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Irish Examiner
17 hours ago
- Sport
- Irish Examiner
As Club World Cup hands out riches, a plan is needed for those left behind
While a dozen of Europe's elite clubs were chasing the American dream, 170 of their less garlanded peers gathered for a barbecue next to Lake Geneva. They had converged on Uefa's headquarters to attend the qualifying round draws for next season's continental competitions; Tuesday night was time to get together, perhaps to speed-date representatives of the team you had been paired with or simply to cut loose before a labyrinthine summer spent journeying in search of league-phase football. Borussia Dortmund were slugging out a goalless draw with Fluminense while the meat hit the grills, but 'Club World Cup' is a dirty formulation in Nyon's corridors of power. Any available screens showed action from Uefa's own U21 Championship and alternative sources of entertainment roamed the pastel green lawns. A caricature artist did the rounds, stopping at the table occupied by Aleksander Ceferin and putting his pencil to work. The picture for these smaller clubs may be similarly distorted, but the humorous aspect is lacking. Uefa were correct to trumpet the event's symbolism in their pre-draw publicity: a vibrant collage of European football life was present, from the storied names of Red Star Belgrade and Rangers to Iberia 1999 of Georgia and Estonia's Paide Linnameeskond. However, beneath the collegiality it is impossible to escape the sense of a majority being left far behind, with ideas to redress the balance painfully few and largely inadequate. Most of Europe's clubs stand no chance of keeping pace with a top-level juggernaut that has unhitched itself and careered away. Some occupy an untenable half-space, unable to seriously challenge those in the big five leagues while crushing domestic opposition with the money on offer from the Champions League, Europa League or Conference League. Nobody is squarely to blame for trends that owe much to late-stage capitalism and geopolitical forces, but there may be a less charitable outlook towards those who fail to act. There is particular concern that the revamped Champions League, for all the triumphalism around its 36-team group format, will have the variety squeezed from it. Nineteen of its slots will be filled by English, German, Spanish and Italian clubs in 2025-26, six from the Premier League alone. For proud institutions such as Malmö, Dynamo Kyiv and Panathinaikos the hopes of tracing a path to one of the seven playoff qualifying berths are achingly remote. European football's top-heaviness is little secret, but alarm bells ring louder when consequences begin to rear up lower down. In the qualifying rounds only the Armenian club Noah and Pafos, from Cyprus, are debutants in the Champions League. That is the lowest figure for 14 years, according to research carried out for the Union of European Clubs (UEC), and indicates that the monotony felt closer to the summit is becoming a consistent theme domestically. Should that be exacerbated the fear is that, as one figure at a leading club suggests, national leagues in their current form will be living on borrowed time. The example of Serbia is instructive. Red Star, who have won eight consecutive titles, will earn a basic £16m (€18.7m) if they follow projections and reach the league phase. If the qualifying rounds proceed as expected their three compatriots in the Europa League and Conference League will fail to get that far. Novi Pazar or Radnicki 1923, their representatives in the latter, would take no more than £1m from that best-case scenario of elimination at the playoff stage. Read More Kylian Mbappe admitted to hospital with acute gastroenteritis The pattern would only be reinforced. There will always be clubs of wildly varying size, but the disparity in funding has never been starker. For Red Star's part, they and their equivalents can only gawp at the bare minimum of $12.81m (€11.16m) European sides will receive from appearing at the Club World Cup. In most cases that figure will be multiplied several times over by its conclusion. The clear danger is that three strata are emerging in Europe, separated by financial chasms that have become impossible to mitigate. Solidarity payments, a subject of fierce bargaining annually, are one of Uefa's ways to soften the divide. Clubs absent from European competition receive 7% of the annual £3.7bn revenue from those flagship events, a further 3% being allocated to those eliminated in the qualifying phase. It is certainly well meant, and has increased markedly for the current three-year cycle, but will not disturb the status quo. Creative solutions are needed and it caught the attention last month when the UEC, formed in 2023 to represent non-elite clubs, unveiled its plan for a 'player development reward'. Under that scheme, another 5% of revenue from club competitions would be redistributed to the teams whose academies developed those competing in them. It has been taken seriously enough for European Leagues to discuss it in depth last week. Any European club not playing in the Champions League proper could benefit. UEC's formula, devised with Transfermarkt, takes into account the on-pitch time by each player and the