Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain and the threat to football’s state-owned superpowers

Inside the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, there was a television camera trained on the Paris Saint-Germain delegation, waiting for a reaction.

They didn’t disappoint. Club president Nasser Al-Khelaifi looked like he had seen a ghost. So did sporting director Luis Campos, sitting alongside him.

Al-Khelaifi had been among the most enthusiastic advocates of the new Champions League format: more match-ups between the biggest clubs, more competition, more excitement, he promised. But judging by his startled look during the first-ever league-phase draw last August, being pitted against Manchester City, Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Atletico Madrid and others in their eight matches was not what he had in mind.

😳PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaifi and Sporting Director Luis Campos react to Les Parisiens drawing Manchester City, Bayern Munich, Arsenal and Atlético de Madrid in the Champions Leaguepic.twitter.com/BQxNcTzwTR

— Get French Football News (@GFFN) August 29, 2024

He put a brave face on it afterwards, repeatedly telling reporters how “amazing” this season’s competition was going to be and how, though he felt PSG had the “toughest draw” of all 36 participating clubs, he was excited by the challenge ahead.

Five months later, PSG are languishing in 26th place in the Champions League standings, facing a battle even to scrape into next month’s play-off round to see who fills out the last 16 after winning just two of their first six matches. Al-Khelaifi’s initial look of horror has begun to look justified.

But PSG are not alone in that respect. The past two European champions, Real Madrid and Manchester City, are 22nd and 24th respectively. And while Madrid are firmly expected to progress, with games against Red Bull Salzburg and Brest to finish the league phase, PSG’s meeting with City at the Parc des Princes tonight is laced with the kind of jeopardy that is all too rare at this stage of the Champions League.

Such heavyweight contests have been a welcome feature of this season’s competition, with no seeding system during the league phase. But to this point they have felt relatively relaxed — glamorous, high-profile occasions with relatively little risk, just the way the big clubs’ owners like it.

This will be the seventh meeting between PSG and City since they were acquired by, respectively, Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the vice-president of the United Arab Emirates, in 2011 and 2008. The rewards were far greater when they met in the Champions League’s quarter-finals in 2016 and its semi-finals four years ago, with City winning both ties. This time the rewards are far outweighed by the potential consequences of defeat.

Title holders PSG are nine points clear at the top of Ligue 1 and unbeaten in their 18 matches in France’s top flight this season, but their Qatari owners have never been remotely satisfied by domestic success. In sporting terms, their PSG project is judged almost entirely on what they do in the Champions League, a competition Al-Khelaifi first talked about needing to win by 2016, then by 2018… It is a target which, for all the encouraging steps made in the past 18 months under latest head coach Luis Enrique, has rarely felt more distant than it does right now.

PSG’s chief revenue officer Marc Armstrong told the BBC last season that, contrary to some of Al-Khelaifi’s statements in the past, the Champions League was “not an obsession” for them. “Would we love to win it? Yes,” he said, but he added, “You don’t have to win the Champions League to be a successful club.”

Of course not. And City finally did so in 2023 by following a clear football vision rather than an unhealthy “Champions League or bust” obsession. But for PSG, trusting the process has proved almost impossible. Ligue 1 supremacy has been taken for granted (which is not to say it has always been achieved), so marginal defeats on the European stage have often felt cataclysmic.

There is, though, a misconception in imagining that the legitimacy of the entire Qatari project at PSG (and likewise the Abu Dhabi project at City) hinges on Champions League success. It doesn’t. PSG and City are trophy assets, whose acquisitions can be seen to reflect the wider diplomatic, economic and strategic relationships between France and Qatar, and the UK and UAE. In that respect, PSG and City have already fulfilled their purpose.

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The last time the two clubs met in the Champions League, in its 2021-22 group phase, diplomatic relations between the two Gulf nations had only recently been restored after the Qatar diplomatic crisis. Links have improved considerably since then, with increased cooperation over economic matters as well as over the Israel-Gaza conflict.

A statement from the Qatari government earlier this week detailed conversations between Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani, its prime minister, and UAE minister of foreign affairs Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan (Sheikh Mansour’s younger brother) discussing “the latest developments in Gaza and occupied Palestine territories, particularly in light of the ceasefire agreement and the exchange of detainees and prisoners”.

As much as PSG and City have become flagships for Qatar and Abu Dhabi respectively, they are also just small parts of a far bigger picture as the Gulf region’s global influence — and Europe’s financial dependence on it — continues to grow.

The rivalry between PSG and City is genuine, though.

While the two clubs had a common grievance with UEFA, European football’s governing body, over the implementation and enforcement of financial fair play (FFP) regulations, Al-Khelaifi has sat on UEFA’s executive committee since 2019 and been chairman of the European Club Association (ECA) since April 2021, capitalising on his opposition that spring to the failed European Super League project, to which City and five other Premier League clubs had signed up. City’s chief executive Ferran Soriano was elected to the ECA board in 2023, having missed out two years earlier.

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On the pitch, it is a different matter. The tables have turned since 2016, when, the day before the first leg of that quarter-final at Paris’ Parc des Princes, PSG’s then head coach Laurent Blanc suggested, “Maybe in Europe, they (City) are a bit behind us.” It looked that way for a time, but that 3-2 aggregate defeat spelt the end for Blanc that summer.

PSG reached the Champions League final in 2020 and semi-finals the following year and again last season, but after the departure of so many big-name stars from the squad, most notably Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe, the talk is of a new project under Campos and Luis Enrique, one that is more long-term in its focus. PSG have been successful, but the type of continuity City have enjoyed under manager Pep Guardiola for the past nine years — the past few months’ turbulence notwithstanding — has so far been elusive.

At the pre-match news conference on Tuesday, PSG forward Ousmane Dembele called this the most important game since his €50million (£42.3m/$52.1m at the current exchange rate) transfer from Barcelona in summer 2023. “We know we have to stay alive,” he said — aware that, even if they beat City, they might still have to get a result away at Germany’s Stuttgart next Wednesday to secure a place in those two-leg February play-offs.

“This is a very peculiar match because of the format of the competition,” Luis Enrique said. “It (would have been) hard to imagine that Manchester City and PSG would have (only) this many points after six games.”

It would — and it remains to be seen whether all of that illustrates the strength of the format, the randomness of the fixtures or simply the localised difficulties both clubs have had this season.

Whatever the answer, tonight’s showdown in Paris — “a final”, Guardiola is calling it — is the kind of occasion the Champions League needs.

It cannot be just about big clubs and big teams playing each other more often. There has to be something at stake, something riding on it, a sense of excitement and drama. It still requires such elite teams to underperform significantly, but so far in this competition PSG and City have done that, which is why, rather than a dead rubber, the Parc des Princes will be staging a dogfight.