Paris Saint-Germain made a winning start to their Club World Cup with a comfortable 4-0 victory over Atletico Madrid.
In Group B’s first match, Fabian Ruiz, Vitinha, Senny Mayulu, and Kang-In Lee were on target as the newly-crowned Champions League winners got off to a flyer in the heat at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California.
Luis Enrique’s side weren’t at their scintialling best as they had shown in their 5-0 decimation of Inter Milan in the Champions League final, but they showed signs that they had brought that Munich momentum with them stateside with a professional performance against an errant Atleti.
Paris suffered a scare in the early exchanges as Julian Alvarez bent a free kick just wide of Gianluigi Donnarumma’s near post, but they were ahead inside 18 minutes.
Fabian was the goalscorer, arrowing an effort hard and low into the far corner to open the scoring and give the Ligue 1 champions a deserved advantage.
Their high-octane pressing was proving too much for a laxadaisical Atletico side who seemed to be lacking a bit of unity, and with Fabian and Vitinha orchestrating play from the Parisian engine room, there was no stopping the French side.
They doubled their advantage on the stroke of half-time, with Vitinha slotting home cooly past Jan Oblak to finish a sweeping move from back to front after Antoine Griezmann had tested Donnarumma for the first time just seconds earlier.
Atleti upped their intensity in the opening minutes of the second half, but they imploded as the game wore on, with Clement Lenglet’s petulance earning him his marching orders as tempers flared and Simeone’s side continued to collect needless bookings.
Atletico thought they had halved the deficit through Alvarez as Desire Doue was robbed by Koke, before Pablo Barrios fed Alvarez, who had peeled off his marker. The Argentine struck beyond Donnarumma, but the goal was chalked off by VAR for a foul on Doue by Koke, leaving Diego Simeone to sarcastically applaud on the touchline.
Mayulu repeated his Champions League feat by adding a third late on, slamming home emphatically as a loose ball broke his way to compound Atletico’s miserable afternoon.
It could only go from bad to worse for the Spanish side as Robin Le Normand was adjudged by VAR to have handled Ibrahima Mbaye’s shot, and Lee converted the resulting penalty to round off a Rose Bowl rout for the Parisians.
The youthful exuberance shone through from Paris’ stars in the end, keeping their heads in tempestuous conditions as they sailed past their Spanish counterparts to top the group with ease.
