RB Leipzig and Paris Saint-Germain are not wonders of just one season in the UEFA Champions League

RB Leipzig’s 2-1 win over Atletico Madrid on Wednesday means there will be three teams in the Champions League semi-finals that have never won the competition.

Barcelona or Bayern Munich are probably still favorites. But Paris Saint-Germain, RB Leipzig and one from Manchester City or Lyon make the Champions League semi-finals look a little different this year.

In the old days of the European Cup, new teams winning the competition were common, but for the past 20 years, the only team to win the competition for the first time in their history was Chelsea in 2012.

This year’s semifinal line-up could be a one-off. The progress of Paris Saint-Germain and RB Leipzig could be slightly overstated due to the supposed luck of ending up on the “easy” side of the Champions League draw, if there is such a thing.

But it feels more like a sea change, with European football royals Juventus and Real Madrid being wiped out by newcomers Manchester City, PSG and RB Leipzig, pushed forward by new money.

When Sergio Aguero scored at the last minute against Queens Park Rangers in 2012 to win Manchester City their first title, people could tell that the tide had turned. Since then, the blue side of Manchester has been the team that won the Premier League trophies.

Late goals from RB Leipzig’s Tyler Adams and PSG’s Erik Choupo-Moting may have been scored in an empty stadium under rather quiet circumstances. But looking back in a few years, those goals could end up being Leipzig or PSG’s “Agueroooooo!” moment.

Both PSG and RB Leipzig are growing, getting progressively stronger each year. It is not the wonders of a single season that all their best players will lose this summer. While circumstances have favored them this season, both teams will likely be in better positions in the coming seasons.

Paris Saint-Germain and RB Leipzig are two of football’s youngest clubs, with PSG founded in 1970 and RB Leipzig only 11 years old. But pretty much everything else about them was extraordinarily different.

Paris Saint-Germain dominate nationally and have a truly huge fan base. They had some success before Qatar came, including winning the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup and reaching the Champions League semi-finals in the mid-1990s. But seven of the nine Ligue 1 titles have come since Qatar Sports Investment took over the club in 2011.

Money can take you this far; allowed PSG to sign Neymar and Kylian Mbappe, but being able to compete regularly in the Champions League finals will allow PSG to keep its top players and prevent them from getting itchy feet every time they start thinking about how many Ballon d ‘The Ors and Champions League medals will be on their trophy boards at the end of their career.

For PSG owners, there is only so much that they would be willing to invest without success, and success is defined as the Champions League. A strong performance this year could help keep Qatar’s oil money.

RB Leipzig’s sports franchise approach isn’t based on signing star names; they beat Atletico Madrid after selling their star Timo Werner to Chelsea. Instead, they rely on a network of affiliated clubs, including Red Bull Salzburg and New York Red Bulls.

Only Manchester City have taken building a club network seriously, with the City Football Group owning teams on nearly every continent. Given that top-tier clubs can be bought for less than Mbappe and Cristiano Ronaldo, it’s no surprise that more clubs haven’t copied them.

Red Bull’s football network allows them to get hold of the best young talent in the world, develop that talent and then sell it at a profit. For the past two years, Red Bull’s football empire has sold Naby Keita, Timo Werner and Erling Haaland, each for huge sums.

RB Leipzig owner Dietrich Mateschitz is one of the richest people in the world. He is above Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich on Forbes’ 2020 billionaire list. But Leipzig’s net transfer spending in its short history is only about $ 120 million according to Transfermarkt. This took them from the fifth tier of German football to the four Champions League finals. Some Premier League teams have spent similar sums on lower-middle rankings.

Red Bull’s player production line has supplied RB Leipzig with players such as Naby Keita and Dayot Upamecano over the years. Hwang Hee-Chan, who famously missed Liverpool’s Virgil Van Dijk in this year’s Champions League group stages, is the latest to move from Salzburg to Leipzig.

Leipzig have the youngest coach in the Champions League with 33-year-old Julian Nagelsmann. They also have the youngest team left by far in the Champions League, with an average age of just 24.7, compared to Juventus’s 29.2, or 28.1 at Real Madrid. This RB Leipzig squad is still a few years from its peak, and with the money the Leipzig player production line continues to bring, the club can afford to invest. Basically, Leipzig can also afford to occasionally lose a star and keep getting stronger.

Paris Saint-Germain and RB Leipzig may have very different assets, but they have one thing in common: they are both hated.

All football clubs are hated to some degree, but PSG and Leipzig appear to be hated by teams other than their close rivals, and they certainly aren’t hated for their trophies yet.

Some don’t like them because they allegedly use calcium as a vehicle for something else, whether it’s to increase the soft power of a Gulf state or increase the popularity of an energy drink. Football is supposed to be pure, but the Champions League itself has removed the purity of competition with a format that seeks to ensure success for the biggest clubs. As a result, the crooked cash prize also ruined the competitiveness of the European national leagues from Croatia to Scotland.

Others don’t like them because they represent a change in football. In Germany, most of the teams are fan-owned, at least in part, and because of that ownership model, many can’t get a wealthy benefactor to pump millions. This allowed RB Leipzig to create a management structure that bypasses the 50 + 1 ownership model and uses Red Bull’s wealth to outdo one team after another. In Germany, only Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund remain for overtaking.

At a European level, RB Leipzig are not that different from most clubs and have nowhere near the amount that owners of Chelsea or Manchester City have. And if anything, their spending has made the Bundesliga more competitive.

Paris Saint-Germain, on the other hand, like Manchester City, are on a completely different financial level. Their vast wealth made Ligue 1 a useless procession. If Qatar really wants to turn on their spending, even teams like Barcelona and Liverpool will struggle to compete on money alone. Once PSG starts looking like serious Champions League contenders, they have the potential to wipe out the competition.

They might be hated by others. But being hated and winning is better than being the beloved underdog who never wins and has all his best players bought from the same few clubs that win trophies year after year. As Leeds United and Millwall fans might say, “Nobody likes us, we don’t care.”

Paris Saint-Germain and RB Leipzig could have avoided the cream in the knockout stage, but Borussia Dortmund and Atletico Madrid are hardly a challenge, and both PSG and Leipzig won their respective groups, with PSG beating the Real Madrid 3-0 along the way.

In some ways it doesn’t matter that they haven’t had the hardest matches possible, or that they played the knockout matches in empty stadiums rather than having to go to Camp Nou or the Allianz Arena. Success breeds success and once one of these clubs reaches its first Champions League final, people will start looking at it differently.