Latest news with #Platini
New York Times
4 days ago
- Business
- New York Times
Paris Saint-Germain are in the Champions League final, but has Qatar already won?
On November 23, 2010, a lunch was hosted at the Elysee Palace, the official residence of the French president. Among President Nicolas Sarkozy's guests that day were Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, now the Emir of Qatar, and Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, who was Qatar's prime minister at the time. Advertisement Also in attendance was the legendary French footballer Michel Platini, then-president of UEFA, European football's governing body, and a member of the FIFA executive committee that was about to hold a vote to decide which countries would host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Platini, he has said, went to the palace that day expecting a private audience with Sarkozy. Instead, he found himself in conversation with the high-powered delegation from the tiny, enormously wealthy gas-rich nation of Qatar. When that ballot was held at FIFA headquarters in Zurich nine days later, Platini was among those who swayed the vote in Qatar's favour. He has maintained his only motivation was 'what is good for football' and denied being put under any political pressure. 'I understood that Sarkozy supported the candidature of Qatar, but he never asked me (to vote for Qatar) or to vote for Russia (for the 2018 tournament),' he told the Guardian in 2013. France and Qatar have been allies since the latter declared its independence in 1971 with the termination of British rule. The two nations signed a defence pact in 1994. Under Sarkozy's presidency, between 2007 and 2012, there was a huge surge in Qatari investment in French industry, Parisian real estate and much else. There have been far bigger deals than the state-backed Qatar Sports Investment's (QSI's) acquisition of an initial 70 per cent stake in Paris Saint-Germain for a reported €50million ($56.7million or £42million at today's exchange rates) in June 2011. But that deal, too, was of interest to the highest levels of government. In that same 2013 interview with the Guardian, Platini said he 'knew Sarkozy wanted the people from Qatar to buy PSG' — though he has maintained the matter was not discussed at the now-infamous lunch at the Elysee Palace. A statement at the time from Franck Louvrier, who was Sarkozy's communications adviser, said the president 'took a close interest' in QSI's takeover of PSG — 'firstly because it is a foreign state that is investing in France and then because he is a (PSG) supporter'. In 2010, PSG were in financial difficulties. They had won just two Ligue 1 titles in their history, in 1986 and 1994, and appeared unlikely to add to that total any time soon, having finished 15th, 16th, sixth and 13th in their four full seasons under the ownership of Colony Capital, an American investment firm, which was looking for a way out. Advertisement How times change when a football club has the financial backing of a nation with Qatar's resources. Nearly 15 years on, Forbes values PSG at $4.4billion. On the pitch, they have won 11 of the past 13 Ligue 1 titles and on Saturday, they face Inter in the Champions League final in Munich, where victory would make them the first French club to win European club football's biggest trophy since Marseille in 1993. That has been the PSG owners' stated ambition from the moment they bought the club. Their Qatari president, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, set an initial target to win it by 2015. After three consecutive quarter-final defeats, that target was put back to 2018. By 2018, Al-Khelaifi had revised it further, but said they 'have' to win it within four years. So if not on Saturday, then when? For Qatar, though, the acquisition of PSG has already paid off many times over. It was never, as some suggest, just about the prestige and kudos to be gained from winning the Champions League. Because buying PSG was about so more than just football. 'I wanted to build a brand,' Al-Khelaifi said when asked by The Athletic's Nick Miller, in his book Who Owns Football? The Changing Face of Club Ownership, why QSI bought PSG. 'We wanted to build up the football club. We wanted to have fanbases all over the world. We wanted to win trophies. We wanted to build the best training centre in the world.' Qatar also wanted protection and influence. Dr David Roberts, a reader in international security and Middle East studies at King's College London and the author of Qatar: Securing the Global Ambitions of a City-state, suggests the PSG takeover — along with a wide range of other investments in France, Germany, the UK, the U.S., China, Russia and elsewhere — was primarily about security. 'Just look at it from a geographical point of view,' Roberts says. 'Qatar shares a border with Saudi Arabia, with whom it has had a difficult relationship in recent decades. To the south, there's the United Arab Emirates, where again, there has been an uneasy relationship at times. Then, across the Persian Gulf, there's Iran, with whom it shares this huge gas field but again, there are obvious concerns. In that scenario, with a long-running history of conflicts in the region, how does a country the size of Qatar secure itself?' Advertisement In the 1970s, Roberts says, Qatar was 'pretty much anonymous internationally, hiding under Saudi Arabia's auspices'. Under the rule of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, from the mid-1990s, and once his son, Sheikh Tamim, became Crown Prince in 2003, Qatar took a very different approach by looking to strengthen its economic and, by extension, diplomatic ties with the most powerful nations. Roberts describes it 'as security through being seen, through these relationships' — both business and personal. 