Qatar bid to complete football with third act of PSG project

Whatever the result of the Champions League final tomorrow, the French club's owners have positioned their trophy-chasers as the game's next superpower

- Barney Ronay

Put a bisht on it. That's a wrap. At first glance it might be tempting to see the 2025 Champions League final as one of the more obviously high-European occasions in recent football history.

Twenty thousand Parisians and Milanese will trace out a thousand-mile right-angle this weekend, north from Lombardy, east across Alsace and the Rhineland, there to spend a long weekend wandering the white stone streets of Munich, with its reassuringly terrifying gothic cathedral, its pounded-meat cuisine de terroir, its altstadt boutiques selling wristwatches priced at roughly the same cost as the average human arm, and finally on to the lighted dome of the Allianz Arena, dumped down in the green fringes to the north like a giant alien doughnut.

For the first time in five years there isn't a single English person involved as Paris Saint-Germain and Inter meet in the capital of Bavaria. Premier League, Club World Cup. Look upon our Euro splendour and tremble. This is heartlands stuff, a moment of pure Schengen-ball.

Except, of course, it is something else entirely too, an opportunity to complete a brilliantly enacted subversion of that old order from within.

PSG have been the best team in Europe this year. In Munich they will kick off as favourites to take the trophy to France for the first time since 1993. But victory would also represent something much more significant, the moment Qatar basically completes football – and in a way that feels far less brittle, far more permanently entrenched than might have seemed possible a few years ago.