“I love watching the Championship,” Marcel Desailly says. “Usually I don’t watch a full 90 minutes unless I’m working on a game in the studio. But I love to watch 90 minutes of Championship matches. The intensity is just incredible. And technically, they can really play.”
Perhaps this was not what you were expecting to hear from a winner of the Champions League with Marseille and Milan, the World Cup and European Championship with France, an imperious defender who spent most of his career at the very highest levels of the game. But in many ways Desailly has always been an instinctively counterintuitive figure. He left Serie A when it was the best league in the world and moved to Chelsea, who weren’t even the best club in London. He moved to Qatar in the mid-2000s, long before it became a global footballing powerhouse.