'I don't like the phrase 'soft power',' he says, 'but that's what it is.' Christopher Davidson, the author of Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle for the Middle East, agrees. He cites the PSG acquisition as one of several 'straight-up soft-power investments to strengthen relations with the host countries, which were essentially seen as military protectors'. 'For Qatar and other states in the region,' he says, 'that have transitioned into boosting the economic diversification policies, strengthening their status as safe tourist destinations, investment destinations and international partners.' In June 2017, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain severed relations with Qatar, citing Doha's support for terrorist groups including Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. It was a de facto blockade of Qatar and there were times when its hopes of hosting the 2022 World Cup were under genuine threat. But throughout that period, there was little condemnation from the rest of the international community. U.S. President Donald Trump said in June 2017 that Qatar was 'a funder of terrorism at a very high level', adding it had an 'extremist ideology in terms of funding', but days later he authorised the sale of $12billion of American F-15 fighter jets to Doha. France, Germany and the UK also continued to sell arms to Qatar. Nobody is suggesting this is out of respect for Qatar's ownership of a French football club, but PSG is an increasingly prestigious part of a vast investment portfolio. Qatar's investment in European sport — and so many other sectors — is widely felt to have bought a layer of security and diplomatic strength that such a small nation would not otherwise have had. Advertisement Privately, these elements are acknowledged by some people close to PSG. While officials at Manchester City object to portrayals of their 2008 takeover by Sheikh Mansour, now vice-president of the UAE, as anything but a personal investment, those in Paris and Doha do not dispute the geopolitical dimension behind QSI's acquisition of PSG. People who have worked closely with PSG's leadership, speaking to The Athletic on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation, emphasise the many ways in which the club was the perfect fit for QSI: an opportunity to build a brand in keeping with Paris's status as one of the most glamorous cities in the world. But they also emphasise PSG made perfect sense in the diplomatic, economic and security context — as part of a wider picture where Qatar was strengthening its connections and diplomatic ties with France while also diversifying the nation's economy in the knowledge that the gas supply will one day run out. 'It's diplomacy through sport,' one person says. 'They've got money and they feel sport — whether it's hosting the World Cup in 2022, owning PSG or buying the rights to the World Padel Tour — is a really positive way to make connections, to diversify their economy and, let's be honest, to gain positivity from the relationship with sport and with football in particular.' And influence. In 2021, Al-Khelaifi became chairman of the powerful European Club Association, occupying the void that was left when 12 of the biggest clubs signed up to the short-lived European Super League venture. PSG were one of the few clubs invited who opposed it, a position some rival clubs felt owed much to an unwillingness to do anything so divisive when the Qatar World Cup was on the horizon. Having spent the early part of the QSI regime in conflict with UEFA over breaches of its financial fair play regulations, Al-Khelaifi now had one of the most powerful voices in European football's corridors of power. Outsiders a decade earlier, PSG and Qatar were now at the heart of the establishment. There has long been a tendency to see the acquisitions of PSG, Manchester City and Newcastle United — respectively by QSI, Sheikh Mansour and a consortium led by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund — through the same lens. Call it what you like: sportswashing, soft power, diplomacy through sport. It is all usually portrayed as amounting to the same thing. Advertisement Roberts suggests the approaches of Qatar and the UAE, while commonly lumped together in the Western media, are in fact markedly different. He draws a contrast between Qatar's focus on well-known and prestigious Western brands (Harrods Group, big stakes in Volkswagen, Porsche, Heathrow Airport) with the UAE's more considered approach, looking for long-term value in less eye-catching acquisitions, whether it is obscure start-ups, new technology or a phenomenally successful investment in Chicago parking meters during the 2008 financial crisis. The acquisition of PSG — and the way it was run for the first decade, with a focus on signing star players such as Zlatan Ibrahimovic, David Beckham, Neymar, Kylian Mbappe, Sergio Ramos and Lionel Messi — heightened the perception of what even Al-Khelaifi later disparagingly called a 'flashy bling-bling' culture. Comparisons with Manchester City's more strategic approach, under Abu