French press review 5 September 2013

Football transfers, Syria and talk of a new Cold War all feature in today's French papers..

Le Monde wonders, in a front page editorial, at the state of the world in which a football club can allow itself to spend 100 million euros to buy a player. The football club in question is Spanish and, like most other Spanish institutions at the moment, is head, neck and ears in debt . . . Real Madrid owes various creditors a minimum of 600 million euros.

And the cash-strapped government in Madrid is now looking to collect some tax arrears, estimated at four billion euros shared between the 40 clubs of the top two divisions in Spain.

Real have a reputation to protect: they spent 93 million euros to secure the services of Portuguese player Christiano Ronaldo back in 2009. Once you get started on this sort of spending, anything less than a new record investment is going to look dodgy. And think how the new man's team-mates must feel, struggling to get by on a couple of million a year, with derisory price tags like 10 million euros. Can you imagine what the wives are like?

Real Madrid do, indeed, score goals and win football matches. They make a lot of money . . . 513 million euros for the season 2011-2012. But the transfer market seems to have gone a little haywire. The teams in the five biggest European leagues . . . England, Italy, France, Spain and Germany . . . have just spent a total of two billion euros buying players from one another. In the old days, in 1995, 5,735 transfers were agreed for a total price of 400,000 euros, roughly the current value of Garreth Bale's left little toe.

Big names bring in fans, sponsors, advertisers and goals. But they also make it increasingly difficult for the smaller clubs to compete, in any sense.

Once the gap has grown so wide that either Real Madrid or Barcelona, Paris St Germain or AC Monaco, always win their respective national leagues, will anybody still care?

Le Monde also looks at the challenges facing Mali's new president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, elected last month by a huge margin. IBK has two decades of political experience, he is broadly popular, untouched by scandal. He has the support of the military establishment and the High Islamic Council. He is well thought of in France.

Now, he just has to sort out a few details with the separatist tuaregs in the north, banish the islamic militants who claim to want a sharia state, re-unite the country and sort out endemic corruption. Keita's tribal nickname is "the man who has only one word," suggesting that he is honest, straightforward, says what he means, means what he says. In another sense, if he has only one word, he might consider "energy" or "miracle" or "help!"

Otherwise, the front pages are dominated by Syria and the G20 meeting, the two stories converging as different ways of dealing with Bashar al Assad look set to dominate the agenda at the St Petersburg summit of the world's leading economies.

Libération has the French and American presidents on its front cover, with a headline reading "United against everyone else".

Communist L'Humanité, which seems broadly to support the pro-negotiation aspect of Russian President Vladimir Putin's position, continues to call for peace talks rather than punitive strikes. The communist paper accuses the French Prime Minister of being "deaf to all warnings," of unreasonably reducing the options to either military reprisals or nothing at all, when, in fact, peace talks offer the only real way out of the crisis.

Catholic La Croix says the Group of 20 debate on Syria will weaken both the G20 and the United Nations, since the economic summit will try to make progress where the Security Council has failed, but will probably fail itself.

Right-wing Le Figaro is even less optimistic, suggesting that we are on the brink of a new cold war, with relations between America and Russia, already chilled by the Snowden affair and certain human rights questions, now likely to settle into hard silence over the appropriate way to punish a man who decides to gas his own people.