As a final scene it was so appropriate that, for a second, one could wonder if Kylian Mbappé had done it on purpose. He had reached the final embers of Paris St.-Germain’s run in the Champions League. Once again, the dream of European glory that had driven the club for more than a decade had been thwarted.
Suddenly, there he was, hitting the goal: the best player in the world, the local icon who has come to symbolize PSG’s ambition, skill, excess and arrogance, his flashbulb moment at his fingertips. And then, as Dortmund’s defiant defense helplessly followed in its scorching wake, Mbappé slipped.
No entry, no foul, no intervention whatsoever. She just fell down. She wouldn’t have her goal. He wouldn’t be the hero. But at least he had provided a perfect allegory: not only for the seven years he spent at his hometown club, but also for the lavish, transformative and deeply flawed project he has come to represent.
It remains to be seen whether or not this will be Mbappé’s last act as a PSG player; He hasn’t started a Ligue 1 game in more than a month. But it will undoubtedly be his last significant appearance.
For all their work-in-progress and sorry-for-inconvenience vibes, Luis Enrique’s side secured their Ligue 1 title some time ago. The next two weeks are mere bureaucratic necessity, a brief period of inactivity before the international business of the summer. At some point, in the middle of all that, Mbappé will leave, most likely to Real Madrid, and PSG will be left with only memories.
What they will document is harder to pin down. Mbappé, without a doubt, has scored many goals during his time in Paris: 255 in 306 games according to the latest count. He has also accumulated trophies: six French titles, three French Cups, two French League Cups and several individual awards. He has become rich beyond anyone’s imagination. His prominence has also given him some form of political power: he dines with the president of France at the Elysée Palace more often than, say, Layvin Kurzawa.
But it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Mbappé’s seven seasons in Paris will end up defined more by absence than by presence. Like Neymar before him and Lionel Messi after, he was brought in for the spring in Paris. His legacy was supposed to be forged in the knockout rounds of the Champions League, the games that PSG prizes above all others.
His return to them has been, on the surface, impressive: 20 goals on football’s grandest stage. But that number requires a little context.
Mbappé scored six goals in a great flurry en route to the 2021 semi-finals, and five more in this year’s adventure. Most of the time he has proven to be a peripheral figure. (The contrast with international football is both appropriate and stark: when he was 24, Mbappé had been a dominant figure in two World Cup finals.)
The same could be said of his team. In PSG’s defense, he has recently established himself as a true force in the Champions League. He has reached the semifinals in three of the last five years. In 2020, in the unusual circumstances that the pandemic imposed on the tournament, the club finally reached the final.
However, the fact that it has never managed to cross the line and touch the trophy is (or at least should be) a source not only of considerable embarrassment but also of genuine existential tension for the world’s richest club. PSG, as a project, was acquired by an arm of the Qatari State with the aim of winning the Champions League.
To do this, Qatar has invested incalculable amounts of money in acquiring players, from Edinson Cavani and David Luiz and Thiago Silva and Javier Pastore and passing through Ángel Di María and Mauro Icardi, to Messi and Randal Kolo Muani. The total cost comfortably runs into the billions.
Foremost among that cast, of course, is Neymar, lured from Barcelona for roughly $240 million in 2017. That fee didn’t just represent the Brazilian’s talent, or even his value to his new employer.
The world record price was aimed, more than anything, at breaking European football. PSG paid that amount, in part, in the hope of inflating the transfer market to such an extent that only the two Manchester clubs could compete. The rest of the old guard, Real Madrid, Barcelona and everyone else, would risk going bankrupt if they tried to keep up. It was a transfer designed to change the world.
In retrospect, of course, we know it didn’t work. Neymar was, at best, a tourist in the PSG first team. A few years later, Messi arrived from Barcelona, heartbroken and disinterested. Mbappé, the most expensive local product in history, gradually became an extravagant problem: unwilling to play in certain positions, ineffective in others, his influence was such that it could extend beyond the team and into its training policy. recruitment.