prize money they have helped generate. The Italian fourth-tier club Pavia, where Federico Acerbi came through the ranks, would have earned £275,000 thanks to his 670 minutes en route to last month's final with Inter. In 2023-24, nearly 1,500 clubs would have benefited from this kind of payment. Jude Bellingham's success with Real Madrid would have handed Birmingham £827,000; Vorskla Poltava, struggling in Ukraine, would have received £679,000 (€795,000) for their club's successes; MSK Zilina, trailing behind Slovan Bratislava's Champions League earnings in Slovakia, would have taken £1.3m (€1.5m). At the top end, Ajax's remarkable production line, picked off so frequently, would have earned them £4.6m. Neither UEC's plan nor any other, including Uefa's welcome £200m (€234m) pot for clubs with players at the past two European Championships, will mend things alone. But it would be a step in the right direction, perhaps helping narrow the gap between those two layers under the elite. Football beneath the ultra-privileged minority will only thrive with integrated incentives that reward clubs for their contributions to the ecosystem. Maybe that, even more than the prospect of a Champions League winner from those clubs assembled by the lake, is a pipedream. In greeting the new European season Ceferin rightly hailed the diversity of the scene he oversees; perhaps Uefa's appointed artist could have warned him what happens when, for all anyone's good intentions, a work of beauty is defaced for ever. Guardian
The Guardian
a day ago
- Sport
- The Guardian
As Club World Cup gifts its riches a proper plan is needed for those left behind
While a dozen of Europe's elite clubs were chasing the American dream, 170 of their less garlanded peers gathered for a barbecue next to Lake Geneva. They had converged on Uefa's headquarters to attend the qualifying round draws for next season's continental competitions; Tuesday night was time to get together, perhaps to speed-date representatives of the team you had been paired with or simply to cut loose before a labyrinthine summer spent journeying in search of league-phase football. Borussia Dortmund were slugging out a goalless draw with Fluminense while the meat hit the grills, but 'Club World Cup' is a dirty formulation in Nyon's corridors of power. Any available screens showed action from Uefa's own Under-21 Championship and alternative sources of entertainment roamed the pastel green lawns. A caricature artist did the rounds, stopping at the table occupied by Aleksander Ceferin and putting his pencil to work. The picture for these smaller clubs may be similarly distorted, but the humorous aspect is lacking. Uefa were correct to trumpet the event's symbolism in their pre-draw publicity: a vibrant collage of European football life was present, from the storied names of Red Star Belgrade and Rangers to Iberia 1999 of Georgia and Estonia's Paide Linnameeskond. However, beneath the collegiality it is impossible to escape the sense of a majority being left far behind, with ideas to redress the balance painfully few and largely inadequate. Most of Europe's clubs stand no chance of keeping pace with a top-level juggernaut that has unhitched itself and careered away. Some occupy an untenable half-space, unable to seriously challenge those in the big five leagues while crushing domestic opposition with the money on offer from the Champions League, Europa League or Conference League. Nobody is squarely to blame for trends that owe much to late-stage capitalism and geopolitical forces but there may be a less charitable outlook towards those who fail to act. There is particular concern that the revamped Champions League, for all the triumphalism around its 36-team group format, will have the variety squeezed from it. Nineteen of its slots will be filled by English, German, Spanish and Italian clubs in 2025-26, six from the Premier League alone. For proud institutions such as Malmö, Dynamo Kyiv and Panathinaikos the hopes of tracing a path to one of the seven playoff qualifying berths are achingly remote. European football's top-heaviness is little secret but alarm bells ring louder when consequences begin to rear up lower down. In this season's qualifying rounds only the Armenian club Noah and Pafos, from Cyprus, are debutants in the Champions League. That is the lowest figure for 14 years, according to research carried out for the Union of European Clubs (UEC), and indicates that the monotony felt closer to the summit is becoming a consistent theme domestically. Should that be exacerbated the fear is that, as one figure at a leading club suggests, national leagues in their current form will be living on borrowed time. The example of Serbia is instructive. Red Star, who have won eight consecutive titles, will earn a basic £16m if they follow projections and reach the league phase this summer. If the qualifying rounds proceed as expected their three compatriots in the Europa League and Conference League will fail to get that far. Novi Pazar or Radnicki 1923, their representatives in the latter, would take no more than £1m from that best-case scenario of elimination at the playoff stage. The pattern would only be reinforced. There will always be clubs of wildly varying size but the disparity in funding has never been