The Eyes of the World 👀

HAIL GFOP

I am elated to welcome my friend and co-host, the one and only Rory Smith, to The Raven. This is a proud moment for me after first meeting Rory at a Dortmund-Real Madrid Champions League game in 2016. I had fallen in love with his writing long before that – the way he sees football as a big story trapped in a small story. The game as a mirror to the geopolitics, culture, history, and humanity that surrounds it. And now, after three years of discussing the Premier League, Champions League, and Terry's Chocolate Oranges on the Men in Blazers podcast, Rory will bring that same curiosity, insight, and heart to The Raven. I hope all our newsletters bring you closer to the MiB community, and to the minds who are broadcasting on our platform. You can expect to see Rory's writing over the next few months on this very feed as we navigate the Club World Cup, a variety of international tournaments, and whatever fascinating transfers come our way this summer.

As always, please send us any questions or thoughts to [email protected], and be sure to give Rory a warm welcome.

P.S. I look forward to joining Rory live from the Allianz Arena after the final whistle of Saturday’s Champions League final for a Do It Live! on our YouTube channel. Come and be with us.

Courage,

ROG

Hey there,

We’re somewhere in the region of two days away from the biggest game in club soccer, depending on when you open this, and I’m less than 24 hours from setting off for Munich. It’s a city that has been transformed for me in the last couple of years by my discovery of an excellent Vietnamese restaurant, as you’ll read below.

The game, though, is probably the more important bit. Paris Saint-Germain against Inter Milan has what any great final needs: two teams who do not just want to win it, but kind of need to. PSG, you may have heard, have never been champions of Europe. Inter have not won this tournament for 15 years. Neither is here just to add another trophy to their collection.

But the most intriguing aspect to me, and the one I’ve written about, is what this final might do for Lautaro Martínez. I find the way Inter’s captain is seen by the soccer public at large fascinating; there is a pretty good chance that will either be changed utterly, or compounded eternally, by what happens in Munich on Saturday. That is the thing with finals: they are not just the culmination to a season, but to dozens of personal journeys, too.

Enjoy,

Rory Smith

👀 The Eyes of the World 🏆

Lautaro Martínez could be forgiven for thinking he has done enough. In vaguely descending order: He has won the World Cup, part of the Argentina side that emerged victorious in Qatar three years ago; he has lifted the Copa América twice; the second time, in 2024, he did so as the competition’s leading scorer, a status he sealed by scoring the winning goal in the final. He won the Finalissima, too, when that was a thing.

At club level, with Inter Milan, he has been no less successful. He has won Serie A twice, and the Coppa Italia twice, and on Saturday he will play in his second Champions League final. He was Serie A’s top scorer, the capocannoniere, in 2024. He has scored more than 150 goals for Inter. No foreign player has ever scored more for the club. At 27, he is captain of one of the biggest teams in the world.

And yet, and yet, Martínez is one of those players who always seems to have something to prove. Outside Italy and Argentina, his name is rarely mentioned when compiling lists of the finest strikers in the world. He is dismissed as a distinctly Serie A phenomenon, a forward who excels only in what has become his comfort zone, a flat-track bully against the likes of Lecce and Cagliari whose limitations are immediately exposed against more illustrious opponents.

It is important to stress, at this point, that this assessment does not really stand up to scrutiny. Even leaving aside the goal that won the Copa América, Martínez has twice scored in Champions League semifinals (against AC Milan two years ago, and Barcelona three weeks back).

He scored in both legs of this year’s quarter final against Bayern Munich, and at the same stage against Benfica in 2023. He scored in the last 16 in 2022. Over the years, he has scored at Anfield, Camp Nou, and at the Bernabeu. Lautaro Martínez scores big goals, and has done for some time.

The disconnect between his reputation and his reality is best understood, perhaps, as a sort of reverse to what I have always thought of as The Niko Kranjcar Effect. (The capitalization is important, here; I am hoping one day to trademark this term, so as to prevent other people using it for free.)

You may or may not remember Kranjcar: he was a Croatian midfielder for Portsmouth, Tottenham Hotspur, and Dynamo Kyiv between 2006 and 2016. He had two defining traits: he was extremely handsome, and he had a habit of scoring quite astonishingly good goals. During his time in England, Kranjcar would reliably feature on various Goal of the Month, and then Goal of the Season, lists.

He was, in the very purest sense of the term, a Highlights Player. That is not to say he was bad. He wasn’t. He was a smart, technically gifted midfielder. He was, at times, a valuable asset to Spurs, although he had a tendency to drift in and out of games.

Most fans, though, did not see that, because most fans did not watch Spurs games in their entirety. Most only engaged with him in abbreviated form. They saw the bit, once a month, where he fizzed a shot into the far corner. They did not see him struggling to impose himself at home to Middlesbrough. There was a disconnect between his reputation and his reality, too; we give more weight to what we do see than what we do not.

The difference is that, in Kranjcar’s case, it worked in his favor. For Martínez, the opposite is true. His goalscoring record in Serie A is outstanding. To an audience of Inter fans – and probably Italian soccer enthusiasts more generally – he is one of the finest strikers in the world. But that is a relatively small subsection of the soccer-viewing public. Serie A does not carry quite as far as the Premier League.

