No Rio, PSG’s Champions League win is not “a victory for football”…
...a rumination on cultural amnesia, state-power and sportswashing.
When I was setting up Against the Run of Play, I promised myself two things. First, that this Substack was going to be home of thoughtful, heritage-focussed reflections on football culture. Second, I’d steer clear of any reactionary commentary on current affairs in the game.
Though I’ve broadly stuck to this formula, I’ve spent much of the last 72 hours ploughing through the huge amounts of online discourse following the Champions League final on Saturday night.
Despite my best efforts, I’ve found the temptation to add to the noise simply too great to resist.
Last Saturday in Munich, Paris St. German tore Inter Milan limb from limb. It was the most one-sided Champions League final of all time, both statistically and spiritually.
As I sit writing in the afterglow of the final, there is so much to unpack.
There was the arrival of 19-year-old Désiré Doué as a global superstar with a glittering individual performance. There was the remarkable 5-0 scoreline, and the breathtaking collective display of an astonishingly effective and efficient PSG side. There is the heartwarming journey of PSG manager Luis Enrique, who has reached the career high of winning the Champions League with a second club via the most terrible of personal tragedies.
But despite so much rich narrative spinning out from Munich, I have not been able to shake a feeling of profound melancholy about the way the game unfolded.
To this end and against all the odds, the most prescient piece of analysis on the night may have come from the awful Rio Ferdinand.
With Inter’s mauling reaching its sticky end, Rio turned to his TNT Sport commentary colleagues and proudly declared PSG’s win a “victory for football”.
Not in my name.
If Ferdinand was scrambling for the words to encapsulate Saturday’s remarkable spectacle, he succeeded. I’m just not sure his words are profound for the reasons that he thinks they are.
As the celebrations unfolded, Ferdinand rode at the vanguard of a battalion of servile pundits, keen to shower Enrique’s remarkable young side with a cavalcade of compliments for their incredible work-ethic and mesmeric progressive football. Many have been excitedly proclaiming this victory the starting gun on a new era of domination in European football. How healthy.
After two decades watching the game, very little shocks me with regard to the fickleness and short memory of football supporters and journalists alike.
However, the rehabilitation of PSG in the popular footballing imaginary from grotesque celebrity experiment to champions of hearts and minds is truly a bridge to far for me.
It is vital that we address and re-centre the crucial contextual factor underpinning PSG’s remarkable ascension: the fact that they are owned, funded and bankrolled by a despotic oil state.
PSG’s Champions League victory represents the crescendo of a protracted football-led sportswashing project run from the very highest levels of the Qatari government.
From the beginning, it has been a masterclass in soft power and reputational laundering. Openly, rapidly and brazenly, Qatar have maneuvered their huge resources to embed themselves as an inseparable, inoperable node of football culture.
In the last decade, they have hosted the greatest World Cup final of all time. They have effectively taken control of European club football through the ECA. They have taken on a huge stake in global football broadcasting through BeIn Sports. And now, they have created the best club team (and equally importantly one of the most potent footballing brands) in the world at PSG.
As the brilliant Barney Ronay wrote in the Guardian earlier in the week:
Some people are said to have a finger or two in the pie. [PSG club president] Nasser al-Khelaifi has both fists jammed in there so deep it’s hard to know where the pie starts and finishes. He is the pie.1
In short, Qatar’s mission to dominate European football is complete.
It’s easy to talk about the growth of Qatari influence in football in abstract terms and lose sight of the genuinely corrosive impact that the involvement of despotic regimes can have on the game and beyond – and indeed, why they bother with football at all.
Let’s run the cold facts of the matter.
Qatar is an absolute monarchy, an authoritarian regime in which female citizens are subject to male guardianship laws, authorities detain individuals for their sexual orientation and the authorities curtail the right to freedom of expression by arbitrarily detaining individuals who speak out for greater rights.
It is a society built on the insidious kafala system, which according to Amnesty International has seen thousands of migrant workers subject to serious abuses, including restriction of movement, wage theft, harsh working conditions and even death.2
It’s vital we emphasise that all of Qatar’s investment in football – and PSG specifically – is not only inseparable from these abuses, but directly caused by them. In other words, Qatar’s investment in PSG is a meticulously planned, deeply political use of the cultural capital of sports to normalise the actions and existence of an autocratic state without the need for reform.3
Though insignificant against this wider geo-political and ethical picture, it’s also important to emphasise that there is also a corrosive sporting impact to state involvement in football too.
