Mbappé staying in Paris has angered Real Madrid and La Liga but PSG argue the eye-watering numbers add up in their favourSo whose side are you on in the fallout following Kylian Mbappé’s decision to stay with Paris Saint-Germain? Watching the extraordinary outrage in Spain, with the press accusing the Frenchman of lacking class and La Liga branding the deal as “scandalous”, has raised eyebrows. But not as many as PSG being able to stump up a €200m-plus package for the world’s best player – despite making a €224m loss last year.There are no good guys here, only a gnawing unease that the laws of economic gravity are being defied to the further detriment of the game we love. As...
So what next if Mauricio Pochettino leaves? Manchester United seemed ideal, but another possibility could occur soonerThere is probably only one thing a manager can do at Paris Saint-Germain that would enhance his reputation, which is to win the Champions League – and even then there would be plenty of people looking at the £900m net spend since the Qatari takeover in 2011 and thinking: “About time.” Mauricio Pochettino has not done that.If, as seems likely despite his insistence this week he is staying, he leaves PSG in the summer, he does so with the blot of a rare second-placed league finish on his record. He will at least have answered the criticism that he had never won silverware –...
Fans of the biggest clubs are angry and it isn’t a lack of trophies but a desire to gain a stake in the futureThe hymns were still playing and the sermons were still being read, but the cathedral was in flames. The Parc des Princes, this monument to glory and desire, the place where you go to see your fantasies made flesh, was in revolt. They were watching Paris Saint-Germain, their team, rip Bordeaux to shreds with perhaps the most preposterously dazzling front three in the history of football. And they were furious about it.Lionel Messi was booed, by many of the same fans who lined the streets to celebrate his arrival in August. Neymar was booed when he scored...
European Cup has become an obsession that deepens with every year but collapse at the Bernabéu showed their fragility“Don’t you sit in our chair.” It was just a moment in the middle of the madness, another picture of a wild, epic night with all its drama and its silliness too, but David Alaba had summed it up somehow. As the Santiago Bernabéu lost its collective mind on Wednesday and Karim Benzema slipped to his knees, fists clenched, the Austrian picked up a white plastic chair and raised it triumphantly to the sky. Iconic and, when he chose to caption it, symbolic too: you don’t just unseat Real Madrid.“We’re the Kings of Europe!” the banner had declared before the game; by...
Having built a lead through their striker’s brilliance, Paris Saint-Germain crumble under Real Madrid’s pressureThere was once a dream that was Paris. It lasted for just over an hour. At which point, enter the old world – and enter Karim Benzema, who had the night of his storied footballing life in this Champions League last-16 second leg.Under the lights of the Bernabéu Paris Saint-Germain produced one of the more extraordinary collapses of elite football’s modern history, a collapse made all the more abject by the divine well of talent in this Paris team, the gerrymandering certainties of Messi-dom, of that divine front three, bought to secure the crown of European club football in this, our year of Qatar 2022. Continue...