Coman is, in other words, the ultimate player for European soccer’s superclub era. He is the embodiment of the game’s stratification, for how different the world of the elite is from that of those mere mortals who might not win a championship every single season of their career. In these circumstances, it feels almost inevitable that at some point he was going to score the winning goal in a Champions League final. He is proof that, at a certain height, it is almost impossible to fall.

For all Neymar’s tears, he and the team he represents — in more ways than one — are precisely the same. Sunday’s final had been dressed up as a meeting between two visions of soccer: the old power and the new money, the establishment and the insurgent, the immovable object of European soccer’s self-appointed aristocracy and the unstoppable force of a sports team co-opted as the marketing tool of a nation state.

In Bayern Munich’s victory, it is possible to draw the conclusion that there is, for now, at least, some sort of winner. Paris St.-Germain has obsessed over the Champions League for a decade. It has spent billions in pursuit of it. It has inveigled its way into the corridors of power and it has broken the rules, both in letter and in spirit, and it has done its best to shift the landscape to its own ends. It wants nothing more than that one trophy, that ultimate vindication of its plan.

And though it came closer than it ever had before this summer, it has failed again. Chalk up a victory not necessarily for the good guys — Bayern Munich, for all its folksy customs, is not what any outsider would call lovable — but for the way things have always been. The old certainties hold. The new order has not been established, and Neymar is sitting on the bench in tears.

Source: New York Times

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