Champions League & La Liga
European club football: the Champions League’s knockout rounds and the Spanish title.
UCL Final: The Water Won
PSG 1-1 Arsenal (AET). PSG win 4-3 on penalties. The wall held for 120 minutes. Gabriel Magalhães was the one who finally broke it.
UCL Final: The Wall and the Water
Arsenal have spent a season making themselves impossible to score against. PSG have spent one making themselves impossible to stop. Budapest, Saturday, decides which proposition holds.
Glorious Mourning
Barcelona beat Real Madrid 2-0 to clinch La Liga. The football was done in 18 minutes. Hansi Flick's father had died that morning.
The Season Was Already Won. El Clásico Still Matters.
Barcelona have 88 points and an eleven-point cushion. The mathematics of La Liga are settled. And yet Saturday's match at the Bernabéu carries something harder to quantify.
Last Stop, Budapest
Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain share a destination. Almost nothing else about how they reached it is the same. One side finished top of 36 teams and never conceded a lead. The other finished 15th, came back from two down in the playoff, and survived a nine-goal semi-final.
Forty-Eight Hours
Arsenal host Atletico on Tuesday, Bayern face PSG on Wednesday. Two second legs, four clubs chasing a final in Budapest. Everything that matters about both ties.
You Cannot Buy a Press
The four clubs left in the Champions League — Arsenal, Atletico, Bayern, PSG — share one thing their eliminated rivals don't: a pressing system built across multiple seasons. None of them bought one. Here is why that distinction matters.