DashSync

Another season, another frustrating departure from the Champions League for Paris Saint-Germain.

In previous years, they have gone out with a bang, sometimes amid controversy and claims of conspiracy, often with a dramatic collapse at the hands of one of the game’s historic heavyweights.

This time, they departed with a whimper, beaten 3-0 on aggregate by Bayern Munich in the round of 16. Twelve years into life under the ownership of Qatar Sports Investments, their dreams of European glory are looking fainter and more distant than ever.

Advertisement

PSG’s struggles against Europe’s elite — relatively speaking, as they did reach the Champions League final in 2020 and a semi-final in 2021 — are invariably portrayed as a story of excess, of “flashy bling-bling” as club president Nasser Al-Khelaifi put it last summer, an apparent acknowledgement that PSG, under his leadership, had been too preoccupied with stardust and glamour.

But it has been also a story of what they lack: the collective identity that the best teams have, an affinity with the club and each other. When Al-Khelaifi mentioned too much “flashy bling-bling” and “the end of glitter”, he also spoke of the need to “create a real team, find a real collective spirit” with “players who are proud to represent PSG and ready to fight every day”.

“My goal for the next few years,” the PSG president added, “is to have only Parisian players in our team.”

Why on earth didn’t they think of this earlier? If there is one club with enough talent on its doorstep to build a team that could challenge in Europe, it is PSG.

The statistics are remarkable. Of France’s 26-man squad at last year’s World Cup, no fewer than 11 were born within 15 miles of the centre of Paris:

Then there are those who missed out on the France squad, such as Tanguy Nianzou, Ferland Mendy, N’Golo Kante, Paul Pogba, Christopher Nkunku and Anthony Martial.

That is before you consider the number of Paris-born players who were called up by other teams on account of their dual-nationality, reflecting not just migration from Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal, Morocco and Tunisia but also from Portugal (Borussia Dortmund full-back Raphael Guerreiro) and, in the case of Southampton defender Armel Bella-Kotchap, migration to Germany at a young age. Riyad Mahrez, raised in the northern Parisian suburb of Sarcelles, would have been in this category had Algeria not been beaten by Cameroon in the World Cup qualification play-off.

Advertisement

For comparison with other European cities, there were nine players from Greater London too (four of them England internationals: Luke Shaw, Declan Rice, Bukayo Saka and Harry Kane), five from the Ruhr region of Germany, four from Amsterdam, eight from Lisbon and its surrounding areas, eight from Madrid and five from Belgrade.

But there is a distinct difference: those other cities have produced top-class footballers for longer than most of us can remember. Paris has not.

Paris never used to be a hotbed of football talent. None of France’s European Championship-winning line-up in 1984 was born or raised in the capital. Their World Cup-winning squad in 1998 reflected the growing diversity of the nation, with Lilian Thuram (born in Guadeloupe), Patrick Vieira (Senegal) and Thierry Henry raised in the ‘banlieue’, the vast suburban sprawl beyond the centre of Paris. By the time France won the World Cup again in 2018, there was Kante, Pogba, Blaise Matuidi, Rabiot and Mbappe as well as others, such as Presnel Kimpembe, from the wider Ile-de-France region.

“You just have to look at the statistics,” says former PSG youth coach Yves Gergaud, now head of scouting for the youth academy at Ligue 2 club Paris FC. “There are so many players from this area playing in the ‘Big Five’ leagues (Premier League, Ligue 1, Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga).”

How are the suburbs of Paris producing so many high-level players? “There are a lot of youngsters whose families are originally from African countries, where the national sport is football,” Gergaud says. “Maybe in English cities a lot of the immigration is from India, for example, where the national sport is cricket, but here the Senegalese families, the Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Malians etc, so many of the young boys here play football out on the streets.”

Advertisement

Pogba once said of the Parisian suburbs: “There is only football. Whether it’s at school or outside in the neighbourhood, everyone will play football. Every day it’s the ball. That’s all there is.”

Arsene Wenger has spoken similarly about how “street football” has become more popular than ever in Paris at a time when it is dying out in many other big European cities. But the former Arsenal manager has also pointed out how, even away from the metropolis, France encourages participation with a structured, organised approach to sports facilities and coaching. He once mentioned opening a new stadium in a small village which had two under-16 teams and four coaches, “all paid for by the government”. By contrast, he said, grassroots football in Britain can be an expensive pursuit.

Gergaud agrees. “In the past, we always played in the street, chasing the ball like little tribes, but now there has been a lot of development of pitches in all the different neighbourhoods.” Still street football, but more structured, better organised.

