Column

Comment

Ethics

Football

Politics

9 June 2025

5 min read

PSG’s win signals politics over purpose – other institutions take note

When church and football feign neutrality, politics can ride roughshod

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A footballer holds up the European cup, behind him fans are jubillant.

PSG fans celeberate.

PSG.TV.

There’s a new name on the Champions League trophy.

In the most one-sided final in the competition’s history, Paris Saint-Germain trounced Inter Milan 5-0 to lift Europe’s most prestigious club trophy for the first time in their history.

But this is not the PSG of recent years. Gone are the Galacticos: no Messi, no Neymar, no Mbappe. Where previously PSG resembled a 13-year-old boy’s attempt to win Football Manager by just buying all the best players, this year’s team looks like … well, a team.

And what a team. Vitinha is metronomic in midfield. The game is played at his pace. He is the jazz instructor in Whiplash. “Not my tempo,” he says, over and over again, until reality bends to his will. Hakimi and Mendes are boundless balls of energy as the two wing-backs. They always threaten and it is no surprise that Hakimi gets the first goal.

And then there are the forwards. 19-year-old Désiré Doué somehow looks the consummate professional at such a young age. Ousmane Dembélé has a quiet night by his standards, but the Barcelona reject looks born to play for this team. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia is the kind of footballer you imagine yourself as when playing on school playgrounds. So unorthodox, but simply irresistible. The ultimate jumpers-for-goalposts footballer. He may well be the closest thing football has to a personification of what the sport is all about. He is joy and flare masquerading as a 24-year-old Georgian lad.

At the helm of it all is Luis Enrique. Enrique’s teams are aggressive, fluid, and intelligent. “They pass forward with spite” Steven Gerrard says during the TV coverage of the match. What a line.

In 2019, Enrique lost his youngest daughter Xana to bone cancer, aged just nine. To hear him talk about his loss is heartbreaking. At full-time the PSG fans unveil a picture of Xana with her dad in a genuinely tender moment of compassion and humanity.

All this is to say that, wherever you look, this incarnation of PSG is a deeply, deeply likeable one.

But then, that’s the point, isn’t it?

PSG were taken over by Qatar Sports Investments in 2011. Qatar’s near 15-year involvement with the club has led to eye-watering sums of money being spent with the stated aim of winning the Champions League. In 2017, they sign Neymar from Barcelona, meeting the €222 million release clause in his contract. A fee so deliberately high no-one would ever meet it. A fee still unsurpassed eight years on.

While the age of the superstars may be over at PSG, they still have European football’s highest wage budget by some distance (an impressive feat when you remember that Real Madrid exist). Their Georgian talisman Kvaratskhelia only moved to the club in January for a reported €70m. Hardly loose change.

Paris Saint-Germain is a Qatari ‘sportswashing’ project. An attempt to make a political regime palatable to European sensibilities by assembling a football team that is deeply, deeply likeable.

And it certainly seems to be working. Rio Ferdinand, on co-commentary for the final, declared that a PSG victory would be ‘good for football’. So did Jason Burt, chief football correspondent for The Telegraph in an article that unironically has a subtitle starting “They may be funded by a nation state but …”.

This is why I find it so disingenuous when people demand we ‘keep politics out of football’. (And anyway, what people often mean here is that they’d like to keep left-wing politics out of football, like the ‘take a knee’ or ‘rainbow laces’ campaigns). Politics is already in football and has been for quite some time now. If you haven’t spotted it, you simply haven’t been paying attention.

I like Luis Enrique. I adore Vitinha. Kvaratskhelia makes me misty-eyed about the very nature of football. But PSG winning the Champions League is bad for football, because it’s a political victory before it’s a sporting one

PSG’s triumph is a timely reminder to the Church that it must remember the political nature of the call placed upon its very existence.

As is so often the case, football and religion find parallels in one another. For the Church, too, all too frequently finds itself as a political football. Debate continues about the place of Church of England Bishops in the House of Lords with only 33 per cent of Britons keen for religious leaders to express political opinions.

But while this would certainly make the Church’s life easier, it’s simply not an option available to it.

‘Gospel’ is not a Christian term. Not originally. It was a term used to describe an announcement or decree made about the Roman Emperor, a practice the Romans adopted from the Greeks before them. It is, in other words, an intractably political term. It is the ‘party-political broadcast’ of the ancient world.

In hijacking the term ‘Gospel’ as a description for Jesus’ life and teaching, the early Church announces itself as an irrevocably political entity from its very beginnings. A body of people called to proclaim a political message. Or, at least, a message with significant political implications. Christ is king; Caesar is not.

This does not mean that the Church is inherently left- or right-leaning. The Church is far older than this simplistic understanding of politics and will surely outlive it, too. But it does mean that the Church has a stake in the politics of the day; that it cannot be politically disinterested without simultaneously compromising something of its most fundamental identity.

PSG’s Champions League win is not the first by a nation-backed club. Manchester City – principally owned by Vice President of the United Arab Emirates Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan – won the Champions League in 2023 (also beating Inter Milan in the final; bless them). Depending on what we make of Roman Abramovich’s connections to the Russian state, it’s also worth noting Chelsea’s wins in 2012 and 2021, too.

