FUNNY
OLD
GAME
Comedian
George Lewis
reflects on the
season’s actionAfter their worst ever
Premier League campaign,
Manchester United have
cancelled their end-of-season
awards ceremony. It’s a damning
indictment of just how bad things
are that United can’t even face
having a pint with each other.
But it means there are a bunch
of little plastic trophies and a
function room going spare. So, I
have commandeered them for my
own end-of-season awards do.
Here we go:Best Partnership Son Heung-min
and Harry Kane have been good,
but what entertained me the most
were the footballers that
partnered with NFTs and
cryptocurrencies. The unlikely
move led to John Terry flogging
pictures of cartoon baby apes
(that subsequently crashed in
value) and Wayne Rooney
describing himself as a “partner in
Blockasset”, which I found to be a
completely natural and believable
thing that Rooney would say.
Can’t wait for more next year.
Greatest Comeback It’s a close
one. Christian Eriksen’s
miraculous return to football
moved everyone, Everton gave us
pure drama with their 3-2 win
over Crystal Palace last week and
Newcastle United managed to
escape relegation with nothing
but fighting spirit and the richest
owners in the history of sport. But
for me, the award has to go to
pitch invasions. Yes, there are
safety concerns, players hate them
and groundstaff have had their
summer breaks ruined, but they
are just so damn nostalgic. A few
violent morons are already
ruining it and next season we’ll all
be caged in like hamsters.
Most Spurs-y Team You’d have
thought Spurs would have been
nailed on for this one but with
their constant self-sabotage, I
have to give it to Arsenal.
Best Stadium For the first time, it
isn’t a stadium. Instead, the award
goes to the British Courts of
Justice, which played host to some
of football’s most dramatic stories.
Manchester City’s continued
escape from Financial Fair Play
punishment that you just couldn’t
make up (unless you are City), the
upcoming challenge from Leeds
United and Burnley of Everton’s
finances and, of course, Wagatha
Christie. I fully expect Sky to
acquire the rights to televise trials
from next year with Roy Keane
giving post-courtroom analysis.
Interview of the Season While
Romelu Lukaku’s chat with Sky
Italy was memorable, it’s hard to
look past Ralf Rangnick’s body of
work. I can’t remember a manager
who has so mercilessly pointed
out the flaws of his own players.
It’s a risky technique, but a strong
team can use comments like his to
reflect and improve.
Unfortunately for United, they are
not a strong team.
And finally, I’d like to thank
Mike Dean for his services to
refereeing, wish him well in his
retirement and tell him he’ll be
missed. But I just can’t bring
myself to do that. So, Mike, I’ll
just leave your carriage clock by
the door.thegame
IANHAWKEY
European Football
16 1GG Monday May 23 2022 | the times
For the past three months, Real Madrid have had
their sights set firmly on two targets. Both are in
Paris, both ambitious, and in each case, it looked
for much of the chase like the numbers did not
quite add up. No matter. Hombre, this is Real,
where it may sometimes look like there’s a deficit
to overcome but where the aura, the irresistible
magnetism, will make up for that.
The short-term Paris objective, Saturday’s
Champions League final at the Stade de France,
in which Real will meet Liverpool, was achieved
with a magnificent, high-wire swagger. The
numbers did not add up at all for most of their
round-of-16 tie with Paris Saint-Germain. With
half an hour of the second leg to go, Real were
losing 2-0 on aggregate. But they are Real. They
won 3-2.
Come the quarter-final, they trailed Chelsea
4-3 with ten minutes of the second leg left. Real
won in extra time. Semi-final? Even more of a
tease. Here the deficit looked truly ominous, Real
5-3 down to Manchester City with 179 minutes of
the tie played. Somehow, they reached the final.
The simpler Paris target on Real’s
swashbuckling 2022 calendar appeared to be the
hiring of Kylian Mbappé, native of the French
capital’s suburbs but a Real fan since he was old
enough to stick posters of Zinédine Zidane and
Cristiano Ronaldo in all white on his childhood
bedroom walls. Real suspected that their
numbers might show a small deficit in the
financial duel with PSG, where the 23-year-old
has played since 2017 but was letting his contract
run down. They trusted the aura. Besides, the
wage and supplementary earnings offered to
Mbappé to join Real in July were astronomical.
