PSG drew with Borussia and reached the play-offs of the Champions League

The second football giant after Manchester United to fail in the group stage of the Champions League could well be PSG. But the Parisian club still miraculously, having won back in the match with Borussia Dortmund and having waited for a favorable result in a parallel match in which Milan defeated Newcastle, leaked into the play-offs. Such a breakthrough to the cup stage does not deserve condescending smiles for a very obvious reason – because of the radical restructuring that the French club experienced in the summer. It is completely impossible to assess his new potential yet, but sometimes he hints that perestroika has made him more attractive.

Without a historical context, the result of the group round for PSG would have been taken absolutely calmly. In the end, the club, once neck-deep in Qatari money, reached the playoffs for the 12th time in a row. That is, the event is absolutely routine. And then there would be talk about whether PSG will be able to cheat karma this time or whether everything will be as usual, and Qatari wealth will again be useless in battles with the best of the best, and a triumph in the Champions League is mandatory for a giant with such resources, so for now and will remain a dream. But the difficult and ambiguous context has provoked heated discussions on how to approach PSG’s current performance in the group round of the main European Cup.

All the serious media resources that followed him – L’Equipe, BBC, The Guardian – were tormented by contradictory thoughts and observations. For obvious reasons.

On the one hand, there is no escaping the fact that PSG made it into the playoffs miraculously, largely due to luck. The entire tournament in the powerful Group F turned into a roller coaster ride for him. During this tournament, the Parisians had very good matches, like at home against Borussia and Milan. But there were just as many bad ones, ones in which they appeared to be a team with which the favorite label does not fit at all. He was cruelly and extremely rationally destroyed by Newcastle on their field, and beat Milan in Italy. And in order not to suffer a disaster at the end of the stage, PSG needed magic. He would be kicked out of the Champions League by a defeat to Borussia, who took the lead in the second half. But five minutes later the visitors came back thanks to a goal from Warren Zaire-Emry. Despite the draw in Germany, he would have been sent to the Europa League by winning Newcastle’s parallel match against Milan. But the English club, having scored a goal in the first half, conceded two goals in response after the break. The Italian team was equal in points with PSG, and it surpassed them in additional indicators – thanks to the better goal difference in head-to-head matches. In general, everything has grown together as it should. Or it might not have grown together.

On the other hand, something equally important cannot be ignored. Strictly speaking, it is stupid to associate the PSG for which everything has grown together so happily with the PSG, which for many years served as an ideal example of the fact that in football, not everything is decided by resources – financial and personnel. Today’s Parisian club is the fruit of a grandiose summer restructuring. With a new coach, Luis Enrique, without Lionel Messi, Neymar and a whole group of players who formed the backbone of the team. In principle, only fragments remained of him – albeit expensive and bright ones like Kylian Mbappe, Gianluidzhi Donnarumma, Achraf Hakimi. And next to them – this figure, which, as it turned out, is stuck in Enrique’s memory so firmly that he immediately shoots it at a press conference – 11 players who did not play for PSG with Messi and Neymar.

This is, in fact, a new project, a semi-finished product. And it’s nonsense to evaluate him by the same standards by which PSG, which went into the past before the start of the season, was evaluated with its bad European Cup karma. In this sense, the Parisians cannot be compared with Manchester United, which failed in the Champions League, having a serious base, having gone through the perestroika period. You need to be a little more lenient with new projects, noticing the good.

But, if you look at it, there is a lot of good stuff, and everything, by the way, was demonstrated in the match with Borussia. This is the goal of Kylian Mbappe, who tirelessly creates danger, although in the off-season it seemed that PSG had bored him to death. This is the courage of Randal Kolo Muani, who immediately found a common language with an outstanding partner and was not inferior to him in sharpness: in Dortmund he had simply great moments to score. This is the liveliness of the midfield, in which the company of the young – 22 and 23 years old – Lee Kang-In and Vitinha in the most important game was the 17-year-old youth Zaire-Emry, who did not get lost and turned into its hero.

Coupled with the good is a lot of things that should not be characteristic of a grandee – confusion in standards, segments when the interactions between lines and between their elements are completely lost, segments of complete uncontrollability, which seem to lead to white heat, judging by the expression on his face and the screams from eyebrows, Luis Enrique. Sometimes it looks like real chaos. But this happens during the maturation period for teams counting on a bright future.

PSG’s immediate future lies in the Champions League round of 16 draw on Monday. On it, he will receive as opponents one of the clubs that finished in first place in their group. And the list includes Manchester City, Real Madrid, Arsenal, Bayern. At the same time, their leaders are probably also tormented by doubts about how to treat the Paris option if it comes up—as a gift due to its obvious “dampness” or as a mortal threat due to the potential visible through the instability.

Alexey Dospehov