There are amateur clubs all over the Paris area that have contributed to French football’s modern success stories. During Euro 2016, a visit to US Roissy-en-Brie, in the eastern suburbs, brought home the pride the locals felt in Pogba, whose signed Juventus shirt had pride of place in the clubhouse. He was an inspiration to the local youngsters, who dreamed of following in his footsteps.

But similar stories are presented by clubs all over the banlieue. In the eastern suburbs alone, there is also Esperance Paris 19e (Fofana), US Fontenay-sous-Bous (Matuidi), FC Villepinte (Kolo Muani), US Senart-Moissy (Coman) and AS Bondy (Mbappe, Saliba, Jonathan Ikone) and so many others. It is an extraordinary talent pool.

The Paris metro is a triumph of early 20th-century spatial engineering. It feels like you can get anywhere from anywhere.

But it is not quite true. Bondy is only 10km from the city’s beating heart but to get there, you have to take Line 3 to the end, Gallieni, and then travel the rest of the way by bus.

Advertisement

Bondy is not Paris. Physically and spiritually adrift of the city, it is part of Seine-Saint-Denis, the French ‘départment’ with the highest proportion of immigrants and the highest poverty rate, with 28.6 per cent of its 50,000-plus residents living below the poverty line according to INSEE (France’s national institute of statistics and economic studies).

The banlieues get a bad press. The word conjures images of La Haine, Matthieu Kassovitz’s film about the grim realities of life in the Parisian suburbs. Bondy isn’t like that. It has its social problems and its challenges, but there is optimism here, much of it stemming from pride in the town’s favourite son.

There is a steady flow of pedestrians — mothers and fathers with sons and daughters — crossing the bridge over the river to the Complexe Sportive Leo Lagrange, home of AS Bondy. It is the same journey Mbappe made so regularly as a child, dreaming but perhaps never quite believing his talents would take him to the heights he has reached so early in his career.

“The big boom is Mbappe because he’s such a big international star. He’s so influential, particularly among the youngsters,” says Ahmed Fettah, who coaches one of the girls’ teams at AS Bondy. “But it’s not just Mbappe, Saliba, Ikone. Also, Fabrice Nsakala, who played for clubs like Anderlecht and today plays in Turkey; Mourad Satli, who played for Red Star and played in Belgium; Mbappe’s (adopted) brother Jires Kembo Ekoko, who played for Rennes and clubs in Turkey in the Middle East. So many players.

“My son looks to Mbappe. My daughter wasn’t attracted to football at first, but she too has been inspired by Mbappe and by some of the women’s players, so now she also comes here to play. It’s like there’s a fashion effect, the effect that comes from the success of Mbappe and all these players. Among the West African and Arabic people in the suburbs, it’s inspirational.”

On the evening in question last month, there were whispers that Warren Zaire-Emery, a then-16-year-old from Montreuil, again on the eastern side of the city, was about to start for PSG against Bayern in the Champions League, having scored against Monaco in Ligue 1 three days earlier.

“It’s something extraordinary,” Fettah said. “It encourages me, this kind of phenomenon, and it encourages all the young players across Paris.”

Zaire-Emery did indeed play against Bayern, becoming the youngest player ever to start a Champions League knockout game. He acquitted himself well on a difficult night for PSG, enhancing his growing reputation, but he must know that if he is to establish himself as a first-team player at the club, as Kimpembe and Mbappe have done, he will have to buck a troubling trend.

Gergaud recalls the first time he set eyes on a nine-year-old Coman. The winger was one of 300 young hopefuls who turned up at a trial, responding to a poster, but he stood out like a beacon: “His technical ability, speed, agility and the way he dribbled with the ball.”

Advertisement

Almost immediately Coman was integrated into PSG’s youth system, initially for three years. He excelled as he went through the ranks and in February 2013, at 16, he became the youngest first-team player in the club’s history (a record subsequently broken by El-Chadaille Bitshiabu from Villeneuve-Saint-Georges in the south-east suburbs, then broken by Zaire-Emery).

Less than two years after the Qatari takeover of the club, at a time when David Beckham was winding down his career in their midfield, Coman was emerging as the face of PSG’s future.

But six months and another two cameo appearances later, Coman was gone. His contract expired that summer and, though he was offered a new deal, he preferred to join Juventus, feeling his first-team opportunities at PSG would be limited. “Kingsley left because they had just signed Lucas Moura to play in his position, so his progress was going to be blocked,” Gergaud says. “And this has been the case for many players, not just Kingsley. They have so many talented young players, but there has been no room for them to arrive in the first team.”

