Manchester City want to be big in Europe and on Saturday in Istanbul their chance is coming. Against Inter Milan, they will be looking for their first Champions League title, which has been the main goal of the club since it was taken over by an investment fund from the Emirates in 2008.

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After the failure of the first few years, the English club bet hard and took on the services of the then most prestigious coach in Europe, Pep Guardiola. The obsession was to win the Champions League.

In seven years under Guardiola, City won five Premier League titles. In 2021, he was close to his goal of reaching the Champions League final, which he lost to Chelsea.

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One last move was missing, and this year he signed the Norwegian striker Erling Haaland. With his 52 goals, he helped win the Premier League and the FA Cup and reach the final of the Champions League, a competition in which he scored twelve goals in seven games.

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“We have to accept that if we want to take the final step as a big club, we have to win in Europe and win the Champions League. It’s something inevitable,” said Guardiola before this final against Inter.

dream and obsession

The fan zone of Istanbul, in Yenikapi, about 4 km from the Blue Mosque, the center of the city, began to fill up ten hours before the start of the match.

The fans, the vast majority in City shirts, began to take up positions in front of the big screens. Among them Gary Bone and his teenage daughter Maddison, who arrived from Manchester

“We are already a big club. But Guardiola is right that it is true that to enter the club of the big Europeans you have to win the Champions League”, assesses Gary, who is confident of victory: “But this is a good year. We won it today.”

“Haaland will score. That’s why we bought him, so that he can score in these kinds of matches,” assures this citizen fan.

Winning that competition in the Champions League has become both “an obsession and a dream”, admitted his Belgian midfielder, Kevin de Bruyne.

“Every footballer wants to win the Champions League. If you achieve that, you’ve achieved one of the biggest things you can achieve as a player,” he said.

Despite the fact that Guardiola won 34 titles between Barcelona, ​​Bayern Munich and Manchester City in his fourteen years as a manager, it seems his entire career was on the line in this game.

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Looking for a threesome

But the data is undeniable. City can look up to city rivals Manchester United’s treble in 1999. In the Champions League, they scored 31 goals and conceded five, while Inter scored 19 and conceded 10.

In any case, just as City recently won the FA Cup by beating United in the final, Inter boosted morale by winning the Coppa Italia, beating Fiorentina 2-1 in the final, with two goals from Lautaro Martínez.

The Argentinian striker is the star of Inter, as Haaland is the star of City. The Norwegian demoted the Argentinian Julián Álvarez to the bench, who precisely sent Lautaro to the bench at the World Cup won by the Albiceleste.

Inter will try to stop the Englishman’s dreams of greatness.

If City did not win a single Champions League, the Italian team won three, in 1964, 1965 and 2010.

Since 2010, no Italian team has reached the final. Therefore, the Lombard club has a mission to surprise and heal that wound.

It is also about restoring pride to a country that failed to qualify for the last two World Cups and could lose its third European final this year after Roma and Fiorentina crashed out in the Europa League and Conference League respectively.

But Inter manager Simone Inzaghi knows how difficult it is to surprise City.

“Manchester City is probably the best team in the world. We mustn’t make a mistake, because they are a very strong rival,” explained the coach. City will try to build their European prestige, and Inter will try to restore it. (D)