starker. For Red Star's part, they and their equivalents can only gawp at the bare minimum $12.81m (£9.6m) European sides will receive from appearing at the Club World Cup. In most cases that figure will be multiplied several times over by its conclusion. The clear danger is that three strata are emerging in Europe, separated by financial chasms that have become impossible to mitigate. Solidarity payments, a subject of fierce bargaining annually, are one of Uefa's ways to soften the divide. Clubs absent from European competition receive 7% of the annual £3.7bn revenue from those flagship events, a further 3% being allocated to those eliminated in the qualifying phase. It is certainly well meant, and has increased markedly for the current three-year cycle, but will not unseat the status quo. Creative solutions are needed and it caught the attention last month when the UEC, formed in 2023 to represent non-elite clubs, unveiled its plan for a 'player development reward'. Under that scheme, a further 5% of revenue from club competitions would be redistributed to the teams whose academies developed those competing in them. It has been taken seriously enough for European Leagues to have discuss it in depth last week. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion Any European club not playing in the Champions League proper could benefit. UEC's formula, devised with Transfermarkt, takes into account the on-pitch time each player has spent and the prize money they have helped generate. The Italian fourth-tier club Pavia, where Federico Acerbi came through the ranks, would have earned £275,000 through his playing 670 minutes en route to last month's final with Inter. In 2023-24 nearly 1,500 clubs would have benefited from this kind of payment. Jude Bellingham's success with Real Madrid would have handed Birmingham City £827,000; Vorskla Poltava, struggling in Ukraine, would have received £679,000 for their club's successes; MSK Zilina, trailing behind Slovan Bratislava's Champions League earnings in Slovakia, would have taken £1.3m. At the top end Ajax's remarkable production line, picked off so frequently, would have earned them £4.6m. Neither UEC's plan nor any other, including Uefa's welcome £200m pot for clubs with players at the past two European Championships, will mend things alone. But it would be a step in the right direction, perhaps helping narrow the gap between those two layers under the elite. Football beneath the ultra-privileged minority will only thrive with integrated incentives that reward clubs for their contributions to the ecosystem. Maybe that, even more than the prospect of a Champions League winner from those clubs assembled by the lake, is a pipedream. In greeting the new European season Ceferin rightly hailed the diversity of the scene he oversees; perhaps Uefa's appointed artist could have warned him what happens when, for all anyone's good intentions, a work of beauty is defaced for ever.
The Independent
11-06-2025
- Sport
- The Independent
How Infantino used Trump and the Club World Cup to open up football's next cash cow
As Fifa put in final preparations for the big show to try and dazzle America, there is something increasingly being said behind closed doors. Figures within the federation openly talk about how the new Club World Cup will quickly move to a biannual tournament, rather than every four years. Despite sources telling the Independent that it is an 'an open secret', Uefa is adamant it will stay at four. They state they have an agreement. It is not, crucially, a legal agreement. The difference in viewpoints is just the latest schism in a build-up that has caused more fractious football politics than any tournament in history. That goes right up to an actual legal challenge against Fifa from the players' union FIFPro. Senior Uefa figures, including president Aleksander Ceferin, are said to barely be able to discuss the Club World Cup without spitting. It might yet cause greater upheaval for the game's future, since the competition almost serves as a nexus for the game's major forces: from the super clubs to Saudi Arabia. The irony is that there is one aspect of the Club World Cup, which starts on Saturday with Al Ahly Egypt vs. Inter Miami, that almost brings a unanimous agreement. Most in football admit the concept is a good idea. Football needed to start spreading the elite game's wealth outside Western Europe, which is why there is little sympathy from tournament supporters for the complaints of the Premier League or Champions League. They are quick to point out exhaustive pre-season tours. This format similarly makes more sense than the previous low-intensity, smaller annual tournament that was held previously. The initial idea even came from a genuine football legend with sporting concerns, in former Fifa Deputy Secretary General Zvonimir Boban. It was partly to replace the 'ridiculous' Confederations Cup - which served as a dress rehearsal for the classic World Cup - but mostly to properly crown club world champions. The problem, according to many in football, is that very little about its implementation has been 'proper'. Fifa president Gianni Infantino previously worked as Uefa Secretary General, and saw first-hand the Champions League's lucrative power. He then saw Boban's idea, and