Coman, a young footballer in a hurry, encountered similar frustrations at Juventus before moving on to Bayern. To say he has subsequently returned to haunt PSG would be an understatement. When they reached the Champions League final in 2020, it was their one-time prodigy whose goal won the trophy for Bayern. When the two teams met again in the first knockout round this season, again it was Coman who struck the only goal of the game.

According to data released by the CIES Football Observatory, no fewer than 34 players trained by PSG at youth level are currently playing in the Big Five leagues. Only Real Madrid (43) and Barcelona (38) have produced more. But only three of PSG’s — as opposed to eight of Barcelona’s, five of Real Madrid’s, 10 of Manchester United’s and 12 of Lyon’s — are still playing for the club.

PSG are planning changes to their youth academy to try to develop more players for the first-team squad. But the academy seems the least of their worries. Like Chelsea until recent years, it is producing high-quality players, but — perhaps until now — the pathway to the first team has been congested by the club’s transfer policy, which has been entirely focused on the short term.

Almost every club has stories of players who slipped through the net. But in PSG’s case, losing players such as goalkeeper Mike Maignan (now at AC Milan via Lille), Mendy (now at Real Madrid via Le Havre and Lyon), Guendouzi (now at Marseille via Lorient and Arsenal), Moussa Diaby (now at Bayer Leverkusen), Nkunku (now at RB Leipzig, preparing to join Chelsea in the summer) and Coman (now at Bayern via Juventus) seems negligent, particularly when even the club hierarchy has now identified “flashy bling-bling” as a symptom of their shortcomings — and homegrown talent as the remedy.

They are far from the only Parisian talents making an impact at other clubs. Exceptions can be made in the cases of Barcelona’s Kounde and Southampton’s Bella-Kotchap (whose families moved to the Bordeaux area and to Germany respectively when they were young), but Konate ended up joining Paris FC and moving on via Sochaux and RB Leipzig to Liverpool; Disasi went to Paris FC before moving to Reims and Monaco; Fofana went to Red Star before moving on to Drancy, Strasbourg and now Monaco; Saliba preferred to move south to sign for Saint-Etienne before moving on to Arsenal; Kolo Muani headed west to Nantes and is now attracting rave reviews at Eintracht Frankfurt.

Advertisement

No club can expect to monopolise all the young talent in their area — or to capitalise on every promising player who comes through their academy; Gergraud points out that all the other leading French clubs are in the Parisian market, as are Red Star and his own Paris FC and several clubs in other countries, perhaps most notably RB Leipzig. But PSG are in an incredibly, perhaps unrivalled position by being the biggest club by far in what is surely the most talent-rich city in Europe.

The obvious retort to all of this is simply to point to Mbappe. But even his case serves as an illustration of something going amiss. After his time in French football’s centre of excellence at Clairefontaine, coveted by leading clubs across Europe, he chose to move south to join Monaco, believing the club would offer him a better springboard towards stardom. He was right — he made a spectacular breakthrough there before returning to the capital in an extraordinary €180million (£160m; $190m) deal that seemed designed to put the “Paris” into Paris Saint-Germain.

Six years later he is PSG’s all-time record goalscorer, at the age of just 24, but he has cut a frustrated figure in an all-star forward line with Lionel Messi and Neymar. The PSG project has been a confused, unconvincing one. So much talent at their disposal, yet so much fascination with signing big-name players at the tail-end of their careers.

They can be forgiven for making an exception for Messi, but Messi wasn’t the exception. The exceptions, still, are those players like Kimpembe and Mbappe, who, to borrow Al-Khelaifi’s words, appear “proud to represent PSG and ready to fight every day”.

During his “flashy bling-bling” interview with Le Parisien last June, Al-Khelaifi suggested that after 12 years of near-constant domestic success under the Qatari regime, it was time for PSG to make a reset.

It was a summer of change: Mauricio Pochettino out, former Saint-Etienne, Lille and Nice coach Christophe Galtier in; director of football Leonardo out, former Monaco and Lille sporting director Luis Campos in. On the playing side, several senior players on big contracts were sold (Areola, Thilo Kehrer, Idrissa Gueye), released (Angel Di Maria, Rafinha) or loaned out (Ander Herrera, Leandro Paredes, Georginio Wijnaldum, Mauro Icradi), a clearing of the decks to make way for a new-look team built around young talent — ideally French, ideally Parisian.

The inside track of PSG’s failure

The summer intake was not quite as many imagined. It was certainly not “flashy bling-bling”, but it was still relatively expensive and it did not quite amount to the first stage of the Parisification of PSG. Nordi Mukiele, who was born in nearby Montreuil and learned his trade in the academy of Paris FC, arrived from Leipzig, but beyond that, there was Reims forward Hugo Ekitike, on an initial loan ahead of an expected €35million move this summer, two new Spanish signings (Fabian Ruiz and Carlo Soler) and three Portuguese (Nuno Mendes, Vitinha and Renato Sanches).

