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The world’s eyes will be on the UEFA Champions League Final between Paris Saint-Germain and Inter Milan on Saturday, May 31st.
Both teams have come a long way and faced many challenges to reach the Munich Football Arena.
Inter were strong from the first stage, finishing fourth with 19 points, which is equal to Barcelona and Arsenal, and just two points behind leaders Liverpool.
After that, Simone Inzaghi‘s side knocked out Feyenoord, Bayern Munich, and then Barcelona.
On the other hand, PSG suffered more in the initial stage, ending up 15th with 13 points, which led them to the play-offs.
The Luis Enrique-led side advanced past Brest in the play-offs and then knocked out Liverpool, Aston Villa, and Arsenal.
Small details could be crucial in this match, so in this Champions League Final tactics preview, we will examine each side’s tactics in set pieces.
This tactical analysis is a set-piece analysis of each side’s most important tactics in set plays, which we predict will be crucial in this Champions League Final.
We discuss how these tactics will impact the opposing side’s defensive strategy.
Inter Milan Attacking Set Pieces
Starting with their impressive performance against Barcelona, we will examine how Inter countered a man-marking defensive system.
As shown below, they target the far post and the middle area behind the two zonal defenders (red), and they prefer to use an out-swinging cross to keep the goalkeeper at a distance.
Three players (white arrows) make decoy runs to take the attention of the two zonal defenders, but how do they free the targeted player from marking?
Here, their trick appears, which is to ask most of the attackers to start far in a group next to or behind one another (pack or stack), as shown below.
This allows the targeted player (yellow) to move around his teammate, forcing his man marker to try to follow him from the other side.
This leads to a separation between them, as shown below.
In addition, the man marker needs to do this while the ball is in the air, tracking both the ball’s movement and the attacker’s movement simultaneously, which increases the probability of the player escaping from their marker, especially when there is a mismatch between the attacker and their marker.
In the second leg, Barcelona decided to use three zonal defenders, pushing them more forward to get this out-swinging cross, leaving Alessandro Bastoni free behind them, as shown below.
However, Inter were ready with a different plan in the Champions League Semi-Final: to fix Lamine Yamal on the edge of the box, standing with a player from Inter.
This places the short-option defender in a 2v1 situation, which allows Hakan Çalhanoğlu to dribble more toward the box and shoot.
When the first zonal defender tries to step more forward to be ready to help, they target the near post using the same stack to give an advantage to their targeted player over his man marker, as shown below.
When they face teams with more zonal defenders, they apply some of these main steps with added variation, as seen in our following case against Lazio.
In the photo below, Lazio defend with five zonal defenders (green), a rebound defender near the edge of the box (yellow), a short-option defender (pink), and an additional short-option defender (orange) to help in case the ball is played shortly.
The remaining two are man markers.
As shown below, Inter have two takers, along with six players to attack the box, with Denzel Dumfries
starting late, and two rebound defenders (pink).
The second taker joins them to form the trio of rebound defenders.
The purpose of that is when you have two takers, one can send an in-swinging cross while the other can send the out-swinging one; with both takers there, the zonal line can’t predict the cross.
Inter want to keep the zonal line distracted because they wish to send an out-swinging cross to the middle area in front of the six-yard box.
If the taker was just a right-footed player, the zonal line would easily be able to take some steps up due to the expected ball trajectory.
Dumfries’ starting position also places him out of the man-markers’ sight.
This allows him to run a sufficient distance before facing the zonal defender, which enables him to jump higher than the zonal defender, who jumps from a stationary position, creating a dynamic mismatch.
The first three runners (white) evacuate the targeted area for him while #4 distracts the goalkeeper, delaying his reaction so that he does not claim the ball and then retreat.
#5 will run after him to be in the ball’s trajectory in case the ball is overhit.
As shown below, Dumfries runs while the zonal defender starts to get up late.
The plan works, as shown below.
Against zonal systems, I Nerazzurri also have many short-corner variations.
Let’s see one.
In the photo below, the taker passes the ball to the close short-option guy and overlaps.
Here, we should mention that they depend heavily on Federico Dimarco and Hakan Çalhanoğlu.
The short-option attacker directly passes the ball to the first edge-of-the-box player, while the rebound defender stands between the two edge-of-the-box attackers, which delays his reaction.
Behind them, the first zonal defender is coming.