Dhabi leadership, were not flattering. It was an image PSG's owner became desperate to shed. And it feels instructive that their resurgence has followed a switch in focus to signing young, up-and-coming players such as Willian Pacho, Joao Neves, Vitinha, Bradley Barcola, Desire Doue and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, rather than star players whose best years are behind them. Some have wondered whether the PSG hierarchy deserve more credit, spending the first decade building up the club's brand by signing superstars and then switching focus. But even within the club there is a recognition that the change in approach came via default — due to exasperation with the circus that accompanied the superstar influx — rather than design. In Paris, there is a willingness to portray the PSG story, for better or worse, as a less calculated venture than some appraisals would suggest. The wider geopolitical strategy is undeniable — as is the background to the takeover — but people with knowledge of the matter have indicated to The Athletic that the PSG venture as a whole was always more opportunistic, in direct contrast to, for example, the highly controversial but successful bid to host the 2022 World Cup. 'People should never underestimate how foreign policy and economic policy can be entirely directed by individuals,' Roberts says. 'I sometimes talk about rule by whim in the Gulf, which is quite evident on occasions. 'We tend to look at these things, when it's a $100million or $200million deal, and assume that they've undertaken an enormous study with consultants and lawyers and plans and strategies. But my basic point is that often, especially back in the day, some of these investments were made on a whim.' Late last year, the French daily sports newspaper L'Equipe reported that the Emir of Qatar was open to the possibility of selling PSG. The report also suggested there was a sense of frustration and disillusionment within QSI after the 'flashy bling-bling' period. PSG immediately called the reports 'completely false', stating QSI's commitment to the club, including investment in a new €350m Campus PSG training ground in Poissy. Further reports since the turn of the year have suggested QSI's disenchantment grew after Al-Khelaifi was placed under formal investigation in February in relation to a wider case involving the businessman Arnaud Lagardere, the head of the Lagardere Group, in which QIA has an 11.5 per cent stake. Khelaifi has denied any wrongdoing, describing the investigation as 'nonsense'. Advertisement People familiar with the situation have told The Athletic that selling PSG has never been on QSI's agenda. More likely is that they will sell off another minority stake, similar to the deal that saw U.S.-based investment firm Arctos Partners take a 12.5 per cent stake in the club in 2023. Nevertheless, questions have persisted about the future of the Qatari project at PSG. A mooted Qatari bid to stage the 2036 Summer Olympics seems to reflect changing priorities in Doha. Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani, son of the former prime minister, might have failed with an attempt to buy Manchester United in 2023, but the nature of that bid — and the persistent rumours of Qatari interest in buying Tottenham Hotspur — raised questions about whether PSG might have served its purpose. In some ways, it has. Even purely in financial terms, the return on investment is enormous. That growth can be attributed largely to the surge in PSG's commercial revenue — much of it linked to deals with Qatari or Qatari-owned companies — but none of this investment by Qatar Airways, Visit Qatar, beIN Sports, Qatar National Bank would be happening without a belief in Doha that it all makes sense as part of a wider soft-power strategy. But after a period of frustration, which prompted Al-Khelaifi to backtrack on some of his earlier declarations about their ambitions, PSG find themselves one win away from Champions League glory. People in Doha suggest a PSG victory on Saturday night would be greeted with celebrations on the Corniche — perhaps a firework display — but nothing wild. Yes, there are PSG shirts on display when you walk through Doha, but even after the 2022 World Cup it is hardly a hotbed of football passion. And, as in so many other big non-European cities, Real Madrid and the rest of the usual suspects also compete for top billing. 'There is no doubt it would be a very good thing for the Qataris' investment,' Davidson says. 'It's an additional return on investment and it keeps visibility high. I guess it's just a question of the marginal utility of that investment. If they win the Champions League, then, going forward, does winning it again bring them as much recognition as the initial stage of that cycle? I'm not sure it does.' Advertisement Another person suggests winning the Champions League would be a 'relief' for PSG's Qatari owners, 'a monkey off their back'. There would be a certain regional 'bragging rights' perspective — emulating Manchester City, two years after their long-awaited first European title under Sheikh Mansour's ownership — but not like that 2017-21 period, when relations between Abu Dhabi and Doha were so strained. Champions League glory has always been cited as the ultimate ambition for PSG's Qatari owners, but the reality looks more nuanced than that. After all, how can it be the ultimate goal if it was about so much more than football in the first place?
