Uli Hoeneß made his point of view clear more than 20 years ago: football and the circus have nothing to do with each other. More precisely: they should have nothing to do with each other. In any case, Hoeneß, who was still in constant attack mode as FC Bayern manager at the time, recommended retraining to the then Dortmund player Otto Addo: “He should go to the Sarrasani circus. He has no place on the football field,” said Hoeneß after an emotional duel between his Bayern and BVB.
Just before Bayern’s Champions League game against Paris Saint-Germain on Tuesday evening, which is quite important for both teams, PSG coach Luis Enrique is now proving to be a Hoeneß brother in spirit: “To see incredible things, you have to go to the Cirque de Soleil,” he said on Friday evening. His team had just won against Toulouse 3-0 in a pretty straightforward manner, including two late goals.
It was a performance that was typical of the new PSG. The team plays pragmatically for results, the team works as a collective and practices anything but hurray football. For the first time in years, it felt like the local Prinzenpark was not sold out against the gruesome Toulouse. Magic shows like those in previous years, when Neymar, Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé regularly made the football crowd cheer with heels, spikes and tralala, are now the exception in Paris.
Those in charge of the club, which has been financed by the Emirate of Qatar since 2011, have learned their lesson. Because as with the role model Real Madrid, which competed with the “galactic” Zidane, Beckham, Ronaldo and Figo around the time when Hoeneß made his circus comparison and was repeatedly rudely brought back to earth, the Parisian dreams of winning were also shattered the Champions League so far year after year.
Apart from reaching the final in the 2019/20 Corona season, which PSG lost 1-0 to Bayern thanks to a goal from Paris-trained Kingsley Coman, the successes in the premier class are manageable. This was also due to the discipline of the stars: Neymar was constantly injured or regularly turned night into day by either playing online poker until dawn or going to the discos. Messi never gave the impression that he was comfortable in Paris. And although Mbappé was the most effective of the trio until the unpleasant break with the club last spring, he refused to do any defensive work at some point simply because the other two dazzling teammates did the same. What didn’t play a decisive role in the domestic Ligue 1 always caused PSG to stumble internationally.
PSG has recently been focusing on youth work – sometimes also on that of other clubs
Hence the radical new course that Paris ushered in with the separation of Neymar and Messi and the engagement of the gnarly Asturian coach Luis Enrique in the summer of 2023 and which club president Nasser Al-Khelaifi described as a departure from “bling-bling”. From now on, more emphasis should be placed on team spirit and youth work, and by the way also on that of other clubs, which is why, for example, the then 20-year-old winger Bradley Barcola was brought in from Lyon a year ago – and in the most recent transfer summer, Joao Neves, 20, from Benfica Lisbon, Desiré Doué, 19, from Rennes and Willian Pacho, just turned 23, from Frankfurter Eintracht.
The 18-year-old midfielder Warren Zaïre-Emery is set for Luis Enrique, and other teenagers such as midfielder Senny Mayulu, right-back Yoram Zague and the 16-year-old winger Ibrahim Mbaye also receive regular match practice. They are led by a few veterans who are left over from the old era – like Captain Marquinhos or the Moroccan Achraf Hakimi. The coach acts as a human shield for the chicks and repeatedly clashes with the press, for example when he recently said that he would even accept a salary reduction in his upcoming contract extension if he had to talk to reporters less in return.
In the league, PSG is also storming away from the competition undefeated in the new formation; they are currently six points ahead of Adi Hütter’s AS Monaco and nine ahead of Roberto de Zerbi’s revamped, highly betted Olympique Marseille. “We are exceptional with the ball. I repeat: extraordinary,” says Luis Enrique. And yet he has to admit that there is a huge difference between the performances in the league and those in the current Champions League. In Europe there is a lack of clarity and effectiveness – with only four points after four games and given the tough remaining program (Bayern, Salzburg, Manchester City, Stuttgart), participation in the intermediate round from places nine to 24 is not even guaranteed for Paris.
If you add in the previous season, in which PSG only bounced back from Borussia Dortmund in the semi-finals despite an unimpressive campaign, Luis Enrique has only won six of 16 Champions League games as Paris coach – 37.5 percent. This is the weakest record of any PSG coach since the Sheiks joined, worse than Carlo Ancelotti, Laurent Blanc, Unai Emery, Thomas Tuchel, Mauricio Pochettino and Christophe Galtier.
Pochettino was the only one from this series to win in Munich – in April 2021 (3-2), when PSG knocked Bayern out of the competition in the quarter-finals. This time Luis Enrique from Fröttmaning urgently needed to take something with him. Otherwise his new contract, which is supposedly ready to be signed, could end up in the shredder – and the circus could return to Paris.
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