Morning all.
Last night’s Champions League semi-final was a fun watch for a neutral like me, even if I did have a strong preference for Borussia Dortmund over PSG. 1-0 ahead from the first leg, the Germans doubled their lead in the second half with a header from Mats Hummels, and even though PSG threw the kitchen sink at it, they couldn’t find a way through.
Hummels produced a superb piece of defending to deny Kylian Mbappe as he was lining up to take a shot from close range, but based on the way the rest of the game went, even if he had made contact, he’d have hit the bar. So near, yet so, so deliciously far away for PSG, whose continued failure at this level is something that should warm the hearts of all football fans.
I have to say, I love the fact that despite the way the game has developed over the years, where raw pace is often considered sufficient to offset some of the technical inefficiencies of modern forwards, a 35 year old central-defender can be the man of the match. Sometimes you have to dig in, and earn your bit of luck. The xG of 3.25 to 0.77 in PSG’s favour tells some of that story, but that’s also what’s great about football. There’s no doubt Dortmund defended with real heart, but also that the opposition failed to make the most of good chances. I think the result over the two legs was more than fair.
I guess Mbappe will have to go to Real Madrid to win a Champions League now. Obviously the financial aspect of his move to PSG has been extremely favourable to him, but he turns 26 this year, and I wonder will he have regrets about what he might have achieved if he’d gone there earlier. I enjoyed this piece about him from Barney Ronay in The Guardian:
The last time Mbappe started a game in Ligue 1 was five weeks ago. It has been not so much a long goodbye as a meandering, work from home kind of season’s end, extended scenes from Kylian Mbappé’s day off. Football is a long game. It’s about a sustained pitch of performance, dragging the moments out of yourself. Is this the way his talent is meant to be used?
Also, it’s impossible as an Arsenal fan not to connect with what Dortmund have done. They found themselves up against PSG in the group stage, along with AC Milan and Newcastle. A so-called ‘group of death’, from which Eddie Howe’s team were ultimately the corpse that propped up it up. They were beaten by the Parisians away from home, and drew 1-1 in Germany. PSV was a relatively friendly Round of 16 tie, but Atletico Madrid in the quarter-finals was anything but.
Their 4-2 win at home saw them through after a 2-1 defeat in Madrid, and two 1-0s against PSG again in the semi-finals is a very impressive way to reach the final. For me, PSG exist in the same realm as Man City. A club whose success is entirely built on the kind of investment that has skewed the financial reality of football as we know it. When they spent £200m on Neymar, it wasn’t simply one club overpaying for one footballer whose time there was ultimately a massive flop for them and for him, but a deal that had ramifications for the entire market.
It set a benchmark price for a player which, while obviously ridiculous at the time, had a material impact on prices across Europe. It raised the bar, both in terms of fees and salaries, and it was all artificial. Did the sponsorship deals done with companies and entities linked to the ownership that helped fund that transfer bring in revenue commensurate with market value at the time? While not exactly the same thing, it’s a question that puts you in mind of the 115 charges leveled at Man City by the Premier League last year. Tax authorities in France have looked closely at that Neymar deal, but the damage was done the minute it went through.
The difference between City and PSG is that the former have very, very smart people in charge, especially of the footballing side of things, and they have a veneer of respectability that the latter don’t. They’ve been able to deflect away so much of what they have done and how they have done it, to the point there’s just a widespread apathy about their success – even if legal wranglings have bubbled under the surface for years.
You see the manifestation of that when you see Liverpool fans talk about how they’d rather City won the league than Arsenal. A club that has inflicted so much pain on them down the years is preferable to one more analogous to their own because they can write it off as nothing. Or maybe too it’s because in the desperation for an actual competitive rivalry, something that is at the heart of what makes the game of football great, Arsenal fit the bill and City are just this outlier that doesn’t really matter. For the record, I’ve always said I took some heart from the fact that Liverpool were able to compete with and push City so hard, because it showed it’s not 100% pointless to try and win the Premier League.
So, circling back – it’s great to see a club like Dortmund go through against a club like PSG. Underdogs from a financial perspective, underdogs on paper, underdogs on the pitch, but but they just chewed the balls off the big dog and it was fun, fun, fun. More of that please, closer to home, and soon. The other semi this evening is poised at 2-2 between Bayern and Real Madrid, and I’d like to see a German/Spanish final. Let’s see what happens.
Till tomorrow.