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Qatar bid to complete football with PSG project's crowd-pleasing third act
Put a bisht on it. That's a wrap. At first glance it might be tempting to see the 2025 Champions League final as one of the more obviously high-European occasions in recent football history. Twenty thousand Parisians and Milanese will trace out a thousand mile right-angle this weekend, north from Lombardy, east across Alsace and the Rhineland, there to spend a long weekend wandering the white stone streets of Munich, with its reassuringly terrifying gothic cathedral, its pounded-meat cuisine de terroir, its altstadt boutiques selling wristwatches priced at roughly the same the cost as the average human arm, and finally on to the lighted dome of the Allianz Arena, dumped down in the green fringes to the north like a giant alien doughnut. For the first time in five years there isn't a single English person involved as Paris Saint-Germain and Inter meet in the capital of Bavaria. Premier League, Club World Cup. Look upon our Euro splendour and tremble. This is heartlands stuff, a moment of pure Schengen-ball. Related: A different kind of Champions League final is something to be cherished | Philipp Lahm Except, of course, it is something else entirely too, an opportunity to complete a brilliantly enacted subversion of that old order from within. PSG have been the best team in Europe this year. In Munich they will kick off as favourites to take the trophy to France for the first time since 1993. But victory would also represent something much more significant, the moment Qatar basically completes football – and in a way that feels far less brittle, far more permanently entrenched than might have seemed possible a few years ago. Every drama needs a ticking clock. This one came bonging into existence in November 2010 with the staging of the most iconic lunch in modern football history. Summoned to the French president's Élysée Palace by Nicolas Sarkozy (the pre ankle-tag version), Uefa's Michel Platini found a surprise guest at the table. This was Tamim al-Thani, crown prince of Qatar and a footballing nobody at this point, but the same Thani who would, as the emir, hand the World Cup to Lionel Messi in Qatar 12 years later. It is important to state that Platini denies this interaction had any bearing on his vote, 11 days later, for the 2022 World Cup hosts. Sarkozy has also denied influencing or even appearing to influence the Uefa president's choice. Qatar did gain the decisive Platini backing all the same. Coincidentally, Qatar's state broadcaster almost immediately bought up the unsold TV rights to Ligue 1. In another unrelated act, six months later Qatar Sports Investments bought PSG, who were at that time in financial difficulties. A year later France sold 50 Airbus planes to Qatar Airways, a key step in a process that has led, 15 years on, to Qatar standing elbows-deep in French infrastructure funding. Fast forward to Saturday and the emir may well be present again as the jewel in his sporting outreach arm completes a key stage towards overhauling Real Madrid as the most commercially successful club in the world. Make no mistake, this will be a coronation even in defeat. We all wear the bisht now. It is worth being clear on how that final phase has played out, a wonderful example of football's instant amnesia. Until six months ago PSG were still struggling to free themselves from the idea that this was some kind of debauched celebrity waxwork museum, defined by a mental image of Neymar breakdancing on crutches at his own gala birthday party dressed only in a chinchilla fur thong and solid gold bowler hat, before driving off into the night in a special car made entirely from cheese. Fast forward through one tactical rejig and a key jettisoning of stars and the talk in France is of how this team has 'seduced the French people' with its youth and verve, transformed now into a kind of kitten collective, not just the good guys, but the best guys. This is the new PSG. Soulfulness, graft, sweat, doing woodwork in a shed. It turns out humility might actually be a good way to win after all. So we will buy the greatest humility available to mankind. Kneel before our self-effacing collectivism. There was always a gulf between the keep-ball style of successive PSG coaches and the desire to stack the squad with strolling superstars. So the new sense of grit is present in the tactical patterns too, a team that take to the pitch wound up into a kind of tackle fever, whose superpower is not being more famous than you, but counterpress and rapid team transitions. It is a brilliantly drilled, brilliantly obedient group, like watching a kind of cubism-ball in action, a world of rigorous geometric patterns, nature morte, all squares, angles, order, clean lines. The basic material here is young, high quality and ego-free. So instead of Neymar we have the anti-Neymar Désiré Doué, acme of the orderly modern prodigy, a football obsessive who takes timed daytime naps to improve his energies. The midfield is defined by Vitinha, who loves the ball and nothing else, who looks as though the only time he would cancel training is when he wants to do even more