Three-Letter Grand – Newspaper Kommersant No. 40 (7485) dated 03/10/2023

The main victim of the current Champions League draw was determined by the starting play-off round, in which PSG, with Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe, lost too resignedly to Bayern, without scoring a single goal for more than three hours of playing time and conceding three, two from Munich – in the return match. The stylistics of the next European Cup misfire of the Parisians, some details made it very similar to the semantic collapse of a grandiose in terms of high cost and brightness of the project executors invited to implement it, which showed insanely low efficiency.

Salt of this failure PSG seems to have described perfectly L’Equipe in the material with the analysis of the return match of the Parisians with Bayern. Of course, it was said in it that their high-profile European Cup disruption was already a familiar phenomenon, such a football constant that will always find a place among the highlights of the season since the French club gained a status that forced you to expect a lot from him and follow him more closely. than for the rest. But the breakdown of the current one was still different from the previous ones, even if it had to be expressed not in numbers, but in sensations.

PSG set its sights on success in the Champions League in 2012, when it came under the control of Qatar Sports Investments, an owner so generous that over the past ten years it has invested more than € 1 billion in personnel enhancements. But instead of success, so far there have been solid misfires.

In most cases, at such a distance from the trophy that it’s even somehow embarrassing, given the club’s capabilities, to call it close approaches. There were only two exceptions during this time – reaching the final in 2020 with a loss to the same Bayern and the semi-final of 2021, in which Manchester City dealt with PSG. In all other draws – a breakdown either in the quarterfinals, or, as now, already in the starting round of the play-offs.

During this time, PSG managed to lead six completely different in every sense – biographies, tactical preferences – coaches: the master with colossal experience Carlo Ancelotti, Frenchman Laurent Blanc, full of trendy ideas Unai Emery, young and daring Thomas Tuchel, skillful strategist Mauricio Pochettino , finally, Christophe Galtier, appointed instead of him last summer, is a mentor without a chic track record, but he jumped two years ago in the giant’s national championship with the most modest Lille against his background. During this time, PSG managed to make a million adjustments to the composition, carrying out its constant upgrade, spending record money on Neymar and Kylian Mbappe, huge on their partners, and in the end even poaching the best player of the century, Lionel Messi. But none of the combinations at the Champions League level worked.

At the same time, each of the previous breakdowns was perceived acutely – as a drama, a tragedy. Everyone was stuck in the memory of the fatal goals conceded by PSG in the last minutes, amazing plot twists – such as in 2017, when, after seemingly putting Barcelona on the shoulder blades with a 4-0 defeat in the first match, the Parisians then managed to lose to her – 1 :6, or at least recessions that did not follow from the general course of the season, so inopportunely falling on the European Cup play-off. And everyone, bringing pain to those who are worried about PSG, gave them along with it a ray of hope: it didn’t work out now – it will work out a little later, when a new coach comes, when they buy new stars, when Messi adapts better in the team. The smallest thing is missing.

So, the peculiarity of this gathering of PSG is that not a single gram of drama was found in it, that it did not give birth to truly strong emotions at all.

It turned out to be some too routine, ordinary event, for which everyone was subconsciously ready, only having seen in reality what they already imagined well, waiting for the confrontation between the two giants. There is again no trace left of that PSG, which sometimes gives out excellent matches in the French championship. In it, he played at the level that the funds invested in him suggest, in segments. In the second leg, a segment of good football, however, lasted about an hour – until the mistake that resulted, as it turned out, in the goal of Eric Choupo-Motinga that finished off the Parisians, but this is still terribly little for a club that expects to be at the top of the continental hierarchy. In it, being, strictly speaking, not in perfect shape, but gathered for the sake of an important battle, Bayern, without any extra effort, coped with Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe, a tandem of players who less than three months ago in the final of the Qatari World Cup scored five for two heads. In the Munich match, Neymar, who injured his knee, could not help them, but his presence would hardly have embarrassed the defense of Bayern. It was definitely not Neymar.

From this confrontation, it did not breathe hope, but something completely opposite to it – hopelessness, the collapse of not a single European Cup campaign, but of the entire Paris football project on a cosmic scale.

A semantic collapse, based on not momentary troubles, not the workload of the calendar, which Galtier referred to when explaining the defeat, but something permanent, stuck so deep and so hard that you can’t corrode either Messi or another billion euros thrown out on transfers . Something that made the once famous English midfielder Joe Cole, who analyzed the PSG game for the BBC, wonder: how is it possible that a team with such resources still does not have a clear, immediately recognizable face ?! Something that made Cole’s colleagues remember other details related to the implementation of the project. For example, the fact that Carlo Ancelotti and Thomas Tuchel, after being fired from PSG, won the Champions League, with Real and Chelsea, Tuchel did immediately, in the same season. Or that in 2014, the Parisians released Kingsley Coman to Bayern for free, and in 2020, Eric Choupo-Moting, considering the brilliance emanating from them was not very bright. Both in this clash scored the former club, as if deciding to emphasize the dead end of his chosen path.

Alexey Dospekhov