Lionel Messi scored a brilliant goal. Gianluigi Donnarumma kept a clean sheet. Paris Saint-Germain won, easing immediately any sense of unease that might have been threatening to develop after the opening-week draw against Club Brugge. All is well for Mauricio Pochettino and Nasser al-Khelaifi. The crowd at Parc des Princes can relax, take their celebratory selfies and send whatever gleeful WhatsApps they like. Perhaps this will, at last, be their season.
And yet, comfortable as Tuesday’s win over Manchester City ultimately was, fitting as it was that Messi should get off the mark for his new club with a strike of that nature against a fellow petroclub, the one managed by the coach with whom he twice won the Champions League, there must still be concerns.
Having a forward line of Neymar, Messi and Kylian Mbappé, enticing as it may sound, enticing as it may look, brings problems. With Neymar unusually diligent, PSG’s forward line attempted 10 pressures in the final third on Tuesday; City’s attempted 29 – and that despite City having more of the ball: if you have three players disinclined or unable to press but whose brilliance and status means they must be selected, what can you do? It’s a problem that has undermined not only PSG in recent years but also Barcelona and Juventus.
Pochettino did the only thing a coach can do: he packed the midfield with industrious scufflers and arrayed them in front of his back four. Idrissa Gueye and Ander Herrera occasionally got forward to offer a goal threat, but fundamentally PSG played with what in Italy in the 90s was called a broken team, a sort of 4-3-0-3. That runs contrary to most modern thinking about tactics, which tends to elide the differences between positions and demand the team function as a single integrated unit but, here at least, it worked.
Can it be relied upon, though, always to work against high-level sides? City had 18 shots to PSG’s six, seven on target to PSG’s three. City had the better xG by 1.9 to 0.8. It’s true that, other than the incident in the first half in which Raheem Sterling and Bernardo Silva hit the bar in quick succession – although there was a suggestion of offside – PSG had the clearer opportunities, and also true that Kevin De Bruyne could have been sent off for his foul on Gueye.
But still, City at the moment are in a slightly odd phase in which they either score five or six, or struggle to break down opponents. Even against Chelsea on Saturday, when they were generally excellent, they perhaps didn’t make the most of the chances they had. In five games away from the Etihad this season, including the Community Shield, City have scored two goals. Other teams, or City in a more fluent moment, may be more adept at taking advantage of the space PSG leave between forward line and midfield. A side with a more natural centre-forward may be able to use the territory PSG inevitably cede to sling crosses into the box.
And PSG, thanks to sloppy defending, got an early goal, against the run of play. They were able to sit back and play on the break, which exposes City’s biggest weakness. But they will not always have that luxury.
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The questions are not merely tactical. It is rare that stars get on as well as Messi, Neymar and Luis Suárez apparently did at Barcelona. At the weekend, there was furore after Mbappé, having been substituted, was filmed in a heated conversation with Gueye, gesturing angrily at the pitch and complaining that a teammate, widely believed to be Neymar, doesn’t pass to him.
Different lip-readers have come up with different variants, but L’Équipe reported that he referred to Neymar as a “clochard” – a tramp.
In itself, perhaps, that doesn’t matter too much. Teammates in any sport at any level complain about each other. But what was telling was the reaction. The news had barely broken when montages began to circulate from Neymar stans on Twitter showing Mbappé wasting chances having been set up by the Brazilian and asking why their man should bother passing to this fraud.
Which is obviously ludicrous. Mbappé’s development may have slowed over the past year or so, but no one seriously doubts that, at 22, he is already one of the greatest forwards in the world. It’s easy to say that Mbappé should be able to laugh off the flak, but his teammate Ángel Di María had to have therapy after a campaign of sustained social media abuse prompted by his performances for Argentina.
That may be an extreme example – although it is certainly not isolated – but the point is more general: when you have three celebrity forwards, their interactions are played out under intense scrutiny and in a bizarre environment in which a perceived mistake by one can bring mockery and abuse from obsessive fans of the other two. It may be that the pressure ends up bonding the three, but the potential for their relationship to become strained is clear.
Which is not to say that the win shouldn’t be celebrated. The interaction between Messi and first Achraf Hakimi and then Mbappé for his goal is highly encouraging. But it is to say that questions remain about that gilded forward line, and that the gulf between them and the midfield is an obvious flaw other sides may be better able to exploit than City, on this occasion, could manage to do.