training, triple training (he will also do your training first, and at twice the speed). But it would also be entirely wrong at this point to imagine the current success springs from the rejection of the superstar era. In fact the opposite is true. One hand washes the other. All parts are connected. For all the occasional moments of on-field farce, it was the Neymar-Messi-Mbappé era that gave PSG the current fully realised team. All clubs like to talk about the Brand. Paris really, really like doing this, the current boilerplate boasts running to 'a cultural icon … at the intersection of sport, fashion, and entertainment … a globally recognized lifestyle brand … The Club of the New Generation … shaping the future of sport and society.' The most astonishing part of this encomium is that it's actually true. The Hollywood stuff, the bolt-on fame, the army of likes and follows: this wasn't simply naivety or cash thrown into an empty pit. Qatar worked out early on that money buys you success, but it can also buy you the stuff everyone else's success is based on. It has taken 15 years of overspend and playing the celebrity game, but this is now a hard commercial success, and a hyper-successful piece of celebrity piggybacking. Bought for €70m (£59m) in 2011, PSG is valued between €3.5bn and €4.2bn. The real killer is commercial revenues, once a third of Manchester United's annual haul but now leaving them in the dust for the foreseeable future. There have been three phases. The first was the frontier age of blunt state sponsor-led investment. Reeling in Zlatan. Changing the logo (previously: club badge) to Paris, firing up the chain of loss-leading global boutiques. The Nike Jordan deal in 2018 was an act of marketing prescience, positioning PSG as NBA-adjacent, fashion runway-curious. Phase two was 2017-2021 and the basking superstars team: no good at enforcing a high press, but hugely successful in ramping up the cashflow. Commercial deals have flooded in, high-end stuff rather than noodle partners by numbers. Matchday revenues are unexpectedly big, fruits of a one-big-club city that loves glitz and spectacle. That star project worked. The club are closer than ever to becoming an independent mega-brand. Messi may have hated being in Paris. But he gave a lot more than he might have realised. It obviously helps that none of this was ever really a gamble. For a club with bottomless owners of last resort there are no hard consequences to shedding a slew of duff star players. Manchester United may have spent years unable to pay off a bloated and sullen squad, but this is a lesson in the power of a truly nation-state owner. Slash and burn. Swallow the losses. You don't have to be backed by one of the world's largest gas producers to build a champion team without fear of the end cost. But it does help. As will the £300m spent on what is, again without bluster, 'the best training centre in the world', Campus PSG at Poissy, with its pristine acreages, its market garden, its chauffeurs' ping-pong room, its hypoxic oxygen chamber, luxury living quarters and hairdressing salon, the panic room in case of terrorist attack. It helps also that the real genius of Qatar has been building power rather than simply working in its shadow. This month the club president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, was seen meeting Jeff Bezos at the Cannes film festival to work out a possible collaboration, the kind of thing that seems logical now for a man who is also president of BeIn Sports, a minister in the Qatari government, head of the European Club Association (ECA), a Uefa executive committee member and even an unexpected face at the recent Gaza peace talks at the Élysée Palace (not the kind of thing Ken Bates, for example, was ever likely to get an invite to). Related: Now or never? Inter ready to seize moment in Champions League final | Nicky Bandini Some people are said to have a finger or two in the pie. Khelaifi has both fists jammed in there so deep it's hard to know where the pie starts and finishes. He is the pie. It has been a nontypical rise for the son of a pearl fisherman, born outside power, but expert in the macro-hustle. Al-Khelaifiused the Super League chaos brilliantly, standing with Aleksander Ceferin just when European football needed someone with no fear of consequences. This led to his current role at the ECA, which has become the real power behind the power, and a key driver of the new Champions League. Yeah, don't do the super league. Do this instead with me in charge. It is worth remembering as PSG present themselves in Munich as a vision of hopeful young talents beaming in sport-couture kit, that this is still nation-state power finding a way. It is also an entity that doesn't need to say please any more. One notable absence from the club's invited guests in Munich is the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, whose tenure has been bruised by the refusal to sell the publicly owned Parc des Princes to QSI. It feels like a fitting bookend to that formative lunch at the palace. We don't actually need to sit with you now. We are the entire buffet these days. Win or lose on Saturday, that table is set.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Qatar bid to complete football with crowd-pleasing third act of PSG project