Terms had been largely agreed. Real felt
assured by some of the closest advisers to
Mbappé that he intended to join them. They
lived easily, until last week, with the soap opera
being carefully cultivated around the big decision
confronting the France forward — to stay at
PSG, a new-money club from a French league
that has only ever produced one European Cup
winner? Or to be seduced by the aura of Real, the
13-times European champions? The will-he-or-
won’t-he suspense seemed helpful to Real, a
teasing cliffhanger just like their Champions
League knockouts, in which prestige, history, and
establishment-heft would be likely to come out
on top.
But at the weekend, confirming suspicions that
had gathered fast and suddenly, the president of
Real, Florentino Pérez, received a message from
Mbappé saying that, this time, Real would not be
getting their man. The forward instead
committed to a three-year extension at PSG that
the French champions had been pushing on him,
ratcheting up in value, for the best part of 24
months. He will earn well in excess of €1 million
(about £846,000) a week, in addition to a
signing-on fee of close to two years’ worth of his
new wage. PSG and Mbappé’s camp are briefing
that the two offers he was weighing up, and
auctioning against one another, ended up similar
in terms of annual earnings; Real say otherwise,
and that they were emphatically gazumped.
It is an arresting snub, of the sort that this club
seldom hears. Under the two mandates of Pérez,
the club president for most of this century, they
have made headhunting superstars part of the
aura, be it Luis Figo’s turncoat move from
Barcelona, Zidane leaving Juventus, Brazil’s
Ronaldo quitting Inter Milan, Kaká being prised
from AC Milan or Cristiano Ronaldo upgrading
from Manchester United.
Time was when a selling club regarded it as a
triumph merely to delay by 12 months a star’s
transfer to Real — as with Ronaldo, hearing outSir Alex Ferguson in 2008, or Eden Hazard,
remaining with Chelsea, in 2018 — or to at least
walk away from a deal with the satisfaction that
the buyer had been exhausted and irritated by
the stubborn pace and price of transfer
negotiations. Tottenham Hotspur managed that
when they sold Luka Modric and Gareth Bale to
Real.
Almost every club that has lost a world-beater
to the Bernabeu is permitted a smile, then, at the
pious indignation unleashed on the club’s behalf
because Mbappé eventually said “No”. “An ugly
moment for football,” wrote a senior columnist at
the Spanish sports newspaper, AS. The head of
Spain’s La Liga, Javier Tebas, rattled a sabre at
the pulling power of PSG, a club transformed in
the 11 years since their takeover by a Qatari
sovereign wealth fund. “Renewing [the contract
of] Mbappé’ at huge cost after losses of €700m in
recent years while carrying a wage bill of €600m
is an INSULT to football,” Tebas tweeted (the
capitals are his).
La Liga, from where Neymar and Lionel Messi
have been prised by PSG in the past five years,
said that it will file complaints about PSG’s
balance of spending to income to Uefa and to the
European Union, while noting that the PSG
president, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, sits on Uefa’s
executive committee. He also chairs the
European Club Association, a body which has
been instrumental in reshaping Uefa’s FinancialFair Play (FFP) rules — under which PSG were
investigated in 2017 — towards a new system
with, potentially, greater flexibility for owners to
invest more as a ratio of a club’s revenues than
under the previous FFP restraints.
The Mbappé non-transfer follows swiftly the
announcement that Erling Haaland, football’s
next-most coveted player in his early twenties,
will join City this summer.
Effectively, two so-called state-backed
superclubs, funded from Qatar and Abu Dhabi,
have already framed this summer’s transfer
window, although Mbappé should anticipate it
still being a busy off-season with PSG. Within
hours of him signing the contract that will make
him the club’s best-paid employee, the PSG
sporting director, Leonardo, was invited to leave.
The head coach, Mauricio Pochettino, will be
given the same instruction. PSG’s preferred
successor would be Zidane, although Mbappé’s
former idol is yet to be persuaded that the
French champions, where none of the previous
three coaches have lasted more than two full
seasons, is a more attractive job than managing
Mbappé longer term while in charge, perhaps
from 2023, of the France national team.
Whoever replaces Pochettino will note the
slogan that the club attached to the
announcement of Mbappé’s new contract. It is a
clear indicator of who now stands at the very top
of the hierarchy: “Kylian is Paris,” it says.Rattled Real pour scorn on PSG
after Mbappé dares to just say no
Home is where the heart is for Mbappé, not to mention a salary of more than €1 million a week that
would have helped to persuade the World Cup-winning striker to sign a three-year deal until 2025, insetJOHN BERRY/GETTY IMAGES*