Qatar now runs European football and ensures only its clubs can win

 

 

 

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By Tony Attwood

Who cares about the violence?  Obviously not Qatar because they didn’t have to pay the police, tend the injured, clear up the mess, do the murder investigations, find prisons to put the rioters in or answer any of the very pointed questions about everything that went wrong in the aftermath of the Champions League final.

But we can ask, will anyone other than Qatar seriously want to bid for subsequent finals in the light of this chaos?  I suspect the answer is “yes”, but only if they have a deal that doesn’t hold them responsible for the violence, or a state so repressive that even mention of the word democracy could be a crime.

Oh yes and only if they have no labour laws, so that stadia can be built with imported workers paid far below the minimum wage and who have no health insurance and are just told to go home when the building work is completed.

PSG is of course owned by a foreign state.   Manchester City is also owned by a foreign state, and we see a pattern emerging. – including the forgetfulness among the media of what the result was the first time Arsenal played PSG this past season.   Still it was a few months ago, and a lot of journalists have partaken of a lot of liquid since then.

But there is another fact here.  Since PSG can, with the wealth supporting them, go out and buy anyone they want, they will be looking to maintain their position at the top for some years to come.

Prior to 2013 Paris St Germain had won the French league four times, starting in 1986.  But then from 2012/13 onwards in 13 seasons, PSG won the French league 11 times.  The other two occasions they came second and shot the manager (although that last point might not be true).

Now the point here is that the French League is technically called a “competition”, but normally that implies that before the start, one doesn’t know who will win.   Just as we don’t know who will win the Premier League.   We want it to be Arsenal, but it could be Liverpool or Manchester City or (if they don’t get the legislation thrown at them for the way they got their FFP figures to work last season) Chelsea.  It could even be Newcastle United.

(And yes I know that not many clubs are seriously in the running but at least it is more than one).

In short, having taken over world football by running the World Cup, Qatar has now achieved its second aim of running European football, by running PSG and being able to outbid anyone for any player at any time they feel like it.

Now part of the tragedy of this is that very few journalists are daring to stand up and say “is this what we really want?” although I would cite the Independent who have done a pretty good job of it.

So let us ask about Nasser bin Ghanim Al-Khelaifi  and what he is.   He is chair of beIN Media Group, or Qatar Sports Investments, and president of Paris Saint-Germain/.

Now maybe in one sense that doesn’t sound too frightening, except that beIN Media Group run sports TV channels all over Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East.  And sports channels do like to tell the people who run the sports that are on their channels exactly how they would like the sports to be run, when the matches take place, and where they take place.

And beIN also owns clubs like PSG.  And we might want to note that Nasser bin Ghanim Al-Khelaifi is apparently a big chum of Aleksander Ceferin.

These are the people who have got hold of world football – so much so that the old term of “sportswashing” no longer seems to apply.   Football has in fact been hi-jacked, and the only reason we don’t fully feel that in England is because of the fight that a small number of Premier League clubs have put up to stop the onward march of the European Club Association, by making the Premier League something that is owned by the clubs.

This is why the fight against Manchester City is taking so long.   Manchester City have threatened the rest of the league with tying it up in court forever unless the League gives in to its demands (which is basically the freedom to create a Paris St Germain-type outfit with no restrictions on the money spent, in the Premier League).

It is only because a handful of teams have stood up to ManC that we are not in the same situation in the Premier League already, but the danger is still there and they have not yet been seen off for good.   France gave up the fight against PSG and its money, and now the French League is the PSG league.  We really do need to make sure that the Premier League does not go the same way.