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Ken Early: PSG owners have created a sporting Disneyland, with Messi as Mickey Mouse

Qatari money has cost the Paris club dearly – no wonder fans are booing loudly

Real Madrid’s Karim Benzema and Paris Saint-Germain’s Lionel Messi at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium on March 9th. Photograph: Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images

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Ken Early
Mon Mar 21 2022 - 06:00

On Sunday afternoon, PSG played Monaco in a match that might have been more eagerly awaited had PSG not already been 15 points clear at the top of the French league, with 10 games left to play. As always, PSG were favourites, while Monaco had won one of their last eight matches, a run that had seen them knocked out of the French Cup and the Europa League. Angry Monaco fans greeted their team with a banner draped over some empty seats: “Comme vous, on est en vacances!!!” (like you, we’re on holidays). But when Monaco’s players got down to poolside, they found PSG’s towels already laid out.

If anything, Monaco’s 3-0 win flattered PSG. “It’s clear that the Champions League has done a lot of damage. The team has to let go of all that,” said the coach, Mauricio Pochettino. “This was our worst match of the season,” said the Paris captain Marquinhos – quite a claim, considering what had happened 11 days before in Madrid.

Pochettino knows that a team cannot simply “let go” of the sort of disaster that engulfed PSG in Madrid. They had controlled the first 150 minutes of their tie against a mediocre Real side, only to suffer a collective panic attack and collapse. In the end, Luka Modric (36) and Karim Benzema (34) simply had too much energy for them.

It's not clear why Henry, Suárez and Fabregas think PSG fans should bow before the memory of the brilliance Neymar and Messi showed for Barcelona

It was asking a lot for them to face back into the crushing anticlimax of the French league, a competition that has been destroyed by their club’s financial firepower, and perform as though the heart had not been ripped out of the PSG project. Messi was absent with a flu-like illness, so the PSG fans didn’t get to boo him again as they had against Bordeaux last week. This struck TV pundit Thierry Henry as a kind of sacrilege or cultural vandalism. “How can you boo the greatest of all time?” he asked on the Amazon Prime coverage on Sunday. “The guy that has assisted the most goals in Ligue 1? Today, without Messi, the team created nothing.”

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Sad claim

“Assisted the most goals in Ligue 1” – what a sad claim to have to make on Messi’s behalf. The man has won six European Golden Shoes, and his defenders are reduced to trumpeting about him setting up 10 goals in what may not even be Europe’s fifth-strongest league. In reality the standout statistic about Messi’s time in Paris relates to the area in which he used to rule the world: goalscoring. He has scored just two league goals from 60 shots, but that doesn’t capture the true awfulness of his shooting. Based on Statsbomb’s G-xG metric – obtained by subtracting a player’s expected goals from the number of goals they have actually scored – Messi’s finishing performance this season ranks 576th out of 578 players in Ligue 1.

Henry was not the only former great going to bat for the former greats who are currently failing to deliver at PSG. Last week Luis Suárez had been disgusted enough by the booing of Messi and Neymar that he went on Instagram to stick up for his old buddies: “As always, football has no memories . . .” Another former Barça player, Cesc Fabregas, chimed in to agree: “Football has no memory whatsoever.”

By outspending the rest of French football to such an absurd degree, the owners have condemned PSG to a kind of free-floating luxury limbo

It’s not clear why Henry, Suárez and Fabregas think PSG fans should bow before the memory of the brilliance Neymar and Messi showed for Barcelona. It’s obvious that the memories that matter to them will involve what the players have done for Paris. In Neymar’s case, the good memories have been eclipsed by the bad, and in Messi’s there are no memories at all. As far as PSG fans are concerned, Messi is just another past-it star who is only in Paris for the money.

Celebrity-driven

The truth is the PSG fans weren’t booing Messi just because his performances have been disappointing. They’re booing him because of what he represents: the celebrity-driven system in which the stars are bigger than the club. They are booing the idea that they should be grateful simply because Qatar could afford to hire the great Messi after Barcelona finally collapsed under the weight of his contract. They’re booing the owners who think of the club as a kind of sporting Disneyland, Messi as Mickey Mouse, and the fans as passive consumers of entertainment content whose job is to applaud when the icons walk past. The booing is an attempt to reassert the club’s identity: Paris is not about these players, it’s about us. It’s no accident that “Paris c’est nous” (Paris is us) was one of the graffitis daubed outside the Parc des Princes by protesting fans last week, with “Paris ne sera jamais Qatari” (Paris will never be Qatari) and so on.

Most football fans now think of free-spending multibillionaire owners like PSG’s Qataris as the pinnacle – just witness how many Chelsea fans are currently rooting for their club to be taken over by a Saudi group they had never heard of until last week. When people talk about PSG, they seldom reflect on what the Qatari ownership has cost them. Paris is the world’s greatest hotbed of football talent. If any top-level club could build a team around players from the local area, it’s Paris. Infatuated with celebrity, PSG’s owners prefer to spend their money bringing in yesterday’s men from La Liga.

And it’s not just a question of representation. By outspending the rest of French football to such an absurd degree, the owners have condemned PSG to a kind of free-floating luxury limbo: every year, once the Champions League is gone, it feels like they have nothing left. Losing the league, as they did last season, brings humiliation, but winning it brings no elation. Where there is no struggle, there can be no satisfaction. No wonder Mbappé thinks it’s time to check out.

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