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The Guardian
10 hours ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Champions League final the calm before storm as Uefa and Fifa battle rolls on
In regal Odeonsplatz, the finishing touches are being applied to a fan zone that will accommodate Inter's travelling fans under an azure sky. It will surely be full to capacity given about 40,000 Nerazzurri are expected to arrive in time for Saturday's Champions League final, even if under half that number will officially make it into Allianz Arena for the match itself. This is not only an appointment with history for their opponents, Paris Saint-Germain; Inter have blended silk with street-fighting qualities to stand on the verge of their first European title since 2010. Gianni Infantino is unlikely to be among the melee but the Fifa president's sympathies are well documented. He will be quietly rooting for Inter from the VIP seats and perhaps it will be an opportune moment for some bridge building. There is a constituency of Inter fans in Uefa's higher echelons, after all, and football's biggest governing bodies could certainly do with discovering a few acres of common ground. Surface temperatures have, at least, cooled since a number of European delegates at the Fifa congress walked out this month in protest at Infantino's prioritising of meetings in the Middle East. A conciliatory public statement from Uefa saw to that, although nobody should assume all is forgiven behind the scenes. There is little love lost between their respective leaderships and the summer ahead is only likely to intensify the power struggle for the future of the elite game. It means that, from Uefa's perspective, there is every incentive to pull off a bravura spectacle on Saturday night. The revamped Club World Cup, Infantino's deeply controversial pet project, begins in a fortnight and a statement of who runs the biggest show in town would be timely. Inter and PSG could face each other again in that competition's final; they are on opposite sides of the draw and it is hardly an impossible scenario if enough can be wrung from their overstretched players. But a show for the ages in Munich would be a hard act to follow, and demonstrate that the traditional gongs, albeit in their heavily updated form, still hold the greatest weight. Greeting visitors to the coffee lounge at Hotel Bayerischer Hof, handed over to Uefa and their wide-ranging entourage for the weekend, are mannequins clothed in replica shirts bearing the names of Lautaro Martínez and Marquinhos. Perhaps that inadvertently speaks of an obvious inconvenience in this final's grapple for eyeballs: the lack of a global superstar to reel in casual enthusiasts. That should not spoil the game itself, which will be finely poised between a free-flowing PSG and an Inter side that can deliver knockout blows at a stroke. It is hard to escape the thought, though, that the commercial brains in Nyon would have deemed Lamine Yamal's presence more future-facing. How much the presence of Linkin Park at the now obligatory pre-match show will enthral younger fans is a different question, albeit not an altogether separate matter. The influential European Club Association (ECA) chair Nasser al-Khelaifi, who also happens to run PSG, has never been shy to say he wants these occasions to rival a Super Bowl in tone and glamour. Given the ECA's ever-growing power, it would not hurt Uefa to deliver one. Fifa will certainly try to do that when the Club World Cup concludes in New Jersey on 13 July. Khelaifi sits astride football's sparring factions, with sources describing him as modern football's kingmaker. The ECA leadership have fully backed Infantino's tournament, to the extent that a handful of staff are working full time on preparations for the event. But their recent joint commercial venture with Uefa, UC3, promises to supercharge the Champions League's presence and influence across the Atlantic. Which competition will ultimately produce the kind of jamboree Khelaifi envisages? Uefa is satisfied, at least, that this season's reformatted Champions League has proved successful. Insiders have sung the praises of its 36-team 'league phase' to the point of evangelism, even if its debut edition did not ultimately deliver the level of tension and jeopardy that had been threatened. This weekend is seen an opportune moment to discuss feedback given by participating clubs. Small tweaks may follow, but there will be no fundamental changes to the structure. One alteration that may come closer to fruition in Munich would see the clubs that finished higher in the league phase given the perceived advantage of a home second leg in the knockout stage in an attempt to incentivise performance in that sprawling first round. Next season a six-strong English contingent will knock the Champions League's remaining credibility as a truly representative European tournament, even if it offers an accurate snapshot of the Premier League's overwhelming strength. Nineteen of the 36 league phase competitors will come from England, Germany, Spain or Italy; a Super League is effectively here by stealth, but few of the gathered stakeholders in Bavaria feel moved to obsess over a lack of diversity. Instead they will savour a radiant weekend in a city that certainly offers a sufficiently highbrow stage. In Königsplatz, PSG's supporters will gather in their own specially designated area. The location, a stone's throw from Odeonsplatz, may keep security personnel on their toes. Passing through the Bayerischer Hof lobby, Khelaifi laughed off any suggestion nerves may consume him on Saturday. The final looks too close to call. Maybe Infantino, along with a number of his peers from Uefa, will depart with the glow of a champion, but the powerbrokers' grievances are unlikely to melt entirely in the Bavarian sun.
