PSG struggled against Lille (given that in the previous match PSG had scored 7!), won 4-3, with Messi scoring an extra-time goal from a free-kick in a reaction of personal pride from the Argentine superstar.
PSG has been obsessed with winning the Champions League for years. And every time this objective slips away (as it seems to do after the recent 0-1 defeat vs Bayern), the team suffers in Ligue 1 too. Often times, it crumbles like a sand castle.
Why is this happening? Why can’t PSG, a team with a spectacular attack, Neymar, Messi, Mbappé, win the Champions League and thus join the ranks of the truly great teams?
Greed and sacrifice
There are several background explanations that have to do with money and the locker room. At PSG there are too much money, greed is encouraged, sacrifice in the name of the team is just empty talk. And the big trophies are only won by the teams. Messi didn’t sign the extension, he haggles over money, so does Mbappé – he’s always an unknown quantity in his own right. How much more will he get paid?
Neighbours complain to the police about Neymar Jr. that he keeps partying until dawn. The Parisians would like him gone, but who else is going to pay the sixty million euros they are asking for a footballer who plays infrequently, is mostly injured or in a state of euphoria that has little to do with football? Of course, Chelsea London. Which has gone (again) into a crazy shopping frenzy.
Then there are the questions: does Galtier stay, does Zidane come? Why isn’t Zidane coming? And if he does, will Mbappé stay? There are too many questions, and ultimately there is too little team spirit at Paris.
Absence of the locker room
In short, there is no locker room. A locker room is that secret ingredient that makes small teams average, makes average teams good, makes good teams great, and makes great teams invincible. PSG doesn’t have it. Teammates aren’t ready to die on the pitch for each other, they fight for the light of the same spotlight.
PSG won against Lille, but it could just as easily have lost. Twenty minutes before the end, Bamba had taken the score to 3-2 (Donnarumma is also more of a star than a goalkeeper you can rely on 100%). In the end they won on two reactions of pride, on the Mbappé-Messi axis, on two individual solutions, not on team play.
How do bettors translate this? It’s simple: you can safely bet that PSG will score but also concede goals – the ”both teams score” bet. The defence is dreamy, the goalkeeper thinks he’s the Neymar of goalkeepers, the midfield is fragile. PSG is not built from the bottom up, as is natural, but from the top down, with a fabulous attack supported by a struggling defence.
PSG is the expression of a team overloaded with stars, from which players have disappeared. There’s no one left to carry the piano with so many nosed-up virtuosos. Real or imagined artists have taken the place of real players.
Humbleness, good humility, modesty, that hard work that doesn’t show – all that has disappeared from Paris. Paris no longer believes in tears, it only believes in Qatari money, but money can’t buy everything.
What’s more, the Qataris themselves seem to have had enough of Paris and have set their sights elsewhere. The future is in the Premier League: Manchester United. That’s the word on the street, and there’s never any smoke without fire. And without Qatari money, PSG will revert to the rather ordinary club it has been for the last fifty years. Worth watching.
