take, then it stands to reason that blocking the ball from going into the goal would be nearly as valuable. I think that’s true — and I’d argue that both of these keepers have a better chance of directly affecting the outcome of the final than anyone else on this list.
But it’s not easy to know how good a given ‘keeper actually is. At least, the numbers we have, which look at where shots end up on the goal frame and compare the expected outcome to the number of goals the keeper allows, can be pretty volatile from season to season. So, either keeper performance itself is quite volatile, or we’re not actually measuring keeper performance properly.
Sommer has saved a ton of goals this season, and Donnarumma saved a ton of goals the season before, so we’re lumping them together. I think they’re two of the better keepers in the world, but who knows what that’ll mean in Munich on Saturday.
13. Vitinha, midfielder, PSG
There was a paper a few years ago that summed up how players provide value in possession in a nice and simple way: some players carry a load of tons of low value actions that eventually add up, while others execute a small number of actions, but most of them are high value. And then there’s Lionel Messi, who managed to do both. Vitinha, though, is perhaps the purest example of the first version. He’s attempted 3,573 passes across the two major competitions this season, while no one else on either team comes within 500 passes of him.
T-14. Marquinhos, center back, PSG
I’m cheating again, but allow me to defend myself for a second: in a back four, no center back is acting on his own. They share the middle of the field and the responsibilities that come along with defending it. And this pair itself makes a lot of sense. Marquinhos provides a ton of value in possession, while Pacho cleans up whenever the press gets broken. Among center backs in the Champions League this season, per PFF FC, he’s accelerated more often (a speed increase of greater than three meters per second squared) and covered more ground than anyone else.
This is completely subjective, but I just feel like he holds onto the ball a little too long and takes shots from a little too far out. OK, the second part is just a fact; he’s averaging 0.09 xG per shot, while the Europe-wide average is around 0.11. Barcola is a fantastic runner off the ball who can also score and create goals, and Doue doesn’t quite have the first part down yet. And why would he? The dude is only 19! But for all his production on the ball, I think the pieces of PSG fit together more smoothly — and they play more fluidly — when he’s not a part of the front three.
The choice between Dumfries and Inter’s other wingback, Federico Dimarco, is mostly a matter of personal preference. But I’m going with Dumfries above Dimarco because he’s especially important to what Inter do. Without three attackers, they need to find other players to crash the box, and Dumfries gets a ton of touches inside the penalty area.
We don’t talk about mismatches that often in soccer, but Dumfries truly is one. Most wingbacks are smaller, more limited athletes, but Dumfries is 6-2, he’s the fastest player on Inter, and he sprints more often than anyone on either team, per PFF FC. On top of that, he’s also dominant in the air.
While Nuno Mendes handled Salah and Saka’s constant ground threat quite well, Dumfries and his late, sporadic runs into the box onto balls in the air will be a totally different challenge.
Among wide defenders across Europe’s five major leagues, Dimarco ranks in the 97th percentile for expected assists and crosses attempted. Also, he’s 5-foot-9. These are all the chances he’s created from open play this season:
Now that’s what a wingback usually looks like.
One of the biggest reasons these two teams are in the final is that their players complement each other so well. Lautaro and Thuram form a classic big-and-small striker partnership. PSG’s forwards can all interchange across the front three. Inter’s wing backs provide totally different skill sets from each other, while PSG’s center backs cover all the skills you want from a duo at that position.
The same holds true for PSG’s midfield. Neves is a defensive demon, while Vitinha will complete 100 passes in a given game and maybe misplace four or five. They’re both tiny and rarely get into the penalty area, but that’s where Ruiz comes in. He’s 6-foot-2 and breaks into the box and takes shots so often that his closest comp on the site FBref is Bruno Fernandes. Ruiz used to be a do-everything midfield colossus and as he’s gotten older, he still does everything, just at a much lower clip.
Based on those xPV numbers listed above, Mkhi should be way higher, but we’ll call this a compromise. It’s amazing that he’s still contributing at this level at age 36, given that he looked like he might’ve been cooked when he was still with Manchester United. He’s not as slow as he should be, and among these two teams, only Joao Neves has covered more ground per game in the Champions League.
As these rankings suggest, the biggest mismatch on Saturday should be in the midfield. Without the ball, all of PSG’s midfielders cover more ground than Inter’s three midfielders. Per every 90 minutes they spend out of possession, PSG’s trio averages 161 high-speed runs, while Inter’s midfield three average just 108.
That, too, is a microcosm of perhaps the defining feature of Saturday’s match. In the Champions League, PSG’s average age, weighted by minutes played, is 25.0 — tied for fourth-youngest in the competition. Inter, meanwhile, have averaged out at 30.3 years old — a full year older than the next oldest team.
Just a really solid player. Can play fullback, traditional center back, or wide center back, and he’ll defend well across a number of situations and provide some decent, safe passing out from the back. He’s been injured for a good chunk of the season, but if Inzaghi deems him healthy enough, he’ll start the final.
Acerbi is good! But this is the Champions League final, and he’s a 37-year-old center back who is going to be the slowest non-goalkeeper in either starting lineup and is quite limited with the ball at his feet. That lands you outside the top 20.
He was fantastic off the bench in the second leg against Barcelona. He scored the winner and quite nearly passed out from excitement — literally. When he’s on the field, Inter are basically playing with three forwards. His job is to break into the penalty area, take shots — and that’s it.
Do not panic! It feels like he’s had a down year, but he’s still played a ton of minutes for maybe the best team in the world, and he only turned 19 a few months ago. There’s no shame in not being able to break into that PSG midfield.
The plan had to be for Zielinski to take over for Mkhitaryan in the midfield this season, but the former Napoli stalwart just hasn’t been able to gain Inzaghi’s trust in his first year with Inter. PSG’s midfield made Liverpool’s midfield look unathletic at times, so it wouldn’t shock me if Zielinski gets onto the field early if things start to get sketchy.
His per-90-minute numbers continue to be absurd, but that can happen when you get to play with PSG’s wingers and fullbacks and midfield –usually against tired opponents who are chasing the game against you and leaving a ton of space. The biggest issue with Ramos, I think? He’s really slow. Among all the players to feature in at least 200 Champions League minutes for these two teams, only the two goalkeepers have a lower max speed than he does.
28. Yann Bisseck, center back, Inter Milan
Really fun player — think Bastoni but more fullback tendencies than midfielder tendencies. But we’re still working off of a reasonable small sample size of minutes at the highest level. If he starts over Pavard, it’ll be really fun to see Bisseck, who is 6-foot-4, and Dumfries square off against Mendes and Kvicha on that side of the field.
29. Mehdi Taremi, forward, Inter Milan
If you want a striker that won’t shoot the ball but will A) be stunningly handsome, and B) create chances for his teammates, then Taremi is your guy.
At just 22, he was one of the starting fullbacks for France when they won the World Cup in 2018. And as hybrid center/fullback, he was also one of the earliest examples of a positional trend that would sweep the sport. But that World Cup still marks the peak of Hernandez’s career. He’s only 29, and the only way he’ll appear in the final is if someone gets hurt or Luis Enrique decides it’s time to try to hang onto a lead.