was determined to make it happen. There were even periods around 2018 when an earlier version of the concept was linked with the Super League. Infantino eventually announced the tournament on the eve of the 2022 World Cup final, to the surprise of the rest of the game. The complaint, which led to FIFPro's legal challenge, is that Fifa just unilaterally imposed the competition on the calendar without consulting major stakeholders. Hence, there has been so much agitation about European clubs being 'exhausted'. They point to how there was no obvious space in the calendar, a view supported by how some players are arriving straight from Fifa's own mandated June international break, and the African Cup of Nations has also been moved. Even Mauricio Pochettino 's United States squad will be missing Juventus' Weston McKennie and Timothy Weah for the regional Gold Cup, which runs at exactly the same time. The obvious question is why Infantino was so adamant, given this upheaval. There has been a constant perception of Fifa changing rules to suit the tournament, then dealing with the fallout later. The most controversial example has been Lionel Messi's Inter Miami belatedly being awarded the host slot as soon as they won the league stage of Major League Soccer, even though the US champions are crowned by the play-offs. Messi is a commercial behemoth, after all, which feels like the start of the answer to that question. The Club World Cup has been so tied up with Infantino himself that it's impossible not to put it into the context of his political career. The competition gives Fifa entry to the elite club game, which is where the money is, and where the power is. That in turn allows the president greater scope to fulfil election promises to the 211 member associations, in a patronage system. There, the federation distributes its ample resources through programmes like Fifa Forward and the associations return their votes. On top of all that are now greater political forces, from the super clubs to US President Donald Trump and state influence. Therefore, the political strife isn't really about the tournament but its impact, control, and the future of football. The Club World Cup already comes in a fractious period, where no one wants to give up space, and everyone is trying to claim more. Many domestic leagues are already concerned about their financial futures. Within that, Fifa isn't acting as the ultimate regulator but as commercial 'players', starting to tear football's 'social contract'. This is the collection of loose agreements on which the game just about functions, such as releasing players for international duty. The landscape has already been transformed by huge prize money. Although Fifa wants the wealth of the Champions League, they need to offer sufficient reward for the big clubs to take the competition seriously. That could see the winners get over $90m (£66.8m). This would work out at $18m (£13.4m) a game, which is $7m (£5.2m) more than the Champions League and $13m (£9.6m) more than the Premier League. It's game-changing stuff, driving the push for a biennial tournament. You only have to consider the impact on PSR. That is partly why Premier League clubs are totally unwilling to allow Chelsea and Manchester City late starts to the 2025-26 season, bringing yet more dispute. And while the Club World Cup has been promoted as redistributing money from Western Europe, the structure is such that Western European clubs are almost certain to get more, actually increasing financial disparity, especially between individual leagues. How will other South African clubs be able to compete with the new wealth of Mamelodi Sundowns? Such money was eventually possible through Fifa's $1bn (£742m) broadcast deal with DAZN, which will broadcast every game of the tournament, as well as various sponsorships. One with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund was announced last week. Football's newest state power has consequently been influential in the tournament's staging, and that in football's newest market. The sport is currently enjoying a boom in the US, visible in supporter interest and club ownership. Everyone wants a piece of it, especially the super clubs. Industry figures tell the Independent that the Club World Cup is therefore affording Fifa 'first-mover advantage' in 'football's new frontier'. Infantino's relationship with Trump is consequently more important, since this tournament comes exactly 10 years after the US state investigated Fifa under the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act. The subsequent arrests directly led to the Infantino era. Now, the wonder is whether the Club World Cup leads to something else. Some sources already describe it as an alternative Super League, and potentially the equivalent to cricket's IPL. Might it be the first step in the game's true 'globalisation', where more competitive fixtures are played outside traditional territories? This is why the subject of two years or four years is so contentious. Many would say that is dependent on it being a success, amid doubts about attendances and whether European clubs are even fit enough. Except, the money ensures that doesn't matter. The clubs still want more. There may yet be more politics to come, along with the football.