The Guardian
14 hours ago
- Business
- The Guardian
PSG and Inter prepare to serve up a continental treat in Bigger Cup final
With the 2024-25 season in Uefa-land drawing to its glamorous close, is there a better time to assess how the whole thing went down with everything considered in the round? Yes! But Football Daily doesn't publish on Sunday morning, so let's make the best of a bad lot. And it's been a good year for English football all right. Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United went to the artistic and creative mecca of Bilbao and staged what can only be described as a dirty protest, a Chelsea squad worth £1,400,000,000 struggled against (though eventually steamrollered) a team collectively priced at 0.96% of a Mykhailo Mudryk, and it's fair to say the rest of the continent will be extremely glad to see the back of us. It was a close-run thing that there's no English representation in Saturday's Bigger Cup final, mind you. Paris Saint-Germain may have reached tomorrow's mega-game by beating all four Premier League contenders, but it wouldn't have taken too much for matters to pan out in a very different way altogether. Perhaps if Manchester City hadn't, for a couple of John Bondian months, reverted to their 1977-2009 norm? Perhaps if Willian Pacho hadn't been able to clear Ian Maatsen's fine volley off the line during the last knockings at Villa Park? What if Liverpool's analytics department had told Jürgen Klopp to cool his boots over Darwin Núñez? And how about a world in which Mikel Arteta didn't spend his life obsessing over WWE-style corner routines and turned the attackers loose instead? Give the old open play a quick go? See what happens? Eh? The slim margins. And so it's fair to say the rest of the continent will be extremely glad to see the back of us. And yet, having said all that, Internazionale aren't necessarily guaranteed to bring big smiles to the big event either. Anyone who speaks fondly of their 1964 and 1965 champions, Helenio Herrera, catenaccio, liberos and all, are trying way too hard, lying both to you and themselves. There's a reason even some Rangers fans were cock-a-hoop when Celtic's Lisbon Lions did their thing. Inter's 2010 winners, meanwhile, are solely remembered these days for driving Barcelona up the wall and round the bend, the final that year almost an afterthought for José Mourinho, his main goal of breaking Po' Pep's noggin already achieved. Although to be scrupulously fair, Romelu Lukaku provided some primetime Saturday-night light entertainment two years ago when keeping goal for Manchester City. So it's swings and roundabouts. This year Inter could finally feature in a showpiece to remember, as anyone who watched their latest iteration's gloriously batty defenestration of Barcelona in the semi-finals can attest. Admittedly their 7-6 aggregate win denied everyone the dream final showdown of Lamine Yamal and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, but it'd be churlish to deny Inter their destiny after their role in that instant classic, two matches that scraped the sky before finally breaking into heaven when Francesco Acerbi, 83½, celebrated his campaign-saving stunner with a joyous Fred-Astaire-style mid-air heel-click. Anything similarly thrilling and life-affirming tomorrow – e.g. Davide Frattesi pulling off exactly the same celebration but backwards and in high heels – and it'll be an occasion to remember. We're not there for a start, so have fun, Europe! Follow England 4-2 Portugal in the Women's Nations League with Xaymaca Awoyungbo tonight (7.45pm BST). And don't forget to join us for Bigger Cup buildup on Saturday, before PSG 1-2 Inter (aet) live with Scott Murray (8pm BST). 'It doesn't take a genius to work out that every attacking stat for Arsenal is down from what it was last year when they finished second. Then they finished second again. Whether it was the manager, or whether it was the top brass whose decision was it to go into the season without having a striker, it's cost them dearly because they never really put up a serious fight to Liverpool' – Alan Shearer gets his chat on with Alexander Abnos, and appears to fancy a gig with AFTV. 'How do Chelsea fans feel about a £1bn+ investment yielding the Conference League trophy? To paraphrase Tina Turner, Wroclaw Got To Do With It?' – Peter Oh. 'Re: Thursday's Football Daily main story – 'I would rather defecate in [my] own hands and clap' will be my new method of refusal to various people for sundry suggestions from now on' – Simon McMenamin. 'Can we say Chelsea have Delap in their hands now?' – Krishna Moorthy. Send letters to Today's prizeless letter o' the day winner is … Rollover. Terms and conditions for our competitions can be viewed here. Trent Alexander-Arnold and Bruno Fernandes have had plenty of battles down the years. For the record it's W6 D5 L3 for the Liverpool right-back against Manchester United, while Fernandes has won just a single game in nine Premier League appearances when facing their fierce rivals. But who knows? Their next head-to-head could be an unexpected showdown in next month's Club World Cup. After reports of being only prepared to pay Liverpool in cured meats and Panini stickers to get TAA in time for the big bash in the USA USA USA, Real are now willing to line Liverpool's pockets with a boo-calming £10m when the transfer window opens on