The 2025 semifinal will be the match to decide the Champions League winner 12 months later. It is a fixture you suspect neither Paris Saint-Germain nor Arsenal will be too disappointed to have landed.
It also promises to be a game that fulfils an easy archetype. The deeper you dig, the more nuggets of information you find — PSG defended their lead in the Allianz Arena quite excellently, Arsenal have a great volume of good attackers even if they are light on legitimate stars — but this is not that far off the unstoppable force vs. the immovable object. The Champions League’s leading scorers on 44 pitted against a defense that has allowed just six goals in 14 games. It is a team that demands the ball and asserts its identity through it against one who backs itself with and without it, short and long. It is set pieces against open play.
Now, of course, all that is painting in the broadest of brush strokes. The game might not go that way. It didn’t at the Parc des Princes in the second leg of last season’s semifinal, when Arsenal rocked up at the home ground of the favorites and controlled possession, took the best shots and put the frighteners on PSG.
Of course, Mikel Arteta’s side lost that game, as they did the first leg in London. It is for that reason that PSG will fancy themselves to enter the realms of truly great European champions, the ones who repeat. The 10 outfielders from that first title-winning side could well be on the pitch in Budapest later this month, utterly at ease on the occasion. On May 30, Arsenal will be where PSG found themselves at the end of last season: probably the most successful team in Europe not to have lifted the Champions League, the sheer weight of an expectant fanbase threatening to drag them down.
And yet the Champions League has been a sanctuary for Arsenal this season. Suppose they hold on in the Premier League, the one that they really want this season. You don’t get free hits when you’ve played two European Cup finals in your history, but if you’ve clambered up that mountain, what is there to fear?
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All the more so given that they know how differently their last meeting with PSG might have gone were it not for the now departed Gianluigi Donnarumma. There is plenty of game state to factor into the 2025 semifinal, one which the Parisians led from the fourth minute of the first leg, but Arsenal did put up 4.59 xG over two games while allowing 2.85. Arteta’s insistence that his team were “much better” than PSG over the two legs is debatable but that’s the point. There is a reasonable discussion to be had about which team were superior. When Bukayo Saka tells CBS Sports that “you know deep down who we’d want to face in the final”, it is a pretty telling suggestion that it’s a conversation Arsenal would be happy to have again.
After all, there was no Gabriel, no Kai Havertz, barely half a Bukayo Saka, to say nothing of the new options that were added to Arteta’s squad over the summer. Come May 30, there should not be quite the same injury crisis engulfing the Premier League side, though how it would aid them if Jurrien Timber could return in time to hold down the right flank as best he can against the incursions of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia.
PSG may not have added as many pieces last summer but a side once addicted to recruitment have come to learn the benefit of continuity. A year ago, this team had only just coalesced in such spectacular fashion. Now, Luis Enrique has his machine humming. His coaching of the European champions through a Club World Cup summer with a view to them peaking this month might just have been his masterwork.
A third Champions League title as a coach would establish Luis Enrique not just as the man who turned PSG from elite football’s punching bag to its great power, aided by oodles of Qatari cash. His counterpart Arteta has already proven in establishing Arsenal as Champions League and Premier League contenders that he is one of the game’s outstanding young coaches. Win in Budapest and those qualifiers will soon be dispensed with.
A dynasty awaits for PSG. The missing piece for Arsenal. This Champions League final promises to be something special.
