PSG are not a fairy tale story but a step in the direction of the death of football – it’s time to call the Sportswashing of their owners and the brutality it hides: Oliver Holt

I could only see one story on Saturday evening when I saw the scenes of Munich who unfolded on my television screen. When Paris Saint-Germain destroyed Inter Milan in the Champions League Final in the Allianz Arena, I could only think of Luis Enrique and a life in which loss and victory were so inextricably intertwined.

The images that the Spirit flooded were not from Desire Doue’s goals or the sparkle of Ousmane Dembele But from a moment ten years ago when the daughter of the PSG coach, Xana, one Barcelona Vlagging around the field in the Olympiastadion in Berlin after Barca won the Champions League and her father had planted it in the center circle for her.

Xana was only five years old at the time, but four years later she was taken away. She was diagnosed with the rare bone cancer Osteosarcoma and her father, then coach of Spain, walked away from the track to spend all the time he could spend by her side in her last months.

After she was gone, Luis Enrique said she would be the star that his family led and she has that too. He has repeatedly said how happy he is that Xana was nine years in his life and that because of all the memories and the joy she shared, she is still in his life.

After the last whistle on Saturday, the PSG fans unfolded a beautifully moving Tifo Imagine that Xana stands next to her father, this time you are still planning the PSG flag in the Midcirkel in Munich, father and daughter next to each other. Looking from far, that Tifo Will remain my lasting memory of that final.

So it was a wonderful human story. The triumph of a coach about sorrow and the tribute to the little girl he lost was one of the most uplifting sports stories of the year. It was good to look forward to it and to celebrate it at a human level.

But let’s not confuse joy for an inspiring man with our emotions in the direction of what a first Champions League trophy for PSG, a club of the Qatari state, means for sport.

What I can’t accept is the wider idea that the victory of PSG was good for the game. It wasn’t. It was the opposite of that.

“This is a victory for football,” said Rio Ferdinand during his last performance at TNT -Sport and although I have a lot of respect for him as a former player and as an expert, I don’t think he could have been more wrong. The victory of PSG was a victory for State Owner and it was a defeat for football.

The 5-0 victory of PSG was another spectacular triumph for Qatar’s lush and continuous sportswashing project that is increasingly criticizing the autocratic regime of the emirate and the terrible treatment of migrating employees.

Nobody talks about that anymore. Nobody challenged Ferdinand’s claim on the air. One or two journalists wrote about it at night and were shouted from the pulp -like pulpit of social media. This is not time, they were told.

I know from my own limited experience that never seems to be time when it comes to discussing the corrosive effects of state ownership of football clubs.

It is almost like it is now a taboo subject. Especially the broadcasting companies do not touch it. Whatever someone’s view of Gary Lineker, he had the power and conviction to speak out at the BBC at the start of the 2022 World Cup. Now he is gone, it is hard to imagine that someone else is approaching his attitude.

PSG’s Triumph is not a kind of football fee story. Again, it is the opposite. The club has the highest wage account – remotely – of each team in Europe.

They have made the concept of competition in French football an outdated idea. They have won the title of the French competition 11 times in the last 13 years and their wage account has overshadowed that of Inter, so it should have hardly been a surprise that their victory was so emphatic.

Although they have found a way to continue to comply with the financial rules of French football, the hegemony of PSG is just a reason why we should be grateful for the Premier League profit and sustainability rules (PSR).

PSR is not perfect and the clubs with the best lawyers and the most opaque structures are increasingly skilled in circumventing them. But despite the fact that Manchester City-De first club of the state that won the Champions League won-Won an unprecedented four English titles of top flight in a row and established a level of dominance in this country that we have never seen before, PSR has for the time being saved the competition, at least.

The idea that limitations for spending anathema are in the sports world was discredited long ago. The best sports competitions in the world – the NFL, MLB and the NBA – all work with a complex system of financial checks and balances, including a salary limit, which have prevented them being dominated by their most powerful teams.

It is part of the reason why the New York Yankees have not won the World Series since 2009, why the Dallas Cowboys, the richest team in the NFL, have no longer won the Super Bowl and why the New York Knicks, one of the three richest teams in the NBA, have not won a championship since 1973.

Those competitions do not run the type of expenses for so many lawyers in the Premier League. All are competitions that reward good coaching and good recruitment and punishing professional and stupidity. It is as it should be.

The kind of financial imbalance of State Seams such as PSG must be abhorred, not celebrated. They don’t stimulate the game. They kill it. Only those who crave the tyranny of the minority would claim differently.

It is part of the reason that it has been vaguely funny to witness the indignation of those under the Newcastle -support who have sold their souls for the wealth of their Saudi masters, only to realize that having the richest owners in sport does not mean that they can buy the Premier League title every season.

Guess something, you might have to earn that right with good management and wise livestock farming and, in Eddie Howe, Newcastle, a manager who has done excellent work and continues to supervise the club on an upward process.

Luis Enrique has done the same on PSG. For that he must be celebrated and he must be celebrated for what he stands for as a father and as a man. However, to celebrate PSG’s triumph in Munich and the message it sends, it would be to hurry football to get out of disintegration.

Woods showed what TNT missed

It was great to have Laura Woods as the anchor of the latest reporting from TNT Sports’ Champions League on Saturday.

She has the courage to maintain a level of professional distance from her panel members and to interview topics that so many of her male counterparts are striking.

Her absence of our screens after the birth of her first child only served to remind us that she is one of the very best in what she does.