Even if it does, it is often (unfairly) dismissed as a substandard alternative; there is an underlying assumption – one that anyone who has played in both leagues would dismiss immediately – that goals are somehow worth less in Italy than they would be in England or Spain.

What does carry, instead, are his performances in the Champions League and the World Cup. In the case of the latter, there is little point denying that Martínez did not have an especially fulfilling time in Qatar; after starting Argentina’s first game, against Saudi Arabia, he was dropped for Julián Álvarez, and Argentina instantly improved. The link between those two things was not quite as direct as it might appear, but still: it was not exactly how Martínez had hoped the tournament would go.

In the case of the Champions League, though, there are mitigating circumstances. Martínez is not playing for one of the competition’s heavyweights, not in a modern sense; Inter’s squad has been constructed at a fraction of the cost of Real Madrid’s or Paris Saint-Germain’s or Manchester City’s. His two strike partners, Marcus Thuram and Mehdi Tahremi, were both acquired on free transfers.

He is also, of course, facing the finest defenders in the world. Basing an assessment of his abilities purely on how he performs in the Champions League is more than a little misleading. Erling Haaland, for example, has never scored in a Champions League semifinal. He has only scored twice in quarter finals. Martínez outstrips him on both counts, and yet ignoring Haaland’s domestic performances is very obviously absurd.

There is, of course, a way to change this misconception instantly. The Kranjcar phenomenon illustrates the importance of being visible when the largest audience possible is paying attention; the outsize influence the Champions League has on our perception of players outside the Premier League, in particular, is encapsulated by the criticism of Martínez himself.

This weekend, then, Martínez can kill two birds with one stone. Score in the Champions League final, beat P.S-G., lift the trophy with Inter, and the Anglocentric, ill-informed suggestion that he does not belong in the front rank of modern forwards will evaporate. He has done enough, over the course of his career, that it should not be necessary. He has nothing left to prove. It is worth doing some things, though, when the world is watching.

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🇫🇷 A First-Time Face-Off 🇮🇹 

It is extraordinary, really, that the Champions League final will be the first time Paris Saint-Germain and Inter have played each other in a competitive game. (They did face each other in August 2023, in an exhibition game at the New Japan National Stadium in Tokyo. Inter won 2-1, apparently. This is the sort of exercise only taken seriously by people who regard the Florida Cup as a major honor.)

In the modern iteration of the competition, this is a genuine rarity. Even before its format was revamped this season, the Champions League had turned what were once the precious, occasional encounters of Europe’s true giants into almost weekly events. There have, for example, been periods when it has felt strange to discover that Bayern Munich and Real Madrid are not playing each other.

There are, though, two things which feel more striking still. One is that Inter is hoping to become the first Italian team to win this competition in 15 years. (The last: José Mourinho’s Inter, victors against Bayern in 2010.) The other is that this is the first time Europe’s showpiece game has not featured an English, Spanish, or German team since 2004. (When Mourinho was involved again, his Porto team sweeping past Monaco.)

Taken together, the picture they paint is not an especially healthy one: a competition in which the same teams from the same countries are playing each other all of the time, with only a select few ever succeeding. It might feel as though PSG against Inter is not the most glamorous final imaginable; it may lack the stardust of Real Madrid or the pulling power of one of the Premier League giants. But it may also be the sort of final the Champions League desperately needs, if it is to shake off the idea it is little more than a closed shop.

🥨 The Best Street in Munich 🇩🇪 

Munich is one of those cities that features regularly on a Champions League itinerary. Depending on how the draw for each season falls, and how good Bayern Munich is that year, there have been spells when I have found myself making the long S-Bahn slog up to Fröttmanning between one and three times each spring.

I’ve always found it a slightly tricky city in which to eat, though. As a rule, I like to consume no fewer than three brezels per day, but for years anything more substantial felt like a gamble. It’s Germany. The cuisine tends toward the sausage-intensive. There is often quite a lot of asparagus, and more cabbage than I would typically encourage.

That all changed last summer, during the European Championship, when I happened to discover a clutch of restaurants around Sendlinger Tor. There’s a brunch place called Vollaths, a gelato spot – Eiscafé Eismeer – and the sort of culinary diversity that, in Germany, can sometimes feel quite hard to find. I’ve been to Chi Thu, a banh mi joint, every time I’ve been to Munich since.

I always feel slightly guilty; I should probably be trying out somewhere, something new. But at the same time, these tend to be flying visits; work, not pleasure. (OK, a bit of pleasure). And in that situation, what you really want is something you know, and trust, the pleasure of finding something familiar a long way from home. I’m sure the Germans have a word for that.

That’s all from me – I hope the final lives up to expectations. As we discussed on European Nights, it feels like it should be a good one: the way PSG play is not so different from Barcelona, and Inter’s games with Hansi Flick’s team were classics. Either way, Rog and I will be picking through the bones of it live after the final whistle – depending on the WiFi at the Allianz Arena – and it would be great if you could join us.

Rory

Who do you favor in this weekend’s Champions League final? What’s your favorite Niko Kranjcar memory? Any other Munich restaurants you’d recommend? Send Rory, and the full MiB team, your questions or thoughts at [email protected].