Tribune. On Saturday 29 May, the title of the most prestigious of European football competitions will go to a British club. As two years ago, the final of the Champions League will indeed pit two teams from across the Channel: Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur yesterday, Chelsea and Manchester City today.
Ironically, these four clubs were part of a recent attempt to secede from the elite of continental football, which aimed to set up a closed and competing league for greater income: the European Super League. . In a humiliating about-face, the English clubs involved in the project were forced to withdraw three days later, under pressure from public opinion and their own supporters.
From its present European stranglehold to its local roots, British football indeed concentrates the most salient paradoxes of a country which wishes to preserve its national identity from a cultural point of view, while opening up to all winds from the point of view of economic view.
Recent champion of England, the Manchester City club are led by a coach – Josep Guardiola – who openly militates for the political independence of Catalonia, supported by a large part of the Mancunian working class (including the Gallagher brothers, of the group Oasis), in a city that overwhelmingly voted to stay within the European Union (60.4%), while the surrounding municipalities almost all voted “Leave” [« Quitter l’Union européenne »].
“Little England” against “Global Britain”
Manchester City has at the same time an extraordinary financial power. Backed by the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, it allowed it to build a global brand and attract the best international talent, to such an extent that the Emirati shareholder was initially sanctioned by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) for financial growth deemed insufficient ” organic “ and contrary to financial fair play.
The club embodies in miniature the tensions of the British model, and in its own way foreshadows the construction of the post-Brexit British identity, between Global Britain and Little england. Outpost and laboratory of globalization, the United Kingdom today is indeed the product of a latent opposition between the economically internationalist logic embodied by the City of London on the one hand, and the highly migratory policies. restrictive policies wanted today by Boris Johnson on the other hand, which are only the continuation of Theresa May’s tirades [première ministre du Royaume-Uni de 2016 à 2019] once against the “Citizens of the world”, who are “Citizens of nowhere”.
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