The Champions League is won by Manchester City.

On a nerve-wracking Saturday night, Manchester City ended a remarkable season by defeating Inter Milan 1-0 to win the Champions League for the first time and complete the treble.

 

Ataturk Stadium's cagey match between a far-from-fluent City and the three-time champion Italian team was settled by Spanish midfielder Rodri's goal in the 68th minute.

Romelu Lukaku, Inter's substitute, nearly tied the game with a point-blank header that Ederson turned away.

However, City, who fell to Chelsea in the championship game two years ago, would not be dissuaded.

"Emotional. a reality check. These guys have all been waiting for however many years around here. We deserve it, and they deserve it, Rodri said.



By winning the Champions League, they equaled Manchester United's 1999 treble of winning the Premier League, FA Cup, and Champions League.

Pep Guardiola, the manager of City, has now won the Champions League three times, bringing his total number of trophies with City to 12.

However, against a tenacious Inter team that appeared capable of shocking the score, City's performance was far from fluid.

The first half saw City stifled, and their fans' frayed nerves at times brought them to near silence.

When Kevin de Bruyne was injured, City struggled to make plays and were shaky defensively, but in the end, Rodri saved them.

The Spaniard swept home Bernardo Silva's cutback because Inter, for once, was unable to close down the spaces.

Even then, City had to play it out to the very end of a long season after Lautaro Martinez hit the crossbar for Inter and Romelu Lukaku was stopped by an outstanding Ederson save.

NEAR-MISSES

Guardiola, who won the Spanish equivalent with Barcelona in 2009, became the first manager to win two trebles in European football by finally leading Manchester City to the coveted European crown after a few heartbreaking close calls since Sheikh Mansour acquired the team in 2008.

Since taking over in 2016, he has led City to 12 victories, and the Champions League curse has been broken, so any sense of inferiority that City may have felt toward the established European royalty of Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, and Liverpool has vanished.

More than 100 alleged Premier League financial regulations violations dating back to 2009 still require City to defend themselves, but that is a topic for another day.

That was the last thing City's jubilant fans cared about on Saturday along the Bosphorus as they celebrated the club's first European trophy since the now-defunct European Cup Winners' Cup in 1969–1970.

When losing to Chelsea in the Champions League final in Porto two years ago, Guardiola's team blundered, and the defeat was partially attributed to Guardiola's tactics.

Even though it wasn't easy against the cunning Italian team, he and his players came through this time.