Ligue 1 looks unhealthily one-sided and it is not alone: the domination of the game’s super-clubs is only just beginningIt gets to Sunday evening. You’ve done your chores. You’ve had your dinner.You’re tired. You have work on Monday. You just want something to stick on the telly while you flick through the papers or doze on the sofa. These days you have choices. Next Sunday, for instance, if you have a comprehensive satellite package, you could watch Levante against Real Madrid, Roma against Fiorentina or Nice against Marseille. Which are you going to choose? Related: Grealish and Lukaku deals expose inequalities of the Premier League Continue reading...
Wherever perhaps the greatest player of all time ends up, this wretched tale shows what modern football has becomePerhaps football has never been about football. Certainly it’s a long time since those who pontificate about the separation of sport and politics have seemed anything other than peripheral cranks (albeit an alarming number of them serve on the IOC or at Westminster). But still, the saga of Lionel Messi’s contract is so profoundly sordid that you wonder whether Ebenezer Morley, if he had known where it would lead, would ever have written the letter to Bell’s Life magazine in 1863 that led to the formation of the Football Association a year later.Morley’s main concern was to end “feverish” disputes about the...
There have been more obviously brilliant performances by City but none surely so calm or complete as PSG lost their headsEverywhere you looked, people were losing their heads. There was Ángel Di María stamping on Fernandinho. There was Leandro Paredes hurling the ball at an opponent. There was Marco Verratti, seconds after being booked, pulling Riyad Mahrez’s shirt. There was Presnel Kimpembe and Danilo flying into challenges. There was Mauricio Pochettino, having at one point marched on to the pitch to try to calm his side, giving up and sitting glowering on the bench. And there was the Dutch referee Bjorn Kuijpers smiling beatifically, determinedly keeping 21 players on the pitch, although had one of those late lunges brought a...
Critics are quick to dismiss the Manchester City man as a mere speed merchant, but he is one of the game’s best full-backsIt was about 40 minutes into the semi-final on Wednesday night that Kyle Walker made the first of his trademark overlapping sprints up the right wing. You know the one: the classic jet-powered Walker burst that seems to possess a surreal comic-book quality. Cartoon smoke billows from him as he goes. Cars are hurled aside in his wake. A dweeby looking businessman gets coffee blown all over his suit. Manchester City were 1-0 down to Paris Saint-Germain, and with half-time looming, City’s all-action hero had finally decided to join the party.That run came to nothing, but a minute...
Pep Guardiola’s side suffocated their opponents in the second half as PSG’s collective meltdown gifted City the upper handIt may be that history comes to look back on the past few days as a turning point in the history of European football, as the Super League, a desperate gamble by the impoverished traditional elite, was crushed and the petro‑clubs, having challenged for so long, finally took charge. And in a great time of crisis, of such flux that unlikely alliances have been forged and the quest for at least some good guys in football ownership – anybody, anywhere – landed upon some spectacularly implausible candidates, there is something deeply reassuring that some constants remain: deep down, Paris Saint-Germain still have...