OPINION: Business is business: PSG's "extraordinary" trips to Qatar and Saudi Arabia
"A Lannister always pays his debts." If you've watched the best show of all time, you'll get the reference. Like Tyrion Lannister, Paris Saint-Germain respects agreements made with others. The club from the French capital is on tour for the Qatar Winter Tour 2023 until Thursday, following commitments made last year.
On the agenda: training open to the public on Wednesday afternoon at Khalifa International Stadium (Doha, Qatar), before going to face the Riyadh Season Team, a Saudi all-star team, at King Fahd Stadium in the Saudi capital this Thursday.
The match should have taken place last season. But the health situation forced the match to be postponed to a later date. "Agreements are made to be respected, especially when there is so much money at stake," explainsd L'Equipe this Wednesday morning.
The Parisians would pocket a little more than 10 million euros according to the French sports daily. A year later, the club of the capital must therefore organize this confrontation, where Lionel Messi (35) and Cristiano Ronaldo (38) will play against each other surely for the last time, in an atypical season with an unusual calendar.
And this is clearly not the best time from a sporting point of view. Between the resumption of the league before the Christmas holidays, a Ligue 1 match on New Year's Day against the second-placed team and the French Cup, Christophe Galtier and his staff are forced to manage an express trip with fourteen hours of flight time in less than three days and two nights on a plane.
"Extraordinary" trips, like those of Jules Verne, to 'Twenty Thousand Leagues' from Paris, is where the 'Centre' of their 'Earth' should be in mid-January.
Unfortunately, business is business. And for the PSG leaders, it seems more important to satisfy the financial partners than to focus on the sport and the various deficiencies that the team may have a month before the most important game of the season.
The two defeats in a row in the league are not reassuring and it would have been better to see the group working at the Camp des Loges, with the rest that goes with it, before the French Cup match scheduled for this Monday against Pays de Cassel. The future will tell us if this "extraordinary" trip will leave traces or not.
