“I am not here to win the Champions League. I am here to build a team.”
These were the words of Luis Enrique, eight months ago at the start of the 2024-25 season. It was the beginning of Year 1 of his Paris Saint-Germain project: a post-Kylian Mbappé era, a policy of no big egos and no big stars, and a new journey with a young, talented and malleable squad.
His words sounded like revolution for a club created by superstars, made for superstars and ran by superstars. It felt like one too, and heading into Wednesday’s Champions League quarterfinal against Aston Villa, it’s fair to say that the evolution of the revolution is much ahead of schedule.
In private last summer, the 54-year-old Spaniard was honest and transparent about the amount of time he felt such a revamp would take, predicting two years of work before reaching the level he wanted and seeing a team on which everyone would play hard, fight and work for each other. On Saturday, as PSG celebrated the 13th French title in their history, coming during a season in which they’re still unbeaten with six games to go, Alexandre Dujeux, the beaten Angers manager, didn’t hold back in his praise.
“I think they make a very beautiful champion. Everyone attacks; everyone defends. I enjoy when I see this. I find it fantastic,” he admitted after his team’s 1-0 defeat at the Parc des Princes that confirmed the Parisians’ coronation.
In only his second season at the club, Luis Enrique has already in a sense lived through three different eras with PSG. Last season, with Mbappé and the constraints that his status represented, the team was built around the France captain. Despite Luis Enrique doing his best to try and make the striker change, work harder and be more of a team player, the coach didn’t like the team, which was not his and not built like he wanted.
Then from August 2024 to the start of 2025, it was about planting the seeds of this new team and moving ahead with his plans. The priorities for Luis Enrique: Finding the right No. 9, teaching the movement with- and without the ball, passing on instruction for their team press and counter-press, improving players individually (namely Vitinha, Bradley Barcola, Désiré Doué and Willian Pacho) and instilling a fighting, collective mentality.
It was not easy, in particular the intense criticism he and the team faced after their league phase stutters in the Champions League — it took them until Matchday 7 to actually confirm their place in the knockout stages — and a few surprising draws (including back-to-back ones against Auxerre and Nantes) in Ligue 1. Yet while the former Barcelona boss kept changing his line ups in search of the right formula, he never deviated from his idea of constructing a team.
“If I fail, it will be with my ideas. I will continue to follow them. I am getting there,” he said in November.
Again, in private, Luis Enrique was letting team officials know that he could feel the squad getting better and starting to really understand what he wanted. The players could feel it, too: Training was demanding — in addition to working on precise tactical plans, the team spent hours on video analysis — but it was paying off. Ousmane Dembélé had been moved to center-forward in December, and all the pieces were starting to fit around him.
1:40
Villa’s Emery backs ‘mature’ Martinez to handle hostile PSG crowd
Aston Villa’s Youri Tielemans and Unai Emery are confident Argentina’s World Cup-winning goalkeeper Emi Martinez can handle the jeers of the French fans in Paris.
On Dec. 15, the 2018 World Cup winner started as the No. 9 against Lyon in Paris. He had only scored once in the 11 matches prior, but it clicked for PSG that night. A goal for Dembélé, and a good win followed three days later at AS Monaco with two more goals for the Frenchman. The Parisians never looked back after that and kept playing better and better.
The third phase of Luis Enrique’s tenure at PSG has come since the turn of the year, as 2025 has been exceptional. With Dembélé up front and the team molded around collective effort, the results include the demolitions of Manchester City (4-2) and VfB Stuttgart (4-1) in the Champions League league phase, the 10-0 aggregate win over Brest in the last 32, and huge wins in Ligue 1 over Brest (5-2), Monaco (4-1) and Lille (4-1).
It’s a PSG team built in Luis Enrique’s image, one that works hard together, with great cohesion, and in which every player is committed. The individual talent has done the rest.
Pacho has made the defence more solid. The first-choice midfield had question marks around it in terms of physicality and size, but Vitinha, João Neves and Fabián Ruiz (unbeaten in his last 50 league games with PSG) have shown that intelligence, movement and quality on the ball are more than adequate compensation. In attack, the arrival of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia from Napoli in January has been a legitimate spark, with Dembélé (32 goals and 7 assists in all competitions), Barcola (18 and 15), Doué (11 and 11), Gonçalo Ramos (14 and 5), Kang-In Lee (6 and 5) and Kvara himself (3 and 4) all finding the net with regularity.
Of course, PSG’s masterclass of the season so far were the two games against Liverpool in the Champions League last 16, in which they dismantled the best team in Europe thus far — 4.41 Expected Goals (xG) vs. 1.86 in two games, with a 48-21 edge in shots on goal — over both legs. Collectively, the two performances are among the best of the season all teams and competitions combined.
PSG reached new heights then, and have set the bar high for the rest of the season. With the French league title already secured, they will have to do it again against Villa this week. Luis Enrique has no doubt that his team will get it done.
>
