Much as it pains me to say it, congratulations to Paris St Germain for becoming the first French team to win the Champions League since Marseille in 1993. I don't know if they were particularly on form tonight, if Inter were particularly off, or whatever, but 5-0 is a pretty emphatic victory. Especially when you consider that PSG got here by beating a bunch of English teams, while Inter got here by beating this season's German and Spanish champions. One would have expected more of a fight from Inter, but clearly their age told, especially when up against epochal talents like Kvicha Kvaratskhelia and Desiré Doué, plus all the other great players PSG have built into this team.
It's easy to be dismissive, but maybe a little unfair. Yes, the French league is ridiculously uncompetitive: PSG have won the last four titles, plus eight of the last 10, and they didn't lose a game this season until they'd guaranteed the title. This is after the period a few years ago when Olympique Lyonnais won seven titles in a row.
It's also easy to be dismissive of a team that's so transparently become a petrostate's sports washing project, and that spent the last decade pursuing the Galactico model. They paid a record fee for Neymar Jr, brought Lionel Messi in from Barcelona, and snapped up Kylian Mbappé in time to see him blossom into one of Europe's finest players and see his transfer fee and influence shoot up. As a result, it was easy to enjoy the sight of them dominating the French league but always falling short in the Champions League, sometimes embarrassingly so.
But credit where credit is due: the management at PSG have abandoned the Galactico thing, allowing those three huge-name players to leave (some with better reputations than others, it must be said), and then giving coach Luis Enrique the latitude to actually build a team. I haven't watched much of PSG this season, but when I have, Kvaratskhelia has been particularly eye-catching for his runs up the flank, and I think he has a genuine claim to being Europe's most exciting young player. Kylian who?
I don't know if I've changed my stance about France's position at the top of the UEFA coefficients. I continue to maintain that there's a Top 4 leagues (England, Spain, Italy and Germany), which are typically closer to one another than they are to the chasing pack - though currently England is so far ahead that I might need to revise this statement. France has the fifth-highest coefficient, but it's farther from Germany, in fourth, than it is from the Netherlands in sixth, or than Germany is from Italy in second place.
French teams haven't really performed very well in Europe, historically, as evidenced by the fact that today's result is only the second time a French team has won the highest European trophy. No French team has ever won the Europa League (or its predecessor, the UEFA Cup), and PSG is the only French club ever to win the now-defunct Cup-Winners' Cup.
PSG is helped along by its owners' financial clout, much as Manchester City has benefited in the Premier League - although curiously, they also found it difficult to win the Champions League until fairly recently, when they, too, beat Inter in the final. This is why I say, there's no Top 5: it's just a Top 4 plus PSG.
Would it be good if French teams won more stuff? I suppose, if it meant more than just PSG winning European trophies, or at least getting to semifinals of major European competitions. But I wouldn't like to see a situation where England, Spain, Italy, Germany and now France are all getting oversized Champions League presences.
Under the previous rules, before the Champions League switched to the league format in the fall, the top 4 countries got four spots each, guaranteed, which accounted for fully half of the teams participating in the competition at that level. Accordingly, the group phase typically featured teams from more countries but then the knockout phase would only ever feature teams from the Top 4 and PSG. Maybe a Dutch or Portuguese team would slip in there, usually because an Italian team would slip up somewhere, but certainly no Eastern European teams.
I don't see this state of affairs changing anytime soon. The other traditional French powers just can't seem to compete with PSG's money, and they can't seem to get their acts together in Europe. But although today's result isn't exactly a win for teams from countries outside the Top 4, it does at least mark the first Champions League win from a team that isn't English, Spanish, Italian or German since 2004.
Although now that PSG has its trophy, I wouldn't mind seeing an Italian team win it again, for once...
No comments:
Post a Comment