Put a bisht on it. That's a wrap. At first glance it might be tempting to see the 2025 Champions League final as one of the more obviously high-European occasions in recent football history. Twenty thousand Parisians and Milanese will trace out a thousand mile right-angle this weekend, north from Lombardy, east across Alsace and the Rhineland, there to spend a long weekend wandering the white stone streets of Munich, with its reassuringly terrifying gothic cathedral, its pounded-meat cuisine de terroir, its altstadt boutiques selling wristwatches priced at roughly the same the cost as the average human arm, and finally on to the lighted dome of the Allianz Arena, dumped down in the green fringes to the north like a giant alien doughnut. Advertisement For the first time in five years there isn't a single English person involved as Paris Saint-Germain and Inter meet in the capital of Bavaria. Premier League, Club World Cup. Look upon our Euro splendour and tremble. This is heartlands stuff, a moment of pure Schengen-ball. Related: A different kind of Champions League final is something to be cherished | Philipp Lahm Except, of course, it is something else entirely too, an opportunity to complete a brilliantly enacted subversion of that old order from within. PSG have been the best team in Europe this year. In Munich they will kick off as favourites to take the trophy to France for the first time since 1993. But victory would also represent something much more significant, the moment Qatar basically completes football – and in a way that feels far less brittle, far more permanently entrenched than might have seemed possible a few years ago. Advertisement Every drama needs a ticking clock. This one came bonging into existence in November 2010 with the staging of the most iconic lunch in modern football history. Summoned to the French president's Élysée Palace by Nicolas Sarkozy (the pre ankle-tag version), Uefa's Michel Platini found a surprise guest at the table. This was Tamim al-Thani, crown prince of Qatar and a footballing nobody at this point, but the same Thani who would, as the emir, hand the World Cup to Lionel Messi in Qatar 12 years later. It is important to state that Platini denies this interaction had any bearing on his vote, 11 days later, for the 2022 World Cup hosts. Sarkozy has also denied influencing or even appearing to influence the Uefa president's choice. Qatar did gain the decisive Platini backing all the same. Coincidentally Qatar's state broadcaster almost immediately bought up the unsold TV rights to Ligue 1. In another unrelated act, six months later Qatar Sports Investments bought PSG, who were at that time in financial difficulties. A year later France sold 50 Airbus planes to Qatar Airways, a key step in a process that has led, 15 years on, to Qatar standing elbows-deep in French infrastructure funding. Fast forward to Saturday and the emir may well be present again as the jewel in his sporting outreach arm completes a key stage towards overhauling Real Madrid as the most commercially successful club in the world. Make no mistake, this will be a coronation even in defeat. We all wear the bisht now. Advertisement It is worth being clear on how that final phase has played out, a wonderful example of football's instant amnesia. Until six months ago PSG were still struggling to free themselves from the idea that this was some kind of debauched celebrity waxwork museum, defined by a mental image of Neymar breakdancing on crutches at his own gala birthday party dressed only in a chinchilla fur thong and solid gold bowler hat, before driving off into the night in a special car made entirely from cheese. Fast forward through one tactical rejig and a key jettisoning of stars and the talk in France is of how this team has 'seduced the French people' with its youth and verve, transformed now into a kind of kitten collective, not just the good guys, but the best guys. This is the new PSG. Soulfulness, graft, sweat, doing woodwork in a shed. It turns out humility might actually be a good way to win after all. So we will buy the greatest humility available to mankind. Kneel before our self-effacing collectivism. There was always a gulf between the keep-ball style of successive PSG coaches and the desire to stack the squad with strolling superstars. So the new sense of grit is present in the tactical patterns too, a team that take to the pitch wound up into a kind of tackle fever, whose superpower is not being more famous than you, but counterpress and rapid team transitions. It is a brilliantly drilled, brilliantly obedient group, like watching a kind of cubism-ball in action, a world of rigorous geometric patterns, nature morte, all squares, angles, order, clean lines. The basic material here is young, high quality and ego-free. So instead of Neymar we have the anti-Neymar Désiré Doué, acme of the orderly modern prodigy, a football obsessive who takes timed daytime naps to improve his energies. The midfield is defined by Vitinha, who loves the ball and nothing else, who looks as though the only time he would cancel training is when he wants to do even more training, triple