Advertisement

The emphasis on local talent has largely been from within, with Zaire-Emery and Bitshiabu part of an ‘elite group’ of youngsters that also includes Ismael Gharbi, Ayman Kari, Lucas Lavallee and Ilyes Housni. Zaire-Emery’s progress inspires confidence, but it also carries faint echoes of Real Madrid’s ‘Zidanes y Pavones’ project during Florentino Perez’s first presidency: a group of young players being fast-tracked to bridge a gap arising from an obsession with stardust.

When it comes to Al-Khelaifi’s talk of building around Parisian talent, Gergaud is unmoved. “He said it 10 years ago,” the club’s former youth coach says.

“Paris Saint-Germain have had a lot of very good players, but so many of them have found there was no place for them. There was no space for them to arrive in the first team, so it means there are very good young players from the Paris region who have moved instead to Bordeaux, Saint-Etienne, Marseille, Lille or abroad, like to Germany. There are phenomenal ones like Zaire-Emery who I hope will prevail, but if so, that will be one or two (players) out of 200.”

In Munich on Wednesday evening, Mbappe was the only French player in PSG’s starting line-up as, 1-0 down from the first leg, they fell to a 2-0 second-leg defeat. It seemed notable that Zaire-Emery, who turned 17 that day, and Bitshiabu, also 17, were summoned from the bench along with Mukiele and Ekitike, intended as symbols of a brighter future but perhaps not ready for an occasion like this, particularly in such an unbalanced team.

It will take time for Zaire-Emery, Bitshiabu and others, even Mukiele, to develop into players that PSG can build around. So many of the best Parisian players for the here and now — those who are at or approaching the peak of their powers — are elsewhere. No doubt there will be an attraction in trying to lure some of them back to the French capital, but that will be expensive.

And that is before we come to the persistent, vexed question of whether they can persuade Mbappe that his long-term ambitions can be satisfied in Paris.

A few years back, another former PSG coach, Laurent Bonadei, now assistant to Herve Renard with the Saudi Arabia national team, recalled declaring in 2012 “that this club had the potential to win the Champions League in the next 10 years with a majority of players trained at the club”. He continued: “In Paris, I had only Parisians and I told myself that we had the means to do something exceptional”.

Advertisement

Looking back at what he said to footmercato.net, he was almost certainly right. He spoke about Maignan, Kimpembe, Rabiot, Coman and Moussa Dembele, who were among those he was coaching at the time. He could also mention Matuidi, an adopted Parisian whose signing from Saint-Etienne in 2011 was among the first under its current ownership, but also among the most inspired.

Also in the PSG system back then were Mendy, Guendouzi, Nkunku, Diaby — and then of course there are those like Pogba, Kante, Mahrez, Guerreiro, Kounde, Konate, Saliba, Fofana and Kolo Muani who have passed PSG by altogether. Add that lot to Mbappe, perhaps with the room for just the odd outsider like Thiago Silva, Marco Verratti or Edison Cavani, and you have enough talent to make you think this club could have won the Champions League by now.

They have not been far off at times. For all the efforts to paint PSG’s Champions League story as a long-running clown show, they reached four successive quarter-finals from 2012-13 to 2015-16 plus that final in 2019-20 and semi-final in 2020-21. Some of their eliminations have been harsh, slightly freakish or by narrow margins, almost always against high-level opposition. By almost any estimation, they have been among the best teams in Europe for the past decade.

But the past couple of years have seen a regression. The circus accusations have become more valid because, by the president’s own admission, it has been “flashy bling-bling” rather than something of real substance. They have become a collection of egos rather than a proper team.

It has not been a sporting project. It has been a vanity project, designed to bring prestige and glamour to PSG and, by association, to Qatar.

The desperation to win the Champions League — “within the next four years at most,” said Al-Khelaifi as far back as January 2014 — seemed to blind them to the talent on their doorstep.

And when you are talking about a talent pool as rich and deep as it is in Paris, that is all the more inexcusable.

(Top image: Kylian Mbappe by David Ramos; William Saliba by Fabrice Coffrini; Kinglsey Coman by Clive Mason; all via Getty Images, designed by Samuel Richardson. Map image: iStock)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57k2tvcWxnaXxzfJFsZmlrX2Z9cLzSoGSvmZ6ewbp5wJyYnZ2drnqktMCmp6Knnqh6rbHAoKyeZw%3D%3D