This was Qatar beating Abu Dhabi, and if you tuned in to the Etihad looking for a team to love, you picked the wrong fixture. PSG are owned by Qatar Sports Investments, backed by the Qatari state, which took a 70% stake in the club in 2011. Manchester City are owned by Abu Dhabi United Group, the vehicle of Sheikh Mansour. Two Gulf states put two squads on the same pitch. One of them won. There's no underdog story in that.
PSG are a state project too, built the same way City were: a sovereign chequebook, a chairman in Nasser Al-Khelaifi who answers to Doha. Enjoying this because you've decided to hate the right billionaires is still cheering for a billionaire.
There's a louder theory going around, and it's wrong. It says City's European record was always a con, built on referees waving them through the Premier League, and exposed the moment a real opponent shows up. City were found guilty of breaching Premier League financial rules, so it's easy to see why people want to believe they've been propped up by the system all along. But a club losing a match just means the other team was better.
And PSG were better. Ousmane Dembélé scored early and set the tone; Désiré Doué added to it. Both were named Champions League players of the season, and they played like it. You don't need a whistle-based explanation for why City couldn't live with that. They got picked apart by forwards operating at a higher level on the night. Reaching for the referees is an excuse for not admitting your team was second best.
The ownership-politics crowd loses the plot here too, just from the other side. Dembélé's goal was real. The performance was real. PSG are a sportswashing project, and they also have genuinely brilliant footballers who put in a brilliant away performance. Treating this win as nothing more than a balance-sheet flex insults the players who actually did it. The money bought the squad. The players still had to play.
What this result actually exposes is narrower than the conspiracy crowd wants. City have long argued there's no room left in the Premier League, that they're stuck grinding out wins against stacked defenses. Europe, the story goes, was supposed to be the kinder test. On this evidence, Europe was harder. A better team came to their ground and beat them. City got outplayed.
So pick your frame carefully. There was no honest football club on this pitch for oil money to humble. It was one state outspending and outplaying another. City lost because PSG were better. The only clean reaction left is the one nobody wants: refuse to root for either of them.
