Pep Guardiola’s free-flowing team are starting to run away with the Premier League and are doing it in a way that cannot help but soak up new admirers
The devil always gets the best tunes. Watching Paris Saint-Germain overwhelm Celtic in the Champions League on Wednesday the most striking thing about PSG was not the sense of powerful gears still in reserve, or even the basic beauty of their attacking play, the way the ball skittered about between Neymar and promising loanee-trialist Kylian Mbappé like a bead of water in a pan of hot fat. The most remarkable thing was how difficult it was, suddenly, to properly dislike them.
Difficult but not impossible. It is important to emphasise this. PSG’s on-field brilliance may be a concern for any football fan committed to resenting and fearing the entire concept of “Paris Saint-Germain”, puppet-club of the world’s richest per capita nation, and an entity that has taken the idea of buying success to the most literal-minded global illuminati extreme.
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