Sportswashing with Parisian characteristics

What are we even talking about with PSG?

Paris Saint-Germain won the Champions League in a culmination of several projects with distinct roots in France, Spain, the Netherlands and Qatar.

Let’s start with the least obvious and work our way towards what you’re all thinking about.

Luis Enrique¹ was an adult convert to the faith. Spending five years at Real Madrid under five different managers is not typically great prep for a “philosophy” coach. He crossed the divide to Barcelona, in an obviously controversial free transfer, in the same summer that Johan Cruyff left the Camp Nou. In his first season wearing the blaugrana, he was managed by Bobby Robson. His first coach actively embracing the Dutch-Catalan style was actually Louis van Gaal, quietly one of the biggest influences on modern European football. Van Gaal, much more than Cruyff, believed in attacking by dominating possession with a clear structure and discipline. As much as he’d tell you otherwise, I think it’s pretty obvious that Pep Guardiola’s football is closer to Van Gaal than Cruyff. This was the era when Van Gaal’s assistant was José Mourinho, and Luis Enrique was right there next to Guardiola in the playing squad.

Luis Enrique stayed at Barça until he retired from football in 2004, before returning to coach the B-team four years later, right when Guardiola got his big promotion. Despite coming from elsewhere, by that point he was well attuned to the Barcelona methods, inheriting young players from La Masia and passing them onto Guardiola’s senior side. He was pretty obviously positioning himself as a future Barça manager. When he took over Roma in 2011, he may as well have shaved his head, such was his obvious desire to copy the man with the job he coveted. Luis Enrique “clearly saw this as extra training for his future job as Barça coach”, Michael Cox wrote in 2015, “rather than necessarily doing what was best for Roma. He essentially transferred the Catalan template onto his new club, which suited them in some ways and caused problems elsewhere.”

No one on Earth was surprised when Barcelona hired Luis Enrique as manager in 2014. People might have been more surprised by what he did in the dugout. Two years after Guardiola left in 2012, the side had stagnated. He was supposed to reinforce the positional play principles slipping away from the side, but he recognised pretty quickly that the players needed something else. Xavi and Andrés Iniesta were both the wrong side of 30, while Neymar and Luis Suárez were bought to add more firepower next to Lionel Messi. Luis Enrique, then, maintained the core Barça principles, but allowed the side to become a little more direct, giving those attackers a little more freedom to do their thing.

I wrote recently that Real Madrid are on the verge of becoming more like Barcelona, but this was Barça becoming more like Madrid. The core principles were still there, but this was a team willing to sacrifice some of that to get the most out of three galactico forwards. He was the perfect person for this job, understanding exactly how to tweak and loosen Guardiola’s principles for a more individualistic team. Guardiola, a pivote of the Sergio Busquets or Rodri type, saw the game from the base of the midfield and sought to construct a side around that profile of player. Luis Enrique played higher up the pitch and, as such, saw the benefit in giving the attackers greater freedom to do their thing, as long as the underlying tactics remained spot on.

He never quite got the credit he deserved for that 2014-15 treble win. Yes, they had three of the four best attackers in the world at the time (the other being Cristiano Ronaldo). But he made a lot of smart choices to maximise that front three’s output, while also maintaining Barça’s traditional control of games. I don’t think any of Ernesto Valverde, Quique Setién, Ronald Koeman or Xavi have pulled that off. It’s only this season, under Hansi Flick, that we’ve seen that balance return.

He tried to reignite Spain with more direct football the same way he fixed Barcelona. The plan was to go a little more direct, getting the ball to the attackers who could run at teams. But he never quite had the wide players to do that. He was usually forced to play a playmaker on one flank and a direct runner on the other. He needed two wingers running in behind and stretching the play, which only quite happened after he left. To the Spanish footballing public, it might have seemed like he just relied more on Messi, Neymar and Suárez than his own coaching ability.

He ended his time as Spain coach at the 2022 World Cup in, yes, Qatar. That tournament played out on the pitch exactly as the hosts wanted, with Messi facing Kylian Mbappé in the final. Both players, of course, played for Paris Saint-Germain in their most exuberant era, one that has to be considered a failure and has now pretty decisively ended.

Qatar Sports Investments took over PSG in 2011 and signed Zlatan Ibrahimović a year later, starting what was pretty obviously a star-driven strategy. It won a lot of domestic trophies, but no one was particularly happy with it, especially after the club finished second in Ligue 1 in 2017. From there, PSG did what just about everyone else would do in the 2010s and tried to copy Barcelona. Fellow oil-rich club Manchester City (who unlike PSG are absolutely not owned by a nation state and how dare you suggest otherwise) did this by hiring Guardiola, sporting director Txiki Begiristain and CEO Ferran Soriano to rebuild Barça from the ground up in Manchester. It was aiming to be a holistic strategy running throughout the club (and indeed into other clubs they own). But PSG? Nah. That sounds too hard. Why do that when you can just buy Neymar himself from Barcelona?