At some point last year, the club’s hierarchy, long after everyone else, accepted their mistake. He came out on the side that the galactic club the era was over. PSG would reinvent itself from now on as a refuge for young French talents, and especially Parisians. “We can’t throw everything away just because we’ve been eliminated,” said Marquinhos, the club captain, after the loss to Dortmund. “This is a new project, a new coach.”
It’s a reasoned and admirable stance, one that the club would have been wise to take a decade or so ago, but it leaves a fairly glaring question unanswered.
Qatar has invested billions in the previous version of PSG, and will likely have to spend even more to undo it, to start again, without Neymar, without Messi, without Mbappé.
In doing so, he has not only turned French football into a wasteland, a league devoid of competition, but he has also distorted the landscape of European football more broadly, all in the hope of reaching a prize he has failed to seize. It hasn’t been worth it. It has not proven to be what anyone would describe as a smart investment. And then what has all this been for?
a matter of chance
Calling Mats Hummels a veteran seems to be an understatement. The defender is only 35 years old, but it is quite difficult to imagine that football would exist without him. It wouldn’t be a big surprise to know that he is in one of the images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, elegantly emerging, with the ball at his feet, from the Pillars of Creation.
He has also felt a distinctly youthful joy at Borussia Dortmund’s advance to the Champions League final. “Good harvest this week, fellow farmers,” he wrote on the social platform Bundesliga.
Then, after Dortmund’s win in Paris sealed their place in next month’s final, he returned. “Many teams wanted to play against us,” he posted. “Luckily we are very good guys and we made it to the final so that as many of them as possible have the opportunity.”
It’s hard to begrudge Hummels a bit of gloating. He was immaculate in both games of the semi-final against PSG. He is considered a failure color about once every three months, and has been for years. And yes, every one of Dortmund’s opponents in this year’s knockout rounds probably saw Hummels and his team as the least bad option for him.
At the same time, there can be no doubt that the draw played some role in bringing Dortmund to Wembley. PSV Eindhoven, now installed as Dutch champions, were not an easy hurdle in the round of 16, but neither were they as tough as Inter Milan and PSG could have been. Dortmund was as grateful as the Spanish team for hosting Atlético de Madrid in the quarterfinals.
This is not an attempt to belittle what Dortmund have done, nor to suggest that their uplifting and inspiring run to the final is some kind of fluke. Quite the opposite. But as much as no one wants to admit it, the draws for knockout competitions do matter. Some roads provide more difficult terrain than others.
Or at least they did. This is the last season in which the Champions League will have an “open” draw starting with the quarterfinals. Starting next year, the event will have seedings, as in tennis.
The theoretical appeal is that this is a more reliable way to discover the two strongest competitors (think of all those finals between Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal or Novak Djokovic), but the downside is that it makes stories like Dortmund considerably less likely. Weigh the dice against him. And in doing so, it takes a little more of the wonder out of the tournament.
Age is just a number
Good news: the list of eight nominees for the Premier League Young Player of the Season award is now available. Bad news: Four of the nominees are also vying to win the overall player of the season award; two of them have already won the young player award; and one, in fact, won it back in 2021, making the entire prize pretty useless.
It is clear (and has been clear for a long time) that the criteria for granting the honor need to be modified. Currently, the rules are very simple: any player who is 23 years old or younger at the start of the season is eligible. And that, ultimately, is the problem. The rules could be a little, maybe a lot, more complicated.
For example, it would make much more sense to focus eligibility not on age but on experience. One of this year’s candidates, Bukayo Saka, has played 225 times for Arsenal. He has been playing for England for several years. Another candidate, Manchester City’s Phil Foden, has won 16 major awards. He is not far from his 300th senior appearance. These are not wide-eyed newcomers.
Likewise, anyone who has already obtained the prize must be disqualified. That would rule out Foden (he already has two, for crying out loud) and his teammate Erling Haaland, who claimed last year’s award. Haaland did it at the same time he was winning the (overall) player of the year award. That absurdity could be stopped by making it clear that players cannot be nominated for both.
Obviously there should be an award for the Premier League’s newest faces, but it would be better to redesign the award as equivalent to the rookie of the year honour: open only to players in their first seasons in the division, rather than those who were installed ago. years.