training (he will also do your training first, and at twice the speed). Advertisement But it would also be entirely wrong at this point to imagine the current success springs from the rejection of the superstar era. In fact the opposite is true. One hand washes the other. All parts are connected. For all the occasional moments of on-field farce, it was the Neymar-Messi-Mbappé era that gave PSG the current fully realised team. All clubs like to talk about the Brand. Paris really, really like doing this, the current boilerplate boasts running to 'a cultural icon … at the intersection of sport, fashion, and entertainment … a globally recognized lifestyle brand … The Club of the New Generation… shaping the future of sport and society.' The most astonishing part of this encomium is that it's actually true. The Hollywood stuff, the bolt-on fame, the army of likes and follows: this wasn't simply naivety or cash thrown into an empty pit. Qatar worked out early on that money buys you success, but it can also buy you the stuff everyone else's success is based on. It has taken 15 years of overspend and playing the celebrity game, but this is now a hard commercial success, and a hyper-successful piece of celebrity piggybacking. Bought for €70m (£59m) in 2011, PSG is valued between €3.5bn and €4.2bn. The real killer is commercial revenues, once a third of Manchester United's annual haul but now leaving them in the dust for the foreseeable future. Advertisement There have been three phases. The first was the frontier age of blunt state sponsor-led investment. Reeling in Zlatan. Changing the logo (previously: club badge) to Paris, firing up the chain of loss-leading global boutiques. The Nike Jordan deal in 2018 was an act of marketing prescience, positioning PSG as NBA-adjacent, fashion runway-curious. Phase two was 2017-2021 and the basking superstars team: no good at enforcing a high press, but hugely successful in ramping up the cashflow. Commercial deals have flooded in, high-end stuff rather than noodle partners by numbers. Matchday revenues are unexpectedly big, fruits of a one-big-club city that loves glitz and spectacle. That star project worked. The club are closer than ever to becoming an independent mega-brand. Messi may have hated being in Paris. But he gave a lot more than he might have realised. It obviously helps that none of this was ever really a gamble. For a club with bottomless owners of last resort there are no hard consequences to shedding a slew of duff star players. Manchester United may have spent years unable to pay off a bloated and sullen squad, but this is a lesson in the power of a truly nation-state owner. Slash and burn. Swallow the losses. You don't have to be backed by one of the world's largest gas producers to build a champion team without fear of the end cost. But it does help. As will the £300m spent on what is, again without bluster, 'the best training centre in the world', Campus PSG at Poissy, with its pristine acreages, its market garden, its chauffeurs' ping-pong room, its hypoxic oxygen chamber, luxury living quarters and hairdressing salon, the panic room in case of terrorist attack. Advertisement It helps also that the real genius of Qatar has been building power rather than simply working in its shadow. This month the club president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, was seen meeting Jeff Bezos at the Cannes film festival to work out a possible collaboration, the kind of thing that seems logical now for a man who is also president of BeIn Sports , a minister in the Qatari government, head of the European Club Association (ECA), a Uefa executive committee member and even an unexpected face at the recent Gaza peace talks at the Élysée Palace (not the kind of thing Ken Bates, for example, was ever likely to get an invite to). Related: Now or never? Inter ready to seize moment in Champions League final | Nicky Bandini Some people are said to have a finger or two in the pie. Khelaifi has both fists jammed in there so deep it's hard to know where the pie starts and finishes. He is the pie. It has been a nontypical rise for the son of pearl fisherman, born outside power, but expert in the macro-hustle. Khelaifi used the Super League chaos brilliantly, standing with Aleksander Ceferin just when European football needed someone with no fear of consequences. This led to his current role at the ECA, which has become the real power behind the power, and a key driver of the new Champions League. Yeah, don't do the super league. Do this instead with me in charge. Advertisement It is worth remembering as PSG present themselves in Munich as a vision of hopeful young talents beaming in sport-couture kit, that this is still nation-state power finding a way. It is also an entity that doesn't need to say please any more. One notable absence from the club's invited guests in Munich is the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, whose tenure has been bruised by the refusal to sell the publicly owned Parc des Princes to QSI. It feels like a fitting bookend to that formative lunch at the palace. We don't actually need to sit with you now. We are the entire buffet these days. Win or lose on Saturday, that table is set.