Oh, and they also added Mbappé the same summer.

Unai Emery, Thomas Tuchel and Mauricio Pochettino all coached PSG during the Neymar/Mbappé era to mixed success. It would be wrong to call that side a failure, because there were occasions when a goal here and there would’ve achieved the obvious aim of winning the Champions League. They came closest in 2020, losing the final. But that would mask a greater issue: their own fans aside, no one wanted PSG to succeed. And isn’t that kind of the whole point?

“Sportswashing” is a complicated thing, and I don’t think the term entirely describes the aims of these projects. But, in order to be useful in advancing the strategic aims of the Qatari state, people have to like PSG. It has to be cool to be seen wearing one of those shirts with Qatar Airways on the front. They certainly had a strategy to do that. It was the club of the superstars everyone loved. They asked broadcasters to refer to them not as PSG but “Paris”, with all the elegance and class that entails. But it totally missed the point of why people like a team in the first place. PSG were the entitled rich kids with no sense of teamwork and ethics. It really could not have been worse branding for a petrostate.

They quadrupled down on this by signing Messi in 2021. The strategy was all there: Messi, in a different stratosphere of star power to Mbappé and Neymar, joining the pair for the most galactico-driven team the world had seen. PSG by that point had a major brand collaboration through Nike with Michael Jordan, and the allure of tying one GOAT to another is pretty obvious. Messi, unlike his former Barça teammate Neymar, is pretty uncontroversially beloved by almost everyone except Real Madrid fans. All of this would take place in the most glamorous city on Earth. This was the most obvious sportswashing win in history, and it failed.

PSG lost to Real Madrid in the 2021-22 Champions League round of 16, then to Bayern at the same stage the following season. No one particularly enjoyed watching this team with three of the most exciting attackers ever to play football. If Messi didn’t win the World Cup at the same time, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was totally past it by his days in Paris. Nothing cohered. Nothing felt like a team. Everyone at the club seemed absolutely miserable.

Another approach was on the horizon, but it was complicated. Mbappé was essentially holding PSG to ransom, getting an absolutely humongous final contract and forcing the club to change on his terms. Messi (by choice) and Neymar (not so much) both left in summer 2023 along with some players thought to be friends with the pair, as things shifted towards Operation Keep Kylian Happy. Luis Enrique came to the club at this time, which made sense. But PSG still lacked the obvious secret to sportswashing success: a brand narrative.

Mbappé was now the side’s sole galactico, while some high profile French players were signed to replace the departing South Americans. They were becoming more French. Barcelona have successfully embodied Catalonia. Bayern Munich usually “feel” German with a core of domestic players. It was time for PSG to become everything French. That’s just a little difficult for one reason: what even is “French football”?

For a European country of its size with two World Cups won in the last 30 years, French football still doesn’t have much of an identity. Five players in the starting eleven of the 1998 World Cup winning side — Lilian Thuram, Marcel Desailly, Didier Deschamps, Zinedine Zidane and Youri Djorkaeff — played their club football in Serie A at the time, while another in Christian Karembeu had left Italy just a year earlier. Serie A was the best league in Europe in the ‘90s, and this France team played Italian football. When Deschamps won Les Bleus a second star in 2018, he repeated the formula and relied heavily on ‘90s Serie A tactics. Zidane, the most successful French manager of the modern era, clearly got his core ideas from his time at Juventus. It’d be fine for France to borrow from Italy (lord knows there’s been enough cultural exchange between those two), but that hasn’t really happened. We’re not seeing young French players imparted with obviously Italian ideas. There is no French football as a set of principles on how to play the game.

So it needs to be built. There was no Catalan football, and in turn not even a clear identity of Spanish football, until they copied the Dutch. Luis Enrique has somehow been brought in to be the Cruyff figure of French football. Starting from first principles, what are France particularly good at? If we’re looking for a core of French football, what could we start from?

The modern French crop doesn’t lack for directness. Where Luis Enrique found in his last job that he didn’t have the direct wingers to make the side click, he is always going to have plenty of those if he leans into PSG’s Frenchness. France have generally played with a combination of tight control technicians and players who can run in behind and stretch the play. It’s a good combination to have.

Mbappé could’ve obviously been the face of this new French football, but he had other ideas. It’s easy to craft a narrative in hindsight that his ego held PSG back. I think that’s unfair just because Luis Enrique is not exactly short on ego himself. That’s another thing he has in common with Cruyff. He’s pulling the same trick the Dutchman did in Barcelona, teaching the locals how to play his own ideas of football while they start to adapt it to their strengths. You can finally feel something of a cohesive identity running throughout the club bonded to the streets of Paris. They did it.

Too bad it’s all in service of what it’s in service of. They built a modern day version of Cruyff’s Barcelona. It’s just a fucking branding exercise for a petrostate.

1. His full name is Luis Enrique Martínez García. His father was Mr. Martínez. We cannot, as frustrating as it is to write, simply call him “Enrique”.