PSG taught Manchester City a footballing lesson last night. With City’s fate in the balance, it may be the last meeting for a long time which will surely undermine the attraction of the Champions League. Losing European visitors will not be good for the Manchester economy,
Both clubs have been generously funded by Gulf states, but
PSG managed to stay the right side of financial rules. Over the past decade or so both clubs
established themselves as European heavyweights thanks to unprecedented funding
from Gulf owners.
Both escaped full bans from Uefa competition as part of
sanctions imposed on them because of Financial Fair Play breaches. Both moved
on from there to win their maiden European Cups. Both clubs strategically
aligned themselves with major investment in their cities from the nations of
their transformative backing: the pair of them have been thanked for that by
heads of state.
English football’s power balance means it needs a successful
City far less than French football needs its lodestar PSG
The challenges of finding a generous broadcast partner for
Ligue 1 remain urgent and defined by an awkward reality for 19 of the
presidents seeking that partner: the chief, dominant attraction for anybody
paying to televise Europe’s fifth-ranked domestic league is the star presence
of a single club, the reigning European champions, PSG, a team with ten
nominees on the 30-strong shortlist for the Ballon D’Or. No other French club
have any.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France from 2007 to 2012
and a PSG fan, is reliably reported to have encouraged the 2011 Qatari takeover
of the club after pushing his compatriot, the Uefa president Michel Platini, to
vote in favour of Qatar’s bid to host the 2022 World Cup.
The British prime minister and former mayor of Greater
Manchester, Andy Burnham, “thank[ed] the City Football Group and the wider
ownership for the money they didn’t just put into the Etihad [stadium] and the
campus around it, but also into the city”. He added: “I would be really
concerned to lose them.”
The scenario of England’s elite losing City is real enough
at least to wonder if this, the eighth European head-to-head between City and
PSG of the past 11 seasons, may be the last for a while. Should City’s appeal
against the commission’s verdict fail and the Premier League impose a
substantial points deduction among the penalties, qualification for future
Champions Leagues would be in jeopardy.
Ligu 1 depends on PSG for global audiences, for Uefa
coefficient points, and, more than ever before, as an argument that Ligue 1 is
not a competition to be sneered at. For much of the past decade and a half, the
QSI purchase of a French club looked like it came with a glass ceiling in
Europe: big-spending PSG would routinely win weekend assignments at
half-throttle and then, come the knockout phase of the Champions League, they’d
be ambushed by teams accustomed to more competitive domestic environments, from
Spain, England or Germany.
That changed in 2024-25, with the building of a squad
capable of wowing and dismantling the best. After a dozen years setting records
for high transfer fees (Neymar at €222million — about £200million) and elevated
salaries (Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé) and finishing with nothing better than a
single silver medal in the European Cup, they claimed gold by beating Inter
Milan 5-0, an unprecedented margin of victory in a Champions League
final.
Twelve months later they defeated Arsenal to retain the
title. Over the next three months PSG profited handsomely from their No1
status, from the benefits of being by far the dominant professional club in a
city with an exceptional concentration of young talent and being the most
powerful buyers within a country of excellent club academies.
PSG’s voice is heard loud and clear in the corridors of
power, no bad thing for Ligue 1. Al Khelaifi, “a bully” for some of his peers
in France, has been an ally to Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin since PSG —
unlike City and five other Premier League clubs — said no to joining a proposed
breakaway European Super League in 2021. Al Khelaifi now chairs the influential
European Football Clubs group, formerly the European Clubs Association.
The PSG brand grows too, carefully cultivating the
association between serial champions and a capital’s glamourous idea of itself,
a Paris enduringly attractive to visitors and to outside investors. While
Burnham may celebrate the transformation of parts of England’s third city
through its second-most supported club, brand PSG nods more towards the chic,
like a Champs-Élysées where, according to Le Monde, 20 per cent of the real
estate is now Qatari-owned. And right now, the view from Paris’s football superpower
looks a good deal rosier than from east Manchester’s.
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