As shown below, the taker runs to receive in the area vacated by the first zonal defender while a player (black) attempts to neutralise the first remaining zonal defender.
The plan works, and the taker (Dimarco) can shoot the ball directly.
Going to PSG, they defend with five zonal defenders (or six, sometimes), four man markers and a player (blue) on the rebound and to go short, as shown below.
Focusing on how they deal with deep runs like Inter’s, we find out that fake movements easily manipulate the man markers.
For example, the player in yellow fakes a step toward the near post and then runs behind his man, Achraf Hakimi, who cannot track him and the ball simultaneously due to an orientation problem.
He runs with a dynamic advantage over the zonal defenders.
On the other hand, the zonal defenders on the near post are not good individually, so this attacker gets the ball on the near post, where Inter also like to form an overload.
Vitinha is usually the first zonal defender, and he can be manipulated in many ways.
One of them is asking a free player to stay near the goal line on Vitinha’s blind side and suddenly cut in front of him to flick the ball to his teammates inside the box, as Aston Villa did in the photo below.
They also suffered when some of the opponent’s attackers started in a far pack and then underloaded it, leaving their targeted player against his man markers.
These markers tried to track the ball in the air and stepped back at the same time, as shown below.
The cross is sent there (far from the zonal defenders), and the targeted player can return the ball to his teammates who frame the six-yard box.
Regarding short corners, they suffer against rotations like Inter’s.
Moreover, the rebound player(blue) can be manipulated away to send a direct cross on the edge of the box to the distant rebound player, while the attackers drag their man markers more inside, as shown below.
PSG Attacking Set Pieces
Going to PSG’s attacking set pieces, Les Parisiens are incredibly dangerous from short corners and have numerous rotations.
Let’s see some examples.
In the photo below, they ask the short-option player to receive a pass and play it back to the taker quickly.
The taker sends the ball to the far post, exploiting the 2v1 situation before the first zonal defender (red) arrives to help.
This action has many benefits.
The first benefit is that the taker crosses from a nearer point, while the second benefit is that the zonal line starts to move up to form a line that focuses on the ball and does not care about their blind side.
The same issue happens with the man markers, so this run from the targeted player (white) doesn’t allow his marker to track the ball and him simultaneously.
As shown below, Nice‘s rebound player (blue) goes to help early, but Paris Saint-Germain were ready with another short-option attacker while the taker overlaps around them.
Nice were also ready for this chess game, asking the first zonal defender (red) to chase him.
As shown below, PSG are always ready to use their two rebound players in the ball rotation, exploiting their dribbling, shooting or crossing abilities.
Hence, the ball is sent directly to the farthest one, who shoots it, putting it into the net.
In their defending scheme, Inter use a man-marking system with two zonal defenders (red), a short-option defender (blue), and a rebound player (green).
Bayern Munich scored against them from a short corner, asking a player to drag the short-option defender far to make the other attacker receive the ball and send it to the far post.
The most important note here is that Bayern Munich asked the rebound player to run suddenly, targeting the far post, which surprised the rebound defender.
Note: PSG exploit the rebound player a lot, even in short corners, targeting him directly with his head inside the box or his leg outside the box.
From normal crosses, Inter have the same man-marking weakness that they exploit, as in this AC Milan goal.
In the photo below, two numbered players run to block the goalkeeper—or, let’s say, create traffic around him to delay his reaction, while the white-arrowed one is making a decoy run to take the attention of the first zonal defenders.
They left their two targeted players on the far post, where the man markers focus on the ball, forcing them to give their backs to the attackers, as shown below.
Yann Sommer wasn’t the goalkeeper, but we think this idea could be implemented.
Similarly, Napoli‘s man markers start in a pack on the far post to target the near post.
The targeted player (yellow) moves around his teammates, which forces his man markers to follow him from the other side, and that’s how he was separated from his teammates.
The next benefit of this starting position is that the targeted player comes from the two zonal defenders’ blind side to surprise them.
The result was a goal.
Conclusion
In this analysis, we have dissected the most commonly used tactics for both sides in the 2024/2025 UEFA Champions League Final, PSG vs Inter Milan.
We explained each side’s attacking tactics, and then we checked the other side’s defending tactics in this case.
In this set-piece analysis, we discovered that set pieces could be crucial in the Champions League Final because each side’s attacking strength matches the other’s defensive weakness.
