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

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

They did not disappoint. Club president Nasser Al-Khelaifi looked like he had seen a ghost. So did sports director Luis Campos, who was sitting next to him.

Al-Khelaifi had been among the most enthusiastic proponents of the new Champions League format: more matches between the biggest clubs, more competition, more excitement, he promised. But judging by his startled look during the first leg of the league tie last August, being lined up against Manchester City, Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Atletico Madrid and others in their eight games 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) 29 August 2024

He put a brave face on it afterwards, repeatedly telling reporters how “fantastic” this season’s competition would be and how, although he believed PSG had the “toughest draw” of all 36 participating clubs, he was relishing the challenge ahead.

Five months on, PSG languish in 26th place in the Champions League standings and face a fight to even scrape into next month’s play-off round to see who fills the last 16 after winning just two of their first six games. Al-Khelaifi’s initial look of horror is beginning to look justified.

But PSG is not alone in that respect. The last two European champions, Real Madrid and Manchester City, are 22nd and 24th respectively. And while Madrid are expected to progress, with games against Red Bull Salzburg and Brest to conclude the league stage, PSG’s meeting with City at the Parc des Princes in night filled with the kind of danger 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 in the league stage. But until now 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 bought by Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Vice President of the United Arab Emirates, respectively in 2011 and 2008. The reward was far greater when they met in the Champions League quarter-finals in 2016 and its semi-finals four years ago, with City winning both legs. 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 games in France’s top flight this season, but their Qatari owners have never been content with domestic success. Sportingly, their PSG project is judged almost entirely by what they do in the Champions League, a competition Al-Khelaifi first spoke of winning in 2016, then in 2018… It’s a goal that for all the encouraging steps taken in the last 18 months under the latest boss Luis Enrique have rarely felt more distant than they do 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 need to win the Champions League to be a successful club.”

Of course not. And City finally did it in 2023 by following a clear footballing vision rather than an unhealthy “Champions League or bust” obsession. But for PSG, it has proven almost impossible to trust the process. Ligue 1 dominance 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 catastrophic.

However, there is a misunderstanding in imagining that the legitimacy of the entire Qatar project at PSG (and likewise the Abu Dhabi project at City) depends 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 relations between France and Qatar and the UK and the UAE. In that respect, PSG and City have already fulfilled their purpose.

The last time the two clubs met in the Champions League, in the 2021-22 group stage, diplomatic relations between the two Gulf nations had only recently been restored following the diplomatic crisis in Qatar. Relations have improved significantly since then, with increased cooperation on economic matters as well as the Israel-Gaza conflict.

A statement from Qatar’s government earlier this week detailed talks between Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani, its prime minister, and UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan (Sheikh Mansour’s younger brother) on “recent developments in Gaza and the occupied Palestinians areas, especially in light of the ceasefire agreement and the exchange of detainees and prisoners”.

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

However, the rivalry between PSG and City is real.

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

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

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

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

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

It would – and it remains to be seen whether all this illustrates the strength of the format, the randomness of the tournaments or simply the local difficulties both clubs have had this season.

Whatever the answer, tonight’s clash in Paris – “a final”, Guardiola calls it – is the kind of occasion the Champions League needs.

It can’t just be about big clubs and big teams playing each other more often. There has to be something at stake, something driving it, a sense of tension and drama. It still requires such elite teams to underperform significantly, but so far in this competition, PSG and City have done so, and so instead of a dead rubber, the Parc des Princes will stage a dogfight.

(Top photos: Al-Khelaifi, left, and Sheikh Mansour; Getty Images)