Phil Foden provides energy and precision as classic Pep-ball prevails | Barney Ronay

Substitute gives Manchester City something they lacked and starts the move that led to Rodri’s winner against Inter

It felt fitting, in the end, that Phil Foden should have a decisive hand. On a taught, sweaty, occasionally indigestible night at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium Manchester City finally turned the whole world a shade of sky blue, reaching the end point, the final high, of this extraordinary 15-year football-industrial project.

City are champions of Europe. If this always seemed inevitable in the abstract, it still feels like moment of double-take, of pure sporting vertigo. A team playing in the same clothes as the one that seemed for so long the embodiment of gallows humour, familiar underachievement, a roll of the eyes in human form, are now indisputably, and by some distance judged on the season as a whole, the greatest football team on the planet.