There’s much to like about PSG stars – but conflict in watching Champions League win

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Football is not demarcated by black and white any more; not since colour television sent broadcast rights spiralling and the Champions League ball was stitched from a shade named “solar slime”.

There is plenty to like about Paris Saint-Germain, European champions for the first time in their history.

Their manager, Luis Enrique, is a kind man and an innovative coach, whose personal success is all the more gratifying for the tragedies suffered by his family.

In Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Desire Doue and Bradley Barcola, they have a trio of wingers who play with the joy and verve of mountain springs made human.

Over his career, Ousmane Dembele has been tossed on a sea of troubles, and at times sunk beneath its waters, but resurfaced to realise his sparkling potential.

For more than a decade in this competition, PSG fans have been left blinking back tears of frustration many times more than tears of joy.

In the microcosm, every player, staff member, and yes, possibly even executive, has their own individual story of overcoming and toil which, on Saturday night, was realised in the glare of a thousand camera flashes.

Some would have you believe that this narrative extends to the macrocosm, and what PSG represent in an increasingly worldwide game. Globalisation is a good thing; it has given Georgia its Champions League hero, it has formed Paris’ uniquely diverse footballing culture.

For them — as PSG’s president, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, congratulated his players on the podium — this was the moment that plucky Qatar, a nation of fewer than three million inhabitants, repaid its 14-year investment in a club with boundless untapped potential.

Dumped out in the group stages of their home World Cup, this was the moment the country’s sporting muscles were flexed, as confetti fell to crown just the second state-backed club to have won the Champions League.

But not many would recognise that understanding of events. Football is aware that Qatar has tooled sport to obscure the brutality of its human rights record and to market its fossil fuel investments. But football, like other big business, is not governed by those misgivings. So there is conflict for many when watching the celebrations unfold.

PSG’s performance in their 5-0 win was moving in its elegance, a triumph of technical skill, industry, and bravery. Inter were dissected by an artist’s sharp palette knife.

But the club are still indelibly linked to the abuses of their nation-state owners — from the Qatar Airways badge on their shirts to the transfer fees for their constellation of starlets. Expect to see their image, lifting the giant silver trophy, on a Qatar Airways poster near you. This is cultural capital that money can buy.

PSG celebrate with the trophy (Michael Regan – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)

Remember that while PSG may have shifted their strategy towards young talent rather than galacticos, that talent did not come for free — they spent €240million (£202m; $272m) on new signings this season, on the back of €455m one year before. In its footballing strategy, this was a fully realised version of the much-maligned Chelsea project.

Of course, football is no Eden without its state-owned teams. The blitz of money which American hedge-fund investors are throwing towards the Premier League is not without its problems. Elsewhere, organised crime still has its tendrils in many parts of the sport across the globe, and the misty-eyed reverence for benevolent local tycoons is a notion that went extinct before the Tasmanian tiger.

Clearly, the Glazer family are not good for football — but equally, they are not attempting to obscure the unexplained deaths of thousands of their migrant employees.

PSG’s Champions League win is a victory for every individual involved, for their own perseverance and ability. But every person, at once, carries both what we ourselves are and we as ourselves represent.

As a collective, PSG’s victory stands for something very different indeed.

(Top photo: Lars Baron/Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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