It’s Champions League Title or Bust for PSG’s Galacticos

The PSG-Real Madrid UCL last-16 matchup is not short on story lines, not least of which is how the French side has modeled its approach to conquering Europe after its opponent.

In the modern world, there are two ways of running an elite football club. You can work with a manager and impose a philosophy, buying players to fit it, or you can sign lots of famous players and hope they’ll all fit together somehow. Tuesday features the meeting of the two biggest exponents of the celebrity route, Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain, and, yet again, one of them is going to be disappointed.

The truth is that a galacticos policy never really works for the long haul—or rather, it hasn’t since the advent of pressing in the mid-to-late 1960s. It worked for Real Madrid in the late ’50s because the game was different then, and it has to an extent remained prisoner of that history ever since. Buying famous players makes club presidents look good, and probably helps get them reelected. It stimulates global interest, and in the modern age it makes the social media figures look impressive, but it is inefficient.

Of course, if you have lots of good players, more than the other teams, you still have a good chance of winning—particularly in knockout competitions, and particularly if you happen upon a combination in midfield that can offer control without a loss of creative variety. Real Madrid’s successes over the past decade came because Casemiro, Toni Kroos and Luka Modrić provided a platform for Cristiano Ronaldo, whose reliance on the selflessness of Karim Benzema has only really become apparent since he left the club. (And yet even then it was a side that could peak in only key games; Real Madrid won just two La Liga titles in Ronaldo's nine years in the Spanish capital, a record of remarkable underachievement for the richest club in the world).

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But it is the galactico model that PSG has chosen to follow. It is enough to win in France, but when you’re so much wealthier than the rest, that is a minimum requirement. Indeed, the more eye-catching details are those seasons, such as last year, when PSG somehow fails to win the league. But success in the Champions League, the ultimate validation and the goal its Qatari ownership set when buying the club in 2011, continues to be elusive.

Signing Lionel Messi from a Barcelona club sunk by its own incompetence and the pandemic was perhaps the ultimate galactico move. In a sense it was the final victory of the project that begun with the signing of Neymar for a world-record fee in 2017, as Barça so impoverished itself trying to overcome the embarrassment of losing its rising star to PSG that it ended up losing its all-time great to it as well.

A forward line of Messi, Kylian Mbappé and Neymar is as starry as it gets, the modern equivalent of those Real Madrid front lines of the late ’50s. But the problem is that this is not the ’50s and forwards these days have to be willing and able to perform their defensive duties. None of those three are.

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Hilariously, to oversee that contradiction, PSG appointed Mauricio Pochettino, a manager who historically had always played a pressing game that demands supreme fitness and effort. He has compromised by installing a brick wall of a midfield: Ander Herrera, Marco Verratti and Idrissa Gueye. The problem with that is that it means there are often seven outfield players within 30 yards of the PSG’s goal, then a gap of 40 yards to the other three. Better teams, you suspect, will take advantage of that.

The pressure to win the Champions League increases on PSG each year. With the World Cup in Qatar beginning in November, there is perhaps a particular desire from the owners to win it this season. And this team does feel like a one-off: Messi will be 35 at the start of next season, while there is a likelihood that Mbappé will leave when his contract expires in the summer, quite possibly—likely, even—to go to Madrid, as his affinity for the club is not a secret.

Madrid’s attempts to prove its post-pandemic virility by signing Mbappé in the summer increased the bad blood between the respective club presidents, Florentino Pérez and Nasser Al-Khelaifi. Add in the possibility that former Madrid coach Zinedine Zidane is a leading candidate to replace Pochettino should he leave in the summer—in addition to the fallout from Sergio Ramos’s move from Madrid to PSG last summer; though he will miss the first leg with a calf injury—and Tuesday night’s first leg at the Parc des Princes could be combustible.

It’s new money against old, a rising power against a club desperate to nab its greatest asset as much for reasons of image as tactics. And yet it’s also a meeting of two clubs pursuing a vision of team-building that, for all it may generate in income and interest, feels old-fashioned in footballing terms.

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