Forbes
6 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Real Madrid And Alonso Warned About Mbappe By France Legend Platini
Real Madrid and its new head coach Xabi Alonso have been sent a warning about Kylian Mbappe by France legend Michel Platini. Mbappe famously joined Los Blancos on a free transfer from Paris Saint-Germain last summer, and then went on to win the Pichichi in Spain as La Liga's top scorer on 31 goals while also warding off the likes of Viktor Gyokeres and Mohamed Salah with 43 strikes in all competitions to claim the Golden Boot as Europe's top marksman. That aside, Madrid still finished 2024/2025 without major silverware thanks to a newfound domestic dominance from FC Barcelona and a Champions League quarterfinal knockout administered by Arsenal. Though there are many factors behind such a fall from grace after Madrid won a La Liga, UCL and Super Cup treble under Carlo Ancelotti the previous term, having to shoehorn Mbappe into an attack that didn't really need him has been cited as a possible reason for Madrid falling short in its attempt to repeat such success. And with Ancelotti since replaced by Xabi Alonso, Platini sent a warning to the new manager and Madrid about how to get the best out of his countryman. "Mbappe is a phenomenal guy. He has scored 43 goals in Spain. He won the Golden Boot, he is the top scorer in Europe. That means he's been good," Platini noted, while added that the 26-year-old achieved this 'playing for a team that hasn't had a great year' 'Real Madrid is also getting older,' Platini also said, before calling Mbappe a phenomenon. 'He is a striker who scores. [But] "I don't understand what the new coaches think. He is a striker who scores. That's the most important thing. Then, you have to be clear about one thing: either you build a team for him, or you build a team so that he plays well. That is the difficulty," Platini warned. Choosing how his attack will line up is one of Alonso's key decisions in the Bernabeu dugout, with both Mbappe and Vinicius Jr. showing a preference for the left flank. Mbappe currently adopts a central 9 role as a striker, so things might stay as is with Vinicius on the left. This summer, however, we could see Real Madrid sell Rodrygo which frees up a space on the right which could be occupied by Arda Guler.
New Straits Times
05-05-2025
- Business
- New Straits Times
Terengganu FC clear the air over FIFA sanction
KUALA LUMPUR: Terengganu FC have dismissed concerns over a FIFA-imposed transfer ban, insisting the matter was resolved last month. In a statement on their official Facebook page, the east coast club said the issue stemmed from a dispute with a former foreign staff member over a five-figure allowance, which has since been settled. "The issue shouldn't even be played up as it was resolved in April," the club said. "FIFA confirmed the settlement on April 21 and gave five days for the claimant to acknowledge receipt of payment. That window has passed." The club stressed that the Malaysian league's transfer window has not opened yet — it's expected to start in July — and that the new season is likely to kick off in early August. "We've already taken proactive steps, despite having ample time. This issue is being sensationalised," they added. Earlier, Timesport reported that FIFA had imposed transfer bans on nine Malaysian clubs, including Super League side Terengganu. The ban, which began in April and is due to last three years, had cast doubt over the club's preparations for the 2025-26 season. Football Dec 16, 2024 @ 7:48am Ex-Terengganu City players finally receive Fifa compensation Football 5 hours ago Nine Malaysian clubs on FIFA transfer ban list Football Mar 25, 2025 @ 8:26pm Blatter and Platini cleared in FIFA graft case Nation Apr 24, 2025 @ 10:21am Terengganu to ban vape sales from Aug 1
