Ligue 1 Move PSG Match Over Objections of Opponent Lens

While moving kickoffs and postponing matches isn’t uncommon across the top European football leagues, at least outside the English Premier League where lucrative broadcast deals and the television rights holders paying them exercise outsized influence and have always blocked any such attempts, typically both clubs involved in a postponement would have to agree with it. Not so in France. There, despite the rules governing Ligue 1 setting out that both Lens and Paris Saint-Germain would have to be on board with postponing a match between the two set to be played between the legs of PSG’s Champions League quarter final tie with Liverpool, the Ligue de Football Professionnel governing body has chosen to delay the match over Lens’ objections.

PSG are currently just a single point ahead of Lens in the Ligue 1 title race, something few would have bet on at the start of the season for a side that has won the top flight just once in their 120 year history, back in 1998. For anyone watching the league without a vested interest in PSG’s success, it’s a feel good underdog story—or could be, if Lens can do the unthinkable and win the title. Lens, as one might expect, have fewer resources and a thinner and less star-studded squad than PSG.

For them, playing the match as scheduled and perhaps forcing PSG to make rotational choices that would leave them a little weaker when the two sides play a potentially title-defining match would have been a good thing. As such, they made it very clear they didn’t want it moved. The Ligue de Football Professionnel, though, it would seem have a vested interest less in the sporting integrity of Ligue 1 and so have handed a gift to their competition’s sportswashing front for a human rights abusing pretrostate.

PSG wanted was a match postponement and so PSG have got have now got because obviously money matters more than sporting integrity. So it goes.