Date published: Monday 24th August 2020 9:34
Well that was a wonderful game. Finely drawn and expansively painted, the Champions League was a stunning affair.
It was the Old Money v New Money final.
In society, Old Money is passed down through generations along with furniture, art and property. It ensures each generation remains part of a monied elite, able to exercise its wealth over others. It privately educates its children, wears green tweed coats, drives 25-year-old VW estates, is white, owns a pile in Gloucestershire and flat uptown, as well as a few thousand acres of land. It is covered in dog hair and its cheeks are flushed with good brandy. They might be called Charles or Camilla.
New Money is the Johnny-come-lately, often flash and with what Old Money would define as terrible taste. It’s called Jason or Debs and it’s noisy, brash and vivid.
New Money buys an old house, knocks it down and builds a Mock Tudor mansion. It worships Tag Heuer and Hugo Boss as gods while judging a person’s worth by the size of their TV. New Money drives a Maserati, complains about the cost of petrol and drinks Cristal but thinks it tastes like cider.
New Money admires some of Old Money’s lifestyle and might go hunting or grouse shooting because it’s a good piss-up and Old Money is happy to allow them along so they can tell critics that their elitist obsessions attract “a wide range of people from all backgrounds” even though it isn’t really true.
But New Money knows that Old Money secretly thinks it is a vulgar braying oik and in turn Old Money knows that New Money considers it a stuck-up old snob who has had it easy and might deliver a powerful boot to the family jewels if overly provoked.
Okay, I’m painting two stereotypes which I don’t pretend accurately comprise the whole cultural and socio-economic panoply of demographic nuances that make up modern society, but they serve to illustrate some of the antagonisms that come with money and class, at least in England, and some feel that the exact same biases and bigotries exist in football too. It was certainly brought into sharper focus on Sunday.
PSG founded in 1970, having won only two league titles and a solitary Cup Winners’ Cup before Qatar’s cash v Bayern Munich founded in 1900, the wealthy winner of 30 league titles (29 of them since 1969) 33 Cup wins and seven European titles.
Much of the dispute over FFP is that it merely protects the status quo, allowing those with the money to keep the money and it prevents new investors pumping vast resources into a club to allow it to compete with those long-wealthy outfits. That is one of Manchester City’s beefs, though by hook or by crook, it doesn’t seem to have affected PSG at all.
They, and others, feel the established elite doesn’t want a new money elite diluting their chances of success, so you can see their point. However, when New Money’s money is from a highly disreputable source, you can also see why Old Money turns up its nose. They feel they’ve evolved organically over many decades to get where they are, whereas New Money is just a shallow, plastic interloper, trying to buy their way to the top table. There were many relieved it was Bayern who picked up the big trophy for that and other reasons.
But then if you dig into Old Money’s past you’ll often find they got it by ill-gotten gains. Much of the land in England is owned by families who acquired it through having a private army or as a reward from royalty or nobility for some bloody imperial slaughter performed on their behalf. Or it was bought with the proceeds of slave trading. Nice. They don’t feel guilty though. And they won’t be handing their inheritance back to the people.
Likewise, if you look into the history of any old, wealthy established football club, you can find dodgy characters, shady investments and strange dealings. Where money goes, so sins go. But because the past wipes away many of those sins and anything dodgy, inappropriate or outright illegal is all water under the bridge for old clubs, they can look somehow cleaner.
But the Old v New Money debate in football, wherever that money has come from, is really just a distraction. Football’s issue today isn’t the influx of new money, or the leverage of old money, it is just the dominance of money per se.
This was a game between not just the two richest clubs in their country, but the two clubs which had won 15 of the 16 league titles available to both clubs to be won since 2012. Only Monaco interrupted the sequence.
The same few richest clubs are winning almost everything, almost all of the time and as those richest clubs use their wealth in the pandemic to climb further away from the more impoverished pack, it’s not going to change any time soon. We are left to try and enjoy the occasional relative success of the likes of Atalanta or Ajax to mediate the discontent this cabal of wealth provides.
So Sunday’s fantastic Champions League final might have been New Money v Old Money but it was, far more profoundly, Big Money v Big Money. Wonderful players playing wonderful football, but to enjoy it fully, there were so many things to try and swallow down and turn a blind eye towards. So many things to ignore in order to pretend to ourselves everything is fine and we could just enjoy the football.
Even Julien Laurens, the esteemed French journalist and a big PSG fan said before the game, in relation to the nature of the owners: “I try not to think about it.”
Should we have to try and not think about it? Can we? Is it hopelessly idealistic to believe, not that the football world will ever be perfect, but that it won’t be so extreme as this situation where the football rich list corresponds so closely to football’s honours list.
I really enjoyed the game and felt it was only distantly related to what we might call real football, in the same way a wagyu steak in a high end restaurant is distantly related to a burger from a van.
In fact, so smooth, glossy, high class and refined was it, it felt less like the conclusion of a competition and more like an elaborate infomercial for a new European Super League. A football amuse-bouche for a new elite competition, where the only clubs that can actually compete with each other, play each other exclusively. A place where all the wealthiest clubs can play their wealthy football and get even wealthier in the process. It is the natural outcome of all this. It is irresistible.
And as the final whistle blew, I found myself thinking not only that it should happen, but that sometime soon, it absolutely will happen.
John Nicholson