But PSG’s win – and the emphatic nature of it over one of the ‘old guards’ of club football – feels like a watershed moment for the sport. It is the culmination of the past 20-or-so years of both football’s internal politics, and the external politics acting upon it. It is a worrying statement of intent of its direction of travel, too.

When Christianity and football feign political neutrality, they simply invite the dominant politics of the day to ride roughshod over them. Insidious politics will always fill any vacuum available to it. PSG’s triumph is a timely reminder to the Church that it must remember the political nature of the call placed upon its very existence. Otherwise it will find itself a mouthpiece for a kingdom to which it does not belong.

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Article

Assisted dying

Care

Comment

Politics

7 May 2025

4 min read

Assisted dying is not a medical procedure; it is a social one

Another vote, and an age-related amendment, highlight the complex community of care.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Graffiti reads 'I miss me' with u crossed out under the 'mem'

Sidd Inban on Unsplash.

Scottish Parliament’s Assisted Dying bill will go to a stage one vote on Tuesday 13th May, with some amendments having been made in response to public and political consultation. This includes the age of eligibility, originally proposed as 16 years. In the new draft of the bill, those requesting assistance to die must be at least 18.

MSPs have been given a free vote on this bill, which means they can follow their consciences. Clearly, amongst those who support it, there is a hope that raising the age threshold will calm the troubled consciences of some who are threatening to oppose. When asked if this age amendment was a response to weakening support, The Times reports that one “seasoned parliamentarian” (unnamed) agreed, and commented:

“The age thing was always there to be traded, a tactical retreat.”

The callousness of this language chills me. Whilst it is well known that politics is more of an art than a science, there are moments when our parliamentarians literally hold matters of life and death in their hands. How can someone speak of such matters as if they are bargaining chips or military manoeuvres? But my discomfort aside, there is a certain truth in what this unnamed strategist says.

When Liam McArthur MSP was first proposed the bill, he already suggested that the age limit would be a point of debate, accepting that there were “persuasive” arguments for raising it to 18. Fortunately, McArthur’s language choices were more appropriate to the subject matter. “The rationale for opting for 16 was because of that being the age of capacity for making medical decisions,” he said, but at the same time he acknowledged that in other countries where similar assisted dying laws are already in operation, the age limit is typically 18.

McArthur correctly observes that at 16 years old young people are considered legally competent to consent to medical procedures without needing the permission of a parent or guardian. But surely there is a difference, at a fundamental level, between consenting to a medical procedure that is designed to improve or extend one’s life and consenting to a medical procedure that will end it?

Viewed philosophically, it would seem to me that Assisted Dying is actually not a medical procedure at all, but a social one. This claim is best illustrated by considering one of the key arguments given for protecting 16- and 17- year-olds from being allowed to make this decision, which is the risk of coercion. The adolescent brain is highly social; therefore, some argue, a young person might be particularly sensitive to the burden that their terminal illness is placing on loved ones. Or worse, socially motivated young people may be particularly vulnerable to pressure from exhausted care givers, applied subtly and behind closed doors.

Whilst 16- and 17- year-olds are considered to have legal capacity, guidance for medical staff already indicates that under 18s should be strongly advised to seek parent or guardian advice before consenting to any decision that would have major consequences. Nothing gets more major than consenting to die, but sadly, some observe, we cannot be sure that a parent or guardian’s advice in that moment will be always in the young person’s best interests. All of this discussion implies that we know we are not asking young people to make just a medical decision that impacts their own body, but a social one that impacts multiple people in their wider networks.

For me, this further raises the question of why 18 is even considered to be a suitable age threshold. If anything, the more ‘adult’ one gets, the more one realises one’s place in the world is part of a complex web of relationships with friends and family, in which one is not the centre. Typically, the more we grow up, the more we respect our parents, because we begin to learn that other people’s care of us has come at a cost to themselves. This is bound to affect how we feel about needing other people’s care in the case of disabling and degenerative illness. Could it even be argued that the risk of feeling socially pressured to end one’s life early actually increases with age? Indeed, there is as much concern about this bill leaving the elderly vulnerable to coercion as there is for young people, not to mention disabled adults. As MSP Pam Duncan-Glancey (a wheelchair-user) observes, “Many people with disabilities feel that they don’t get the right to live, never mind the right to die.”

There is just a fundamental flawed logic to equating Assisted Dying with a medical procedure; one is about the mode of one’s existence in this world, but the other is about the very fact of it. The more we grow, the more we learn that we exist in communities – communities in which sometimes we are the care giver and sometimes we are the cared for. The legalisation of Assisted Dying will impact our communities in ways which cannot be undone, but none of that is accounted for if Assisted Dying is construed as nothing more than a medical choice.

As our parliamentarians prepare to vote, I pray that they really will listen to their consciences. This is one of those moments when our elected leaders literally hold matters of life and death in their hands. Now is not the time for ‘tactical’ moves that might simply sweep the cared-for off of the table, like so many discarded bargaining chips. As MSPs consider making this very fundamental change to the way our communities in Scotland are constituted, they are not debating over the mode of the cared-for’s existence, they are debating their very right to it.