Football journalist and author Guillem Balagué gives his thoughts on the 2025/26 UEFA Champions League final between PSG and Arsenal on Saturday.
Let me explain where I think the UEFA Champions League Final between Arsenal and PSG can be won or lost, and a couple of points that will give three dimensions to the prestigious last club game of this campaign.
But let’s start with how Luis Enrique has created his brilliant team and the special psychological approach of this Premier League winning Arsenal.
The evolution of positional football under Luis Enrique
What Luis Enrique has constructed at PSG is a recognisable descendant of Pep Guardiola’s positional game, but with a significant and deliberate modification in how the final third is approached.
The foundations are identical. The way PSG build out from the back, the control of zones across the pitch, the shape they maintain when in and out of possession, it is the same conceptual DNA that Guardiola developed at Barcelona, refined at Bayern, and brought to its most complete expression at Manchester City.
Players are always positioned in relation to each other, the distances between lines are managed, the team knows how to dominate the ball and wait for the right moment to progress. It is highly organised, hard to press effectively, and psychologically taxing to play against because the ball simply does not come back to you very often.
The difference with PSG is in the last thirty metres of the pitch. Guardiola’s City, at its most developed, would continue to construct even in the final phase. The last pass was prepared, and players like Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva would arrive at the box coming from deep, from angles that defenders hadn’t tracked. There was a deliberate architecture to how City arrived at goal. PSG are less rigorous in that final phase.
Luis Enrique gives his front players — Dembélé, Kvaratskhelia, Barcola — significant freedom to improvise and find solutions themselves once the ball reaches the final third.
Many of PSG’s goals this season have begun from positions in behind the halfway line, released early, with the creative players then making things happen rather than being placed into pre-designed finishing positions. It is slightly less polished in the last twenty metres, and slightly more reliant on individual quality, but it is fast and hard to prepare for because it is less predictable.
What Luis Enrique has achieved beyond the tactical blueprint, though, is arguably the more difficult thing. He has managed the personalities.
PSG’s dressing room has historically been one of the most combustible in European football — a collection of very large egos, enormous wages, and competing interests.
The departure of Kylian Mbappé, rather than destabilising the project, has improved it. What remains is a squad that functions as a squad. Players who work within the system, track back, press together, accept their roles.
Look at Dembélé cheering on the player that is replacing him, or accepting being left on the bench for having arrived late to a meeting. For a club with PSG’s recent history, that cultural transformation is as important as anything happening on the training pitch.
Arsenal's mental state
There is something psychologically interesting about where Arsenal arrive at this final. The league title was always the primary goal. For six seasons, Arteta had been building towards it — accumulating wins, developing young players, installing a culture of belief that the group had not had before.
This season, they achieved it. The relief of that, the release of the pressure that had accumulated over years of near-misses and painful defeats, has been significant. The fear of losing the big prize is gone.
What Saturday represents is the chance to add to something to what has already been accomplished. That is a different psychological position entirely, and it tends to produce a different kind of performance.
Teams playing for a bonus — teams for whom the night can only get better, not worse — often find a freedom in their game that more burdened opponents cannot match. They make decisions faster and take risks they might not otherwise take. Even their defending can be done without anxiety.
Arteta himself has spoken candidly about a moment of doubt after the 2-1 defeat against Manchester City in the league run-in. He questioned, briefly, whether he was the person to take this group to the very top. What resolved that doubt was not his own certainty — it was the response of the players. The dressing room pushed back.
They showed him, in training and in the following performances, that they believed. That the belief ran both ways — manager to squad, squad to manager — is what you see on the pitch every week. Nobody in that Arsenal team hesitates. That is the culture that has been created.
A settled team, playing without fear, in a final. That is a combination that is very difficult to beat, whatever the odds say.
Where the game will be won or lost
The game might be settled by a moment of individual genius or a set piece, but that is not how the managers are preparing it. They will both want to impose the terms of the contest, and which one is forced to play on the other’s ground.
Arsenal’s plan is not complicated, but it is extremely difficult to execute for 90 minutes at this level. They will not open the game up as they will try to make PSG come through them, and they will wait for their moment.
Their defensive organisation has been the spine of everything Arteta has built — the reason they were able to sustain a title challenge across a full season, the reason they kept clean sheets more often than not. That structure (and the tough mentality that comes with it, as not having the ball and at the same time keeping positions is the hardest thing to do in football) will be there again on Saturday.
But within that overall approach, there is a specific tactical question that could shape the match: how high does Arsenal defend? If they press aggressively from the front, they are asking their players to cover enormous amounts of ground against a team that is very comfortable playing through pressure.
PSG’s defenders are confident in possession and their midfielders are very sharp in tight spaces. And in behind any high line, Kvaratskhelia and Dembélé are two of the most dangerous players in Europe in transition: fast, direct, as well as capable of producing something from nothing.
Defending too deep, for too long, is not something Arsenal can sustain without PSG creating chances.
I imagine Arteta will set his team up in a mid-block for much of the game, compressing space, and only press in coordinated bursts rather than maintaining a high line throughout.
As always in these encounters of the two best sides in Europe, there could be moments that could genuinely decide the final. PSG have got individuals that could destroy the script into pieces. And Arsenal have got what everyone knows, the admired and trending set pieces.
They have been one of the most effective teams in Europe from dead balls all season, both in terms of goals scored and the variety of their routines. Against a PSG side that at times can be disorganised defensively in the scramble after a corner, this is a real possibility.
And then, for Arsenal, there are transitions with space to run into before PSG can reorganise. In those moments, Bukayo Saka on the right side, cutting inside, is potentially the most dangerous player on the pitch. PSG’s full-backs are attack-minded, the space behind them is there.
The match has the shape of a tight, tense game. A few chances each way. It has the feel of a final that people will remember not for its spectacle but for its tension. Not unlike Manchester City against Internazionale in Istanbul a few years ago, where City dominated possession and territory, but Inter had two clear chances, and the game could easily have gone either way.
