Paris Saint-Germain’s success in the Champions League final on Saturday was a victory for youth and adventure. It was a victory for a team built with a coherent vision, and a rebuke to those who believe the game is just about collecting the biggest names. It was a victory for Luis Enrique, a very fine coach who has suffered dreadful personal tragedy. It was a victory for forward-thinking, progressive, fluent football.
But it was also a victory for sportswashing.
If you could divorce the game from its context, it was mesmerising. PSG were brilliant and although Inter were awful, at least some of that awfulness was provoked by the relentless energy of PSG. The five-goal margin was the widest in any European Cup or Champions League final and it’s hard to believe any final has been anywhere near so one-sided (at least until the next day’s Concacaf Champions Cup final, won by the same 5-0 scoreline).
Four times before, there had been a four-goal margin in the Champions League final. There was Real Madrid’s fabled 7-3 victory over Eintracht Frankfurt at Hampden Park in 1960, the game that so inspired the future Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson. But part of the fascination there was that Frankfurt were also an exceptional side. They had beaten Rangers 12-4 on aggregate in the semi and they were good enough to take the lead – even if their second and third goals came as part of a four-goal flurry between the 71st and 75th minutes.
Bayern beat Atlético 4-0 in 1974, but that was in a replay. When Milan beat Barcelona 4-0 in 1994, it was a shock, and a huge tactical victory for Fabio Capello over Johan Cruyff, but until the fourth went in there was still a sense that Barcelona might come back. Milan’s 4-0 win over Steaua Bucharest in 1989 was perhaps the closest to Saturday; they were emphatic winners and Arrigo Sacchi said it was the closest any of his sides came to achieving his ideal of football.
Even when Barcelona outplayed Manchester United in 2011, United had enough resilience to restrict them to three, even to force an improbable equaliser. It was not the capitulation of Inter.
Barcelona must have watched Saturday’s final with disbelief; how had they lost the semi-final to that Inter? How had they allowed themselves again and again to be undone at set plays and on the counter?
The sense is that Saturday will be a defining victory. This is a young PSG side. The Champions League is a notoriously difficult tournament to retain for everybody apart from Real Madrid, but there’s no reason why this can’t be the first Champions League of many. After the years of the club as a celebrity circus, one which admittedly helped establish their brand, they have a rational recruitment policy and an intense and gifted manager. And they are undoubtedly fun to watch.
Which is what makes sportswashing so insidious. On the pitch PSG are what a football club should be. But the fact remains that they are owned by Qatari Sports Investments, and that state support gives them an enormous advantage over other clubs financed by more traditional means. QSI invested in PSG six months after the meeting at the Élysée Palace in November 2010 – a month before Qatar won the right to host the 2022 World Cup – between the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president of Uefa, Michel Platini, and Tamim al-Thani, the crown prince of Qatar – now the emir. PSG was just part of wave of Qatari investment in France, although it should be stressed that Platini maintains he had already decided to vote for Qatar.
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However rapacious the private equity funds that own some elite clubs may be, they do not have the in effect infinite wealth of those backed by a state. Inter are one of the big three in Italy. They have won the European Cup/Champions League three times. For a long time, they were sustained by the wealth of the Moratti family. They are not minnows in any sense. And yet, according to Deloitte, their annual revenue is less than half that of PSG. Among PSG’s sponsors are Qatar Airways and the Qatar Tourism Agency; state support can oil a lot of wheels.
Qatar is a country in which workers are routinely exploited, women are subject to male guardianship laws, same-sex relations are outlawed and freedom of expression severely restricted. It is also the country that hosted the greatest World Cup final of all time in 2022 and that owns the best team in European (and therefore world) football. Nasser al-Khelaifi, the president of PSG, is also the chair of the beIN media group, a major player in the broadcasting of football, and is head of the European Clubs Association, in which role he was seated on Saturday next to the Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin. He is enormously influential and is answerable, ultimately, to QSI, of which he is chair.
Inter have lost in two of the last three Champions League finals. Both defeats have been to state-owned clubs. This is modern football, the stage for geopolitical manoeuvring. It used to be easy to laugh at PSG, who had spent a fortune on ageing stars who reliably collapsed under pressure. This latest iteration looks more like a football team. It is admirable in many ways. The football is both thrilling and successful. But it is still sportswashing.
On this day …
Before the BBC screened highlights of Chile’s 2-0 victory over Italy at the 1962 World Cup, the presenter David Coleman warned viewers that what they were about to see was, “the most stupid, appalling, disgusting and disgraceful exhibition of football, possibly in the history of the game”.
He wasn’t wrong. The first foul was committed after 35 seconds and matters had got so out of hand by the eighth minute that Italy’s Giorgio Ferrini was sent off for a foul on Honorino Landa. He refused to leave the field, leading to a melee that was only ended by the intervention of police. In the confusion, Chile’s Léonel Sánchez landed a left hook on Humberto Maschio, breaking his nose. As the mayhem continued, Sánchez got away with cuffing Mario David in the face, but David responded a couple of minutes later with a flying kick to the head for which he was sent off. Chile won what became known as the Battle of Santiago 2-0.
The violence had been provoked by critical articles written by two Italian journalists as they covered the draw in Santiago several months earlier. Both had the sense not to turn up for the tournament itself.
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This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email [email protected], and he’ll answer the best in a future edition.