Sunday. Fernandes, meanwhile, is pondering whether taking a monstrous wage offer from Al-Hilal is a better option than losing friendlies to pub teams in Malaysia. Real Madrid face the Saudi side in the Club World Cup, so if Fernandes does do one, it's on: Trent v Bruno on 18 June in Miami. A former Royal Marine has appeared in court accused of driving into and injuring fans at Liverpool's Premier League victory parade on Monday. Paul Doyle, 53, appeared at Liverpool magistrates court on Friday charged with offences including wounding and causing grievous bodily harm to six people. West Ham have been fined £120,000 for homophobic chanting by fans during their 2-1 Premier League loss at Chelsea in February. The club accepted the FA charge of misconduct and have vowed to ban those involved from future matches. Milan have reappointed Massimiliano Allegri as head coach, one day after sacking Sergio Conceição. Allegri won the scudetto in 2010-11 during his previous spell in charge at San Siro, and takes over a side with no European football next season. Elsewhere in Italy, Raffaele Palladino has left his role as Fiorentina manager by mutual consent, just three weeks after signing a contract extension until 2027. Kelly Simmons, the former FA director of professional women's football, has said Big Sir Jim Ratcliffe's remarks about Manchester United's WSL side 'send a signal … about what he thinks about women, not just the women's game.' Chelsea are poised to add Liam Delap to their attacking ranks after triggering the Ipswich hot-shot's £30m release clause. Having successfully kept Mohamed Salah on board amid Saudi interest, Liverpool have turned around to find Al-Nassr and Al-Hilal sidling up to Luis Díaz and Darwin Núñez respectively. Manchester United have spoiled our fun by ending their post-season Asia tour with a win. Chido Obi scored twice in a 3-1 friendly win over a Hong Kong XI. And fancy another trophy, Spurs fans? Tottenham will face either PSG or Inter in the Uefa Super Cup final on 13 August at Udinese's Stadio Friuli. Not so long ago, Michelle Agyemang was a ballgirl for Sarina Wiegman's first England game at Wembley. Now the Arsenal star is chasing a place in the Euro 2025 squad, as she tells Tom Garry. Tom also got his chat on with Esme Morgan, the England and Washington Spirit defender who's hobnobbed with diplomats and adopted a kitten. Xaymaca Awoyungbo takes in the Unity Cup, a tournament at Brentford's Gtech Stadium for London's diaspora communities to celebrate. PSG have enjoyed a youthful, crowd-pleasing regeneration this season, but a Bigger Cup win for them is still an even bigger win for Qatar, writes Barney Ronay. Philipp Lahm is looking forward to a France v Italy final on Saturday after years of Spanish and English teams making the big game. In Switzerland, third-tier Biel-Bienne are taking on the mighty Basel/Basle/Barrrrl in the Cup final. Michael Yokhin charts their journey from bankruptcy to the big game. On this day in 1979: a big Cup final in Munich, won by Nottingham Forest after Brian Clough's side beat Malmö 1-0, Trevor Francis scoring the only goal. John Robertson (pictured left) got the winner when Forest defeated Hamburg to retain the title 12 months later in Madrid.
BBC News
14 hours ago
- Business
- BBC News
Why the Champions League final stadium has its name changed
Bayern Munich's stadium - the Allianz Arena - will officially be known as Munich Football Arena for the 2024-25 Champions League final between Paris St-Germain and Inter is because of Uefa regulations regarding stadium sponsors, which state the home club must provide a "clean stadium" for means no branding of the stadium sponsor - including any name, logo, trademark, design elements, slogan or corporate colours - may be visible in the "commercial exclusive zone" (inside the stadium).The rule is implemented for any Uefa competitions, and also applies to team names that include Arena previously adopted the Uefa-approved name for the 2024 European Championship, and 2012 Champions League Uefa competitions, Austria's Red Bull Salzburg are known as FC Salzburg, Manchester City's Etihad Stadium is known as the City of Manchester Stadium and the Emirates Stadium is the Arsenal are a few exceptions to the rule - the name of the stadium sponsor can be announced over a PA system, the stadium sponsor may appear as part of the name on printed materials, and may appear as part of the permanent stadium name signage on the outside of the stadium article is the latest from BBC Sport's Ask Me Anything team. What is Ask Me Anything? Ask Me Anything is a service dedicated to answering your want to reward your time by telling you things you do not know and reminding you of things you team will find out everything you need to know and be able to call upon a network of contacts including our experts and will be answering your questions from the heart of the BBC Sport newsroom, and going behind the scenes at some of the world's biggest sporting coverage will span the BBC Sport website, app, social media and YouTube accounts, plus BBC TV and radio. More questions answered... Who has qualified for the 2025-26 Champions League?How can Celtic & Rangers qualify for Champions League?Match of the Day - your questions answered
Yahoo
a day 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
a day 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.
