A look at the most basic numbers might have you believe that the Champions League finalists have had equally demanding campaigns. The final in Budapest on Saturday will be the 63rd game of the season for Arsenal and the 56th for Paris Saint-Germain. However, the French side also played seven matches at last summer’s Club World Cup, which means both teams have played 62 matches since the start of last June.Delve a little deeper, though, and there is more to those figures than meets the eye. While Arsenal were able to rest properly last summer, PSG were in the US, reaching the final of a competition played in sweltering heat, which started only 14 days after they had beaten Inter in the Champions League final.They had barely any time off to rest after it, either, because their season started exactly one month after the Club World Cup had ended, with the Super Cup against Tottenham. And their defence of the Ligue 1 title began just a few days later. The newly expanded Club World Cup set up the teams involved for a difficult season, where their players were forced to play catchup on their rivals when it came to rest and recuperation.There is no way of quantifying how much Chelsea’s players were affected by their run to the final, but it is no coincidence that they only won two of their first six league games of the season and went on to finish way down in 10th. Cole Palmer, for one, had such a disappointing campaign that he will not even be at this summer’s World Cup as a result.But, since the new season started, there is no comparison between the demands on PSG’s players and those on Arsenal’s. From the beginning of the 2025-26 campaign, Arsenal have played more matches than any other team in any of the top five European leagues, having gone deep in the League Cup and the FA Cup. And, crucially, their opportunities to rotate have, unlike PSG, been few and far between.For example, when PSG’s domestic season started against Nantes, their team contained just two of the players who had started the Champions League final a couple of months before. Nuno Mendes, Achraf Hakimi, Ousmane Dembélé, Désiré Doué and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia came off the bench to force a 1-0 win, but that level of reinforcement has not been necessary every week. Far from it, in fact.Luis Enrique has regularly rested his players from Ligue 1 games. So, even though PSG have played a lot of matches, their most important players have been rotated heavily and should go into this weekend’s final relatively fresh.Many of PSG’s best players have played very little domestic football this season. Ballon d’Or winner Dembélé started just 11 of their 34 Ligue 1 games; Neves, Mendes and Fabián Ruiz made 13 starts each; Kvaratskhelia 18, Doué and Hakimi 16, and Marquinhos 11. And it’s not like they come off the bench all that much, either. Not one of them has played even half their team’s minutes in Ligue 1 this season.Many of them have been saved for the Champions League, where Luis Enrique clearly feels they are needed more. Mendes and Marquinhos have played more minutes in the Champions League this season than in Ligue 1, despite PSG playing 18 fewer matches in that competition.PSG have had a few injury problems, but players have missed most matches due to rotation. For example, Kvaratskhelia has missed just three league games due to injury, Marquinhos two, Mendes eight, Neves nine and Dembélé 10. They have just been given time off at every opportunity.And the bulk of their squad is made up of young or peak-age players, who should be able to contend with a packed schedule. Resting Marquinhos regularly might be necessary but many of them have simply been kept fresh for this crucial part of the season.PSG’s superiority in Ligue 1 has allowed Luis Enrique to manage injuries and prevent fatigue by carefully curating his players’ workloads, simply through rest whenever they’ve needed it. PSG won Ligue 1 for a fifth season in a row this year. Everyone knows how hard Arsenal had to work to win the Premier League title.Some of that is due to the trauma of their past failures. Three successive second-place finishes meant Arsenal were desperate to win it this time around and were terrified of throwing their lead away to Manchester City again, and they made hard work of getting the points they needed as they stumbled over the finishing line. Beating relegated Burnley 1-0 at home in their penultimate game was made to look like a mountainous task, for example.But they also struggled in the final straight at least in part because of how strenuous the season was, and also because, whether rightly or wrongly, Mikel Arteta chose not to rotate as much.Despite spending big last summer and boosting the depth of his squad, there were certain players he simply would not rotate. David Raya played every minute in the Premier League this season until the title was won – so he missed the final game – and he has started 13 of 14 their Champions League games.Declan Rice and Martín Zubimendi were as good as undroppable in central midfield, with Rice missing just two Premier League games and Zubimendi none. At centre-back, Gabriel Magalhães and William Saliba only missed out on the few occasions they were unavailable. All five of those Arsenal players started at least 30 Premier League games this season, whereas no PSG player started more than 27 in Ligue 1.In all competitions, meanwhile, that group of Arsenal players have all played more than 4,000 minutes of football this season. The only PSG player to break the 4,000-minute mark is Warren Zaïre-Emery. Illustration: OptaAcross both squads, 12 players have played at least 3,000 minutes of competitive football this season, and nine of them play for Arsenal. If Jurriën Timber is passed fit, all of them could start on Saturday.Barring injury, getting through just one more match will not be beyond any of these super-fit players, but the demands of the season could have an impact on which team can last the distance and keep up the intensity their managers demand for the full 90 – or 120 – minutes. PSG could have a decisive advantage.This is an article by Opta Analyst