PSG’s owners consider European success as their destiny; holding the trophy as the 2022 World Cup begins would be considered perfect PR. Surprisingly, and, odd as this may sound, Kylian Mbappe is actually perceived as the super-glue that the club’s visionary owners can use, especially after the epochal signing of Lionel Messi, to make sure the front three luminaries geld well to spearhead their strike for new gold.
It’s already common knowledge that Neymar has never played more than 20 matches in a Ligue 1 season and has missed more than 25 per cent of PSG’s Champions League games since arriving in France. Conversely, Mbappe has played in 28 of a possible 30 European fixtures since he signed. In short, the young French dynamo, already on the ascendancy as the next one with the skills to take over for the new generation, is still the one who is the best link-up between Messi and Neymar for the Parisian club.
But then sporting factors play second fiddle to geopolitics and the privileges of State ownership by a nation anxious to sportswash their human rights record in the eyes of the west. Which is why the usual economic logic – the contract expiry date, the mammoth fee, the desire of the player and etcetera – does not apply here within this new context. The true strength of the game’s new superclubs lies not even in their ability to buy players at exorbitant prices or fantastically high wages – which characterized the power and wealth of the snooty elite clubs in the past – but their lack of need to sell them and their apparent disdain to do so. They are confident in quietly exercising the total control they can actually wield in defying the laws of logic and economic necessity.
Non-elite, normal clubs, like any other commercial enterprise, can only aim to buy low and sell high as this is the usual, prescribed modus operandi to maximize profits. Then come the established elite clubs – the bourgeoisie and the cognoscenti (or at least those that are well-run) – aiming to buy high and sell even higher as they are haughty enough to realistically afford this luxury of indulgence. Lastly come the superclubs – be they oligarchies or state-owned – for whom extreme wealth is an afforded privilege, aiming to buy high and believe that they can avoid selling at all unless they want to. That forms the basis of the new football socio-economic theory – if wealth provides any one thing, it provides choice.
In other words, in creating wealth, choices are created.
PSG are operating on an entirely different orbit. This summer’s transfer market became a three-way battle between state-owned clubs flexing their muscles as nouveau riche clubs spending and selling intelligently vs the historic elite; there was only like to be one winner. The Premier League’s broadcasting deal (77 per cent higher than the next league) gives them some added power, but all clubs are fighting against a tide of state ownership, and continually griping about a lack of stringent regulation that allows these state-owned clubs to grow exponentially stronger.
Europe’s older, established elite are not finished yet, and are trying at least to put up some kind of a fight. Atletico Madrid have, at least for now, have pounced on the opportunity to take advantage of Barcelona’s mismanagement woes, Manchester United and Liverpool are still largely depending on their global marketing appeal to wrangle new commercial deals and stay afloat, Bayern Munich are still enjoying their domestic dominance that simultaneously allows them to pick and poach players off the rest of the Bundesliga, in the process avoiding the obligation to sell their highest-value assets.
Others are either not so fortunate or not so smart. Barcelona are half-broken, reduced to a measure of their former selves. Arsenal are also a shadow of their former selves, a far cry from the glamor and glory of the early Invincibles and Arsene Wenger days. Inter soared into the azure skies briefly but, like Icarus, flew too close to the sun, with an unsustainable model unavoidably leading to a financial crisis. Juventus, the juggernauts, bought Ronaldo as a desperate move to launch their assault on the Champions League but were left crippled as a result, without the financial power to buttress the rest of the squad and had to be content with being able to shed his wages finally this summer.
There is righteous, and entirely reasonable, anger towards the European Super League, just as there is a reason why Paris Saint-Germain didn’t sign up to the ESL plans and why Manchester City were the first English club to drop out of them – the status quo enables them to seize greater control. There is an ever-decreasing group of clubs who hold realistic ambitions of winning the Champions League and each summer reinforces that smaller pool. Clubs like Barcelona do not deserve to avoid scrutiny for their mismanagement, but it was provoked by a shift at the top end of the game.
The new is already moving in and eschewing the old. It is a totally new game that is being mapped out way beyond the football pitches as the trenches are already being dug with new alliances being formed as old ones are hastily abandoned. The new battle is being fought out for the survival of only the fittest, the strongest, and the most affluent. The latter is where the real power lies as power has at its disposal, choice.
PSG president Nasser al-Khelaifi has recently hit out at Liverpool and the other 11 clubs involved in the failed European Super League project. Those involved in the project also left the European Clubs’ Association (ECA), the body that represents the professional interest of European clubs, but have since been readmitted. Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur were the other five English sides that joined the Reds in backing the controversial proposal, along with AC Milan, Inter Milan, Juventus, Atletico Madrid, Barcelona and Real Madrid.
“I will not spend much time talking about 18 April and the ‘not-so-Super League’ because I do not like to focus on fabulists and failures,” said Al-Khelaifi at a conference in Geneva, Switzerland.
Barcelona, Juventus and Real Madrid have vowed to carry on plans for a Super League and are the only three sides to not be welcomed back to the ECA.
Al-Khelaifi was appointed as new chairman of the ECA in April and wasted little time to aim a dig at the breakaway clubs during his first major speech in his role.
Al-Khelaifi was quick to dismiss their ideas, however, and claimed that the rest of the footballing world are ‘moving forward’ without them.
He said: “Together we defended the interests of European football for everyone. We relied on the resolve and strength of [Uefa] president [Aleksander Ceferin], who stood up to the midnight coup. He said ‘we will win’ and we did.
“While the three rebel clubs waste energies, twist narratives and continue to shout at the sky, the rest of us are moving forward.”
PSG, along with the likes of Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, were not involved in plans to join the ESL.
Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli stepped down from his role as chairman of the ECA due to the involvement of the Italian side in the Super League plans, enabling the PSG chairman to take up a new challenge.
PSG are playing by their own rules. They have changed the game beyond our conventional cognizance of normality and sense. Even those things that seem only tangentially connected to them only appear to be so. The Pied Piper is already beginning to play the mesmerizing tune that everyone else must soon dance to.
For now, Mbappe remains in Paris. His dream of sitting in Ronaldo’s Bernabeu throne will not be realised for another year and a season playing alongside Messi is a huge consolation prize in the meantime. He has abundance of time and talent on his side to achieve all that he wants. But this summer he learned agonizingly that he was not in control. Nor was Messi, left crying at his own press conference and then forced to embrace the new future that was handed to him, not by his own choice.
Real control lies in the hands of those who can well afford – besides also knowing fully well how – to play the game at the highest levels as either corporate- or State-owned entities that are beyond scrutiny, or at least prefer to think they are. All players, including Messi, however ‘other-world’ they may be in terms of their actual skills, talents and marketability, are merely relegated to the role of marionettes with the strings invariably attached to them jangled and pulled by their invisible puppet masters.
A bitter pill to swallow, no doubt, but therein lies the harsh truth.