The former footballer and the modestly talented (and about-to-be-retired) pundit Rio Ferdinand plumbed new depths of stupidity in his post match comments about Paris Saint-Germain’s Champions League win against Inter Milan last night. “It’s a win for football,” he gushed. His comments on the Pay TV channel TNT were endorsed by his fellow pundits who called PSG “fun” and “a breath of fresh air“. If PSG’s 5-0 humbling of Italy’s former giants really is a win for football, I’m a banana.
I should explain that I did not watch the final, choosing instead to do a more useful thing with my time, which involved visiting various pubs around Bristol’s Harbourside area, otherwise known to old codgers like me as “The Docks”. I had no dog in the fight and as is the norm with me these days I saw no point in watching. But reading online media outlets today you might be forgiven for thinking that Ferdinand was right; that it was a win for football. Was it? Was it really?
Since 2011, PSG have been owned by a nation state, that state being Qatar. Qatar owns 87.5% of the shares, US hedge fund Arctos Partners owns the remaining 12.5%. And that brings a few advantages. Last nights victims … sorry, opponents, Inter Milan … have less than half their revenue and a wage bill a third of the size of theirs. Some breath of fresh air.
PSG manager Luis Enrique, a man I greatly admire, became only the second coach to win the Champions League with two different clubs, Barcelona and now PSG, the first being Pep Guardiola who steered Barcelona and Abu Dhabi owned Manchester City. Can you see a pattern here? Barcelona, whose rise to worldwide football prominence was accompanied by running up a billion quid’s worth of debt and two impossibly wealthy state-owned clubs, namely PSG and Manchester City. While no one doubts the coaching skills of Enrique and Guardiola, one can surely see something that doesn’t quite come under the category of “it’s a win for football“. It’s a win for money.
If you are still in doubt, just look at the corporate profile of PSG minority shareholders Arctos: “Arctos is a private investment firm focused on creating valuable solutions to complex problems in partnership with sophisticated owners of premium franchises in the markets we serve.” It doesn’t get any more romantic than that, does it? Reading between the bullshit business-speak, to Arctos PSG is nothing more than a “premium franchise“. Some win for football.
The headlines today are also about Luis Enrique wearing a T shirt of his daughter who died tragically of a rare form of cancer in 2019 and PSG ‘ultras’ displaying a huge banner of them. Deeply moving, wonderful tributes, the best side of our humanity; no question about that. But there has to be a but. PSG’s victory is no victory for football or its supporters. It’s a big win for Qatar, it’s a big win for corporatism and, above all, it’s a win for money. For all the emotions surrounding the game, the bleak reality is that the people’s game is no longer owned by them.
Once the game was over, the game and the tribute to Enrique’s daughter were soon forgotten as rioting broke out in Paris, leaving two people dead, 192 injured and 500 people arrested. What fun, what a breath of fresh air, what a win for football. And at the time of writing – mid morning Sunday – the media is still cheerleading PSG’s “5-0 rout of Inter Milan“. Why ruin the celebrations by banging on about financial shenanigans and violent thuggery?
I wasn’t there, I didn’t even bother to watch it on TV. If I had watched it, especially the post match tributes, maybe I might feel different. From a cold, largely dispassionate place, I feel nothing about PSG’s win, other than the very real expectation that their ownership model will become a template for so-called elite level football and the game we love will continue to eat itself. And doubtless TNT will employ yet another semi-literate pundit to come out with the same sort of bollocks Rio Ferdinand came up with last night. To be fair, with Robbie Savage, Lucy Ward and Steve McManaman already on the payroll, maybe they have enough already.
