Girona's first Champions League adventure has its roots in Abu Dhabi

Catalan club make their debut in Uefa's top club competition against PSG, thanks in large part to backing of City Football Group

Girona's Spanish coach Michel, centre, leads a training session on the eve of the Uefa Champions League meeting with Paris Saint-Germain. EPA

The first buses left town late on Tuesday, for some 12 hours on the road, skirting the Pyrenees and up through France. Other supporters of Girona have arrived in Paris by train and by air. For most, it is the away trip of lifetime.

The full journey of Girona FC, a club from a picturesque city in provincial Catalonia, into the Uefa Champions League, where they play their first ever European fixture at Paris Saint-Germain on Wednesday stretches back over an improbable distance.

There are supporters among the nearly 1,000 with tickets for the Parc des Princes who are old enough to remember when away games meant expeditions no further than the confines of the regionalised fourth tier of Spanish football. Only 20 years ago, Girona were on the way to being relegated to that division.

It’s a journey with freshly remembered downs as well as ups. Girona had spent three years in Spain’s second division until two summers ago. Last season’s third place in La Liga was itself a huge leap from mid-table in 2022/23.

And theirs is a route map that has Abu Dhabi in a prominent place, because part of the engine that has elevated Girona is their membership of the City Football Group, CFG. On Wednesday, they will be sharing club football’s grandest stage with the most prominent club in that network, Manchester City, who begin their quest to regain the European Cup at home to Inter Milan, a replay of the 2023 final.

If that is the glamour tie on the extensive menu of match day one of Uefa’s expanded first phase of the Champions League, PSG against Girona is among the most intriguing collisions. Newcomers against heavyweights; a project partly seeded in the UAE up against the French club transformed by investment from Qatar.

Girona came under the umbrella of the Abu Dhabi-backed CFG in 2017, benefiting significantly from the sharing of expertise and in some cases, playing talent developed at other clubs in the global group. But the rise has been so steep that a degree of distancing from CFG is now required.

Under Uefa rules on multi-club ownership, the fact that Girona have climbed all the way to the Champions League, where City are also involved, obliged corporate links to be loosened in July, to guard against any possibility of the competition’s sporting integrity being compromised. The CFG shareholding – around 47 per cent – in Girona has been placed into a “blind trust”, in accordance with Uefa guidelines, for the course of this season.

City and Girona are not scheduled to play each other in the elongated “Swiss-model” first phase of the new-look Champions League format, but they could do so in the knockouts, a stage Girona, for all that they are novices, are targeting.

The complex structure of the league phase, in which each team plays eight different opponents, means that finishing as low as 24th out of 36 will still qualify a club for a play-off for a place in the last-16 round.

“We have earned the right to dream of matches like this in Paris,” said manager Michel, who guided Girona up into the Spanish first division, counts City’s manager Pep Guardiola among his friends and hopes that the combination of worldliness and youth at his disposal can have Girona “competing in the best possible way”. At their best, Girona are recognisably a team with City instincts, prizing possession, organised and fluid.

What they are not is quite as well-rehearsed as they were when they were setting the pace in last season’s Liga – and beating Barcelona, their near-neighbours 4-2, home and away. They lost the skilful winger Savinho, who was on loan from CFG’s French club Troyes, when he signed for City in July.

Aleix Garcia, the influential midfielder, and defender Eric Garcia, both formerly of City, also left in the summer, joining Bayer Leverkusen and returning to Barcelona respectively, as did striker Artem Dobvyk, now at Roma.

The deficit was noted at Sunday’s visit by Barcelona, this season’s Liga pacesetters, to Girona’s Montilivi Stadium. The visitors won 4-1.

“We are well behind Barca and I’m still a long way from being among the top coaches,” said Michel, who is going up against his Spanish compatriot Luis Enrique, a Champions League winner while coaching Barca 10 seasons ago and a semi-finalist in the competition with PSG last May. “But the Champions League is all positive for us, it’s exciting, stimulating and the players and I are looking forward to hearing the anthem.”

For some, hearing that anthem will jog old memories. Goalkeeper Paulo Gazzaniga, in his second year at Girona, was part of Tottenham Hotspur’s unprecedented run to a Champions League final in 2019. Oriol Romeu, the anchor midfielder, now 32, was part of Chelsea’s European Cup-winning squad fully 12 years ago, near the beginning of a career that has taken the player, a Catalan, through two spells at Barcelona and stints at Chelsea, Valencia, Stuttgart and Southampton.

Arnaut Danjuma, signed in the summer to fill some of the gap left by Savinho’s departure, was a Champions League semi-finalist with Villarreal in 2022. And for Daley Blind, a pillar of Girona’s defence since he joined 14 months ago, the Champions League anthem has been a lifelong soundtrack.

His father Danny, captained the Ajax team who won the European Cup 30 seasons back, when Daley was five years old. Blind junior has done duty in the competition for Bayern Munich, for Manchester United and for Ajax, where he was a part of the upstart side who reached the semis in 2019.

But for no player will this evening seem more poignant than club captain Cristhian Stuani, who has 50 caps for Uruguay, and a career CV that catalogues seasons in Italy’s Serie A, in the English Premier League and Championship and at various Spanish employers – but above all a long relationship with Girona, where he has been relegated and promoted.

Stuani turns 38 next month. But Paris will mark his first appearance in any Uefa competition. “It’s a very special match, and we have to go into it with maximum belief,” said Stuani. “It’s a piece of history and we must compete, whatever confronts us.”