Telegraph
08-06-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Uefa making an example of Crystal Palace would be farcical
The regulations for Uefa's club competitions determine that no two clubs may have the same owner, management or administration, although when that has presented a problem, Uefa have, by their own admission, found a way around it. As the Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin said himself, the organisation tends to adapt when it suits them. 'There are clubs,' he remarked in April 2023, 'or at least one – where we still pretend it's not the same owner [as another] but it's the same owner, and I will not tell you which. You can guess.' Pretending that the multi-club ownership [MCO] issue does not matter has been Uefa's way of dealing with one of the biggest phenomena of modern football. It is why RB Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg can both play in the Champions League despite sharing an energy drink benefactor and a very famous director of football, in Jürgen Klopp. It is why City Football Group can list Manchester City and Girona among their 13 clubs and both could play in the Champions League last season. The same has been done provisionally for Nottingham Forest and Olympiakos, under the ownership of Evangelos Marinakis. Or Manchester United and Nice under the Ineos ownership. Football is good at pretending. In this case, Uefa is satisfied when an owner's shares of one or the other club are placed in a blind trust. Then the problem simply goes away. Crystal Palace, this season's FA Cup winners, are faced with the kind of administrative nightmare that might see them kicked out of the Europa League because they failed to do the necessary pretending by a certain Uefa deadline. The US investor John Textor, whose company Eagle Football owns around 40 per cent of Palace, did not put that share in Palace in a blind trust by March 1, an MCO deadline brought forward by Uefa this year. As a result of Eagle Football's control of Ligue 1 Lyon, also in the Europa League next season, Palace could find themselves ejected from the competition. Uefa works on the basis that Article 5 of their regulations governing MCO seeks to prohibit a single individual having 'decisive influence' across more than one club. Textor's influence on Palace is so decisive that the joke goes that his share of the club is the most expensive season ticket in the Premier League. Everyone knows Palace is run by its chairman Steve Parish – via his alliance with the two key US investors Josh Harris and David Blitzer – and between them they control the club. Those three, as well as Textor, met Uefa officials last week to explain it. Palace and Lyon do not share a single member of staff. No player has ever been loaned between the clubs. They do not share scouting or recruitment systems or indeed any commercial deal. The sum total of their interaction is the £1 million deal for Jake O'Brien to join Lyon two years ago. Yet this is to be the first MCO test case that might see a Premier League club thrown out of its rightful European competition. There may yet be an MCO issue for Palace with Blitzer's stake, via his MCO company Global Football Holdings, in Brondby. That could jeopardise Palace playing in the Europa Conference League, should Brondby make it through qualifying. But it is the Europa League in which Palace belong. That is the competition they reached by winning the club's first major honour. A competition that is Palace's best chance of signing players who previously would have looked elsewhere. A competition they might just win under a manager, Oliver Glasner, who has won it before with an outsider. This is Palace's chance to climb the ladder – and they have earned it. All that is at risk because an investor with no decisive influence, at a club which has no MCO relationship with Palace did not place his shares in a blind trust three months ago. Why that deadline had been moved forward by Uefa from June 1 last year is not clear. Either way, by March 1, Palace were only just playing their fifth-round tie against Millwall. The rule presupposes that Textor should put his shares in Palace in a blind trust every year on the off-chance the club might win a trophy they had never won before. Either way, had they thought of it at the time, Parish, Blitzer and Harris could not compel Textor to do so – they could only ask him. At Uefa and the European Club Association, there is a willingness to find a way for Palace to play their first season in Europe. They have been here before. Palace had thought that a historic third-place finish in 1991 would be good enough for a place in the Uefa Cup. That season Arsenal won the First Division and Liverpool were second, still banned from Uefa competition for 10 years following the 1985 Heysel disaster. Then in April 1991, Uefa lifted Liverpool's ban after six years and they took the English Uefa Cup place. Forest believe that next season's Europa League place should be theirs. Marinakis placed his shares in a blind trust, in case Forest reached the Champions League as well as Olympiakos. Under the terms of Uefa's rules, Forest would have been compliant and Marinakis determined by Uefa to be not a decisive influence at the club from March 1. Although anyone who thinks Marinakis is not a decisive influence at Forest has really not been paying attention to events off the pitch as well as on it. Meanwhile, Textor's share in Palace has become the key element in a farce that is growing by the day. Public filings show that Textor controls 65 per cent of Eagle Football which itself has around 40 per cent of Palace. That puts him personally in control of less than 30 per cent of Palace – a key threshold for Uefa in determining decisive influence. Uefa's MCO regulations were introduced to stop collusion, corruption and all those other unwanted consequences people used to imagine might be the motive for one person running two or more clubs. They were not brought in to punish clubs with back-seat investors like Textor who have stakes in multiple clubs. Football has changed and the world's wealthiest owners want to own more than one club for reasons that do not include fixing football matches. Caught in the middle of it are Palace, who at last have a chance of doing something remarkable and now have had their sleeve snagged on a rule that was never intended for occasions like this.
