Around 15 minutes into the Champions League final on Sunday night, Kylian Mbappé latched on to a delicious long ball from Leandro Paredes and cut in from the left channel. To his right, Ángel Di María spotted a pocket of space on the edge of the penalty area and made a sharp diagonal run towards it. With Di María totally unmarked 18 yards out and screaming for the ball, Mbappé’s low shot was blocked by Joshua Kimmich.
Around 17 minutes from the end, with Paris Saint-Germain desperate for an equalizer, Neymar gathered the ball about 25 yards from goal. Once again Di María spotted the space, peeled around the back of Alphonso Davies and drifted towards the back post, awaiting the sort of lofted dink from which Kingsley Coman had scored the only goal of the game. Instead, with stars in his eyes and glory in his gills, Neymar blazed a shot from distance that whistled safely into the banks of empty seats at the Estádio da Luz.
Is it unfair to cherrypick two isolated passages of play from a 90-minute game and hold them up as unshakeable testimony? Well, yes and no. You could have pointed out countless occasions this season where Mbappé and Neymar have laid on chances for Di María. You could point, for example, to Neymar’s delightful flicked assist in the semi-final against RB Leipzig, an opportunity he could easily have taken on himself.
But equally: like Lee Harvey Oswald and Cat Bin Lady, sometimes you have to be judged by your one-offs. After all, football is not an endless process but a game of discrete beginnings and ends, of definite and binary outcomes. And when the ball lands at your feet in an evenly matched Champions League final, a game of few clear opportunities, there is an extent to which the decision you make at that crucial moment partly defines you as a footballer.
Only Mbappé and Neymar can really know what was going through their minds. But the way they fixed their gaze on the goal as they received the ball suggests their focus was entirely singular. In a tight game where Bayern had more than 60% of possession, PSG dominated in just one major metric: attempted dribbles (13 to five). In the biggest game in the club’s history, when it came to the crunch, PSG’s philosophy with the ball was clear enough. Trust yourself.
And why not? Even in a curtailed campaign, PSG have sailed past the 100-goal mark in all competitions for the eighth season in a row. In the three years they have been playing in tandem, Neymar and Mbappé have shared 160 goals between them. For as long as they have been at the club, they have learned that there will always be plenty of chances for everyone. Why bother passing sideways, then, when you can be the hero?
In many ways, this encapsulates the model to which PSG have wedded themselves since the Qatari takeover in 2011: throw enough gifted individuals at your opponents, and ultimately class will win out. It has worked handsomely in Ligue 1. It may even have worked handsomely on Sunday night, had a couple of cards landed differently. But in many ways it is a model that looks increasingly out of step with the prevailing direction of elite football, where a rigidly drilled collective with a defined philosophy will win out more often than not.
As football begins to move beyond the Lionel Messi/Cristiano Ronaldo era, the idea of anchoring an entire dynasty to outrageously gifted individuals is rapidly falling out of fashion. These days it is systems and automatisms, highly choreographed pressing and sharply honed attacking patterns, that are the surest route to success. Most of the continent’s best teams – or at least, those who have made the best use of their resources – instinctively get this. Manchester City and Liverpool get it. So do Borussia Dortmund and Atalanta. Early Barcelona got it. Late Barcelona, calamitously, do not.
This was perhaps the biggest difference between Bayern and PSG in Lisbon: a team with a honed style, and a team still searching for theirs. Such was Bayern’s commitment to their way of playing that even in the dying minutes, protecting a lead, their defence still held a provocatively high line.
Meanwhile, in amongst the swift turnover of managers and their carpet-bombing recruitment strategy, the modern PSG have made only the loosest attempt at defining a playing identity. Perhaps the closest they came was the patient passing system they developed under Laurent Blanc, anchored by the balanced midfield of Marco Verratti, Blaise Matuidi and Thiago Motta.
Under Thomas Tuchel, they have made tentative steps towards moulding something more dynamic, more resilient. But it is still only really a half-philosophy: a patchwork job hampered by the fact that whether it was Zlatan Ibrahimovic or Neymar at its vanguard, they have never possessed a front three capable of sustaining a robust pressing game.
And really, this is a broader question: about the sort of club PSG want to be. For years it has been content to exist as a sort of carbon-powered royal court, a luxury star vehicle, a VIP nightclub where the big names are indulged, the collective is neglected and they wonder why they always screw up at the sharp end of the Champions League. In fact, the real lesson of this season’s campaign was not their ultimate failure but how much progress they seem to have made in the interim. That’s the thing about being bankrolled by an entire state: you learn your lessons faster than most.
(The Guardian)
