In the summer of 2021, Paris Saint-Germain had seemingly everything it needed to get the one thing it didn’t have: a reputation as one of global soccer’s big winners.
Its roster appeared built out of a video game. Kylian Mbappé, the 22-year-old World Cup champion from France, alongside Brazilian superstar Neymar and, in a breathtaking signing, Lionel Messi, the Argentine many considered the world’s best player of all time. The collection of three of the world’s best goal-scorers — and a total payroll of nearly $430 million — was made possible by the club’s equally staggering resources.
Since 2011, PSG has been owned by an arm of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, which spent freely to establish it among the world’s most accomplished clubs. Although PSG routinely won France’s top soccer division, it had never won the Champions League, Europe’s annual and most prestigious club tournament, and only once played for the title.
By some metrics, the two-year run featuring Mbappé, Messi and Neymar was a smashing success. Star-studded PSG raked in more than $1 billion in revenue, according to the club. But by exiting the Champions League in the round of 16 in 2022 and 2023, and with Mbappé, Neymar and Messi playing together in only about a third of their potential games, PSG never came close to conquering Europe on the field.
All three stars eventually departed, replaced by younger, less expensive successors. For most clubs, that would have signaled the start of a rebuild.
Instead, just two years later, a less-heralded, less-expensive version of PSG could win the most coveted title that eluded its starrier predecessors when it plays Internazionale of Milan in the Champions League final Saturday in Munich.
A Champions League trophy would be notable not only for PSG, one of the most prominent clubs never to have won the tournament. Only one team from France has ever won it, and that was 32 years ago.
PSG enters as the favorite because under manager Luis Enrique, it operates no longer as a star system but as a team, said NBC Sports analyst Robbie Mustoe, a former English Premier League player.
“There’s a lot of evidence that having star players in a team doesn’t make a team, and PSG is such a great example with Neymar and Lionel Messi and Mbappé and everybody else they’ve had there,” Mustoe said. “It takes an all-around team, and you can’t really have passengers too much now. And what I mean by that is players that switch on when they have the ball and switch off when they don’t have the ball.
“PSG is such an amazing example of this, where they changed the manager, they obviously got rid of all the star players, they went younger, they went hungrier.”
Even with Mbappé only 22 years old in 2021, the average age on PSG’s roster that season was 27.8, two years older than on its average opponent, thanks to 34-year-old Messi’s joining 29-year-old Neymar and 33-year-old Ángel Di Maria.
This season, the team’s average age is 25, two years younger than that of its average opponent, a reflection of PSG’s decision after the 2023 season to “completely change its strategy” of roster construction, Alice Lefebvre, a reporter for Agence France-Presse who covers PSG, said by email.
“The club’s management have stopped obsessing over the Champions League, as they had done until now, and have officially stated that they are giving themselves time to build a project around the young players and youngsters coming through the Parisian training program,” Lefebvre wrote. “As the season progressed, despite some internal tensions between a few players and Luis Enrique at the start of the season, a new spirit began to permeate the team. Everyone plays for everyone, and everyone presses for the ball, just as the coach wants.”
Enrique and sporting director Luís Campos recruited younger players including French winger Désiré Doué, 20, a breakout star for whom the team paid $54 million to acquire last summer, João Neves and Willian Pacho. The oldest mainstay is 31-year-old Brazilian defender Marquinhos. The majority of the team is either in its prime, such as leading scorer Ousmane Dembélé, or entering it, like 22-year-old Bradley Barcola, whom Enrique has called “the best passer in Ligue 1; he’s one of the best dribblers in Europe.” The arrival in January of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia from Italy strengthened PSG’s ability to attack.
Weaving it all together is Enrique, who was used to high-profile, high-pressure jobs before, after having managed Barcelona to a Champions League title, then coached the Spanish national team. When PSG hired him in 2023 after Messi had left and Neymar was in the process of exiting, Enrique arrived with a specific project, Lefebvre wrote, of getting young players who would defend and attack in unison. In Champions League competition, PSG owns the fourth-highest passing accuracy and the third-highest possession percentage.
“As long as Luis Enrique is here, the strategy will remain one of youth rather than stars,” Lefebvre wrote.
Enrique was also tasked with overhauling a change in attitude. The team would be built no longer on the potential brilliance of three players, but on the doggedness of all 11.
“A Paris Saint-Germain player has to get used to starting, coming off the bench or even not being called up,” Enrique told reporters amid the team’s Champions League run. “We make sure that every player who comes on is at 100% and gives his all.”
Perhaps the coach’s best work has been coaxing a career-best season out of Dembélé, whose potential had always been evident. Barcelona signed Dembélé in 2017 with ambitions of his becoming the successor to its outgoing star Neymar. Instead, during six inconsistent seasons combined, he scored 24 goals and assisted on 34 more.
When PSG needed its own Neymar replacement in 2023, it placed its hopes on Dembélé, too. This season, his second for PSG, Dembélé scored 21 goals during the domestic season and eight more in 14 Champions League matches, and he added 10 assists between the two.
Enrique’s coaching has mimicked Dembélé’s role earlier in his career at clubs in France and Germany, allowing for “more freedom to go everywhere on the pitch,” Dembélé said this week.
“I have my bearings,” he said “I just try to create space and to cause a bit of chaos in midfield. This has been paying off so far.”
Relative to its past, PSG reined in its payroll this season to $220 million, a number that is nonetheless still larger than that of the three next-high-spending teams in France’s top division combined and that would also rank second-highest in England’s Premier League, the world’s richest domestic soccer league.
What is different is that now PSG could have a trophy to show for all that spending. While past PSG teams weren’t prepared to “suffer,” said Mustoe — a buzzword in global soccer with the loose definition of a team’s ability to endure its struggles — this year, “they have a team that suffers with immense ability,” he said.
PSG proved it during the knockout stage of the Champions League, when advancing relies on the aggregate score of a two-game series. PSG lost in the round of 16 to Liverpool at home, then held firm to win on the road on penalties and advance. After it beat Aston Villa in the quarterfinals, it won again on the road to open its semifinal against Arsenal, then advanced to only the club’s second Champions League final with a home win on May 7.
“If we were to analyze everything that has happened in the UEFA Champions League this season, I think it would make a great thriller or horror film or even a very good series, because it has had a bit of everything,” Enrique, who managed Barcelona to a Champions League title a decade ago, said this week.
“I think we should be proud of what we’ve achieved. However, we have to finish the job because what we’re really aiming for is to make history.”