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
PSG 2.0 have potential to dominate but players may still look elsewhere
As the hundreds of VIP guests at Uefa's official Champions League final dinner listened attentively, Aleksander Ceferin addressed his audience. It was the night before Paris Saint-Germain eviscerated Inter and, taking the floor before the starters were served at Munich's Paulaner am Nockherberg brewery, he elected to keep his predictions general. 'Tomorrow we play the best game a club could ever play,' he enthused. 'The one who wins tomorrow will be the best club in the world.' Ceferin's wording was no accident. The final took place against the context of Uefa's continuing tensions with Fifa and, most pertinent, the imminent rebirth of the Club World Cup. Whether PSG are the planet's most becoming football institution may depend on where your moral compass points but, about 26 hours after the Uefa president's speech, they proved beyond any doubt that their team sit above everyone. Advertisement Related: PSG win Champions League for first time with record 5-0 final hammering of Inter Will this title, which has come well behind the schedule laid out by their Qatari ownership when they took over in 2011, prove a mere ripple in history or could it spark an era of dominance? Has Luis Enrique's enthralling young side simply happened upon a fleeting confluence of time and place, or will they now bed in for the long haul? Those questions hung in the air as Parisian heads cleared the next morning, although realistically nobody should expect their demolition job at the Allianz Arena to be a one-off. Within hours of the full-time whistle, figures close to PSG were pointing out this has been only year one of their well-documented spring clean. They sought to draw a line under the decadence that had coloured much of the club's modern era, even if their investment in humbler individuals and future-proofed talents has hardly come cheap. This trophy crowns a project and signals the start of one. The new direction has been born out already and there is no intention of changing course, or speed, now. There are clear notes of caution. One is that PSG's Champions League campaign was saved by the playoff safety net that gives faltering big guns a second shot in the new format. Even allowing for the fact direct comparisons are wobbly given the previous home-and-away structure no longer holds, it is worth pointing out the seven points they had amassed after six games of the league phase would have brought their elimination in previous years. Advertisement Their chair, Nasser al-Khelaifi, nominally wearing his European Club Association hat, made precisely this point in his own speech at Paulaner am Nockherberg. His sentiment was that it had been far from an easy ride. Even though they were dominant in the knockout phase, helped significantly by spending £60m on Khvicha Kvaratskhelia's ability to add thrilling new depth to their attack in January, there had been marginal moments against Liverpool, Aston Villa and Arsenal. Not even a cup competition set up to smooth the favourites' paths can offer any guarantees of sustained supremacy. Another caveat arrived, perversely, in the form of a well-wisher. 'The big day has finally arrived,' wrote Kylian Mbappé on Instagram after taking in his former employers' win. 'Victory and in the style of an entire club. Congratulations, PSG.' It was magnanimous indeed from a player who is embroiled in a legal battle with PSG over what he claims is almost £50m in unpaid wages. But the fact Mbappé was offering such wholesome sentiments as a Real Madrid player still presents a red flag. While his departure was seen internally as the final big heave towards breaking with past habits, the fact remains he was a star who decided there was one more rung to climb. Will Désiré Doué, Bradley Barcola, Vitinha or Willian Pacho feel that way one day? PSG remain tied to perceptions that their domestic league offers an insufficient workout; there is also the point that one trophy cannot pull their history and gravitas alongside those of Real Madrid or, should they knock themselves into shape, Bayern Munich and some of the leading English clubs. Related: Désiré Doué joins the global A-list to lead PSG's coronation as kings of Europe | Barney Ronay Advertisement The counterpoint is that the mind-boggling depth of their resources, summed up by the fact their wage bill is thought to be around double that of Inter, allows them to accelerate far beyond traditional grandees as an attractive prospect. PSG were simply too richly funded, well coached and tactically liberated for their opponents to cope with. Perhaps, in an era where appearances matter more than ever and swathes of elite football have become micromanaged to the point of tedium, it is a marriage that makes them the biggest show in town. Ceferin had hedged his bets regarding Saturday's outcome but maybe it pays to be bold in making guesses after all. A few hours before the final, another leading European football executive sat on a rooftop terrace in Munich and assessed the night's prospects. PSG would win 6-1, he said, to mirth around the table but keeping an entirely straight face. The spirit of that forecast was to be proved accurate. It may be harder to claim that PSG 2.0 are destined to ride off into the sunset, but Ceferin's carefully chosen words contained a truth that holds for now.
