Sorry, more football

I am very pleased that Manchester City has reached the semi-finals of the European Cup in their history - if nothing else, it gives another half-point to England's UEFA co-efficient, meaning the number of Champions League places for the Premier League are more likely to stay at four.  It is always good for me to see England's teams do well.

But spare a thought for their vanquished rivals Paris St Germain (PSG).  Despite the mega-bucks from Qatar bankrolling the club to crushing dominance in France's Ligue 1, they've hit the brick wall of the quarter-finals for the fourth successive season.  This was not what the state Qatari Investment Fund was paying for - they'd had expected to have won the Champions League itself by now.

But that's the trouble - they've invested in the wrong country.  As French president, PSG fan Nicolas Sarkozy lobbied for the investment and left Michel Platini in no doubt that he should vote for Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup, which has sparked the meltdown of FIFA.  Yet the Qataris did not get the vehicle to give them the favourable publicity for which they would have hoped.  They'd have been better splashing the cash on a club in England (rivalling Man City's UAE investment), Spain, Germany or Italy.  The French top-flight is simply not competitive enough to allow its teams to find an extra gear against high-calibre opposition - the memory muscle atrophies.

This is why, despite being invented by a Frenchman (like the World Cup and European Championships), a French team has only won it once and that was the controversy-shrouded Marseille team who had been bribing other Ligue 1 teams to, ironically, give them an easy time while they made a run to the trophy with big ears on the European stage.  Olympique Lyonnais (Lyon) came from nowhere to win seven consecutive league titles but only after their second national title did they reach the quarter-finals of the Champions League and then for three seasons exited at the same stage.  Only after their glory days faded and they stopped winning Ligue 1 did Lyon manage to reach (once) the semi-finals (and no further).

PSG haven't come exactly from nowhere but when you can go to an opponent's ground and win 9-0 to clinch another Ligue 1 title, it really is the nursery slopes of football.  That's why PSG's owners talk up a European Super League - as the Panama Papers have shown, when rich people can't get what they want, they try to circumvent the rules.