I hope that it is not lost on the reader that the losers (or victims?) of Saturday’s final were Inter Milan. They have now lost two of the last three Champions League finals, both of them to state owned clubs.
Though Inter have long been a proverbial giant of Italian and European football, Saturday’s mauling lays bare the seemingly competitive impossible obstacle that state-owned clubs represent.
Despite all the talk of a re-modelled, grassroots leds approach at PSG, the Parisians still have by far the biggest wage bill in European football and boast a side that cost nearly €1 billion to put together.
Quite simply, PSG, Man City and (soon) Newcastle have a bottomless pit of resources to throw at their teams, a reality which is devastating for competitive balance in European football.
It is perhaps this that made the sight of Inter’s grizzled Dad’s army being torn apart by PSG so melancholic. This was the spectacle of one of the grand old warships of European football being overwhelmed, outgunned and ignominiously hauled off for scrap by a new, superior model.
This is the new state-sponsored era. And the rest of us – even footballing giants like Inter Milan – are just simply existing in it.
So against such a bleak backdrop, is there anything that can be done?
I’m more hopeful than most.
I spent the back half of last week in the lead up to the final at the Fair Game conference in Wimbledon – a collection of the finest minds in the football industry, journalism and academia coming together to try and forge a more equitable future for the game.
One of the most encouraging conversations from the weekend came on a panel entitled “Sportswashing: What can we do” . What emerged from the conversation was a genuine sense of optimism. Specifically, there was a consensus that with a unified, top-down policy approach, it is possible to formulate international regulation which would prevent state-linked owners from taking over clubs.
But until and beyond the moment the footballing authorities achieve a global remedy to state ownership, supporters need to recognise our responsibility to continue calling out the PSG project – and others like it – for what they are: sportswashing.
It is crucial that we do not separate the art from the artist.
By all means, adore PSG the sporting spectacle. But abhor PSG the sportswashing project.
Enjoy the dazzling football of Luis Enrique’s all-star dream team, but temper that enjoyment with the depressing knowledge of the blood money and cold calculus that the spectacle is predicated upon.
Crucially, commentators with huge public platforms like Rio Ferdinand must understand that when they publicly throw their praise behind a team like PSG, they take on a small degree of complicity in what the Qatari government are trying to achieve in football.
By naturalising PSG’s triumph as “a victory for football” Rio Ferdinand is not only normalising the competitive and financial distortion of the sport we all love, but even more damagingly, is aligning the values of the game with those of one of the most despotic regimes in the world.
It’s time we took our moral obligations as supporters, writers and commentators more seriously.4
We need to guard against our collective tendency towards cultural amnesia, and recognise the potent threat state investment in football poses - not just to competitive balance but to football’s moral compass.
It is only by continuing to vocalise our knowledge and disdain of PSG’s reputation laundering mission that we can start to redress the deep imbalances that reverberate out from their monumental victory on Saturday – both in and out of the game.
Ronay, B. (2025) ‘Qatar bid to complete football with PSG project’s crowd-pleasing third act’ The Guardian, May 29th. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/may/29/qatar-bid-to-complete-football-psg-project-champions-league-final/.
Amnesty International (2024) Human rights in Qatar. Available at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/middle-east/qatar/report-qatar/.
Delaney, M. (2024) States of Play: How Sportswashing Took Over Football. London: Seven Dials. pp. 33-35.
Skey, M. (2022) 'Sportswashing: Media headline or analytic concept' International Review for the Sociology of Sport. p. 12.
Amazing and thoughtful article Josh. Football it's so much sport that can't be just business, we can be delighted by a football-art performance made by anyone, but we can't loose sight that's so much business to be just a sport, and state-owned clubs are for sure a critical damage. Nevertheless, Inter been owned by a global Capital Management, on my view, isn't so healthy either.
Thanks for the reality-check, Josh! Great article - it is so easy as a football fan to be blown away by the spectacle, and forget the context.