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Mauricio Pochettino is being unceremoniously dumped by Paris Saint-Germain, talks of a successor search happening out in the open before his termination package has even been agreed upon. He’ll leave behind a sense of vague dissatisfaction and regret, no legacy to speak of. He won a league title and French Cup, but he failed in Europe and so will join an ever-lengthening list of managers who have found themselves unable to overcome the internal contradictions of a club that is beginning to look unmanageable.
The good news for Pochettino is that managers tend to recover from the PSG experience. Thomas Tuchel only left the job in December 2020 (and so bears as much responsibility for the failure to win the league in ’20–21 as Pochettino) but he has already won the Champions League since. Carlo Ancelotti, sacked in ’13, also won the Champions League the season after his departure, and has since won another. Unai Emery has added a Europa League title and taken little Villarreal to a Champions League semifinal. PSG does not make people into bad managers; it is just extremely difficult to manage.
Pochettino was seen wearing a Tottenham T-shirt just weeks ago. He clearly enjoyed life in London, and there has been an effort on the part of the Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy to restore relations. Should Antonio Conte leave, although that in the immediate term now seems highly unlikely, Pochettino would be an obvious candidate to return to his former post. Other high-profile Premier League jobs could conceivably become available sooner rather than later, and, while Ancelotti has credit in the bank at Madrid, it never takes much for its president, Florentino Pérez, to start considering other candidates.
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The problems at PSG are obvious. There is an executive layer that is too readily seduced by footballing celebrity. It wants the biggest, most glamorous names, and gives little thought as to how they may fit together. Club president Nasser Al-Khelaifi claimed in interviews this week that the direction of the club’s project was changing, to move away from that approach, but it’ll be believed when it is seen. It is one of football’s enduring strengths, one of its defenses against the tyranny of wealth, that it demands balance. You can have the three greatest forwards in the world—and with Kylian Mbappé, Lionel Messi and Neymar, PSG isn’t far off—but there still has to be structure.
The most cohesive modern teams make their forwards work, they press from the front, they track, they are—as near as possible—a single unit of 11 high-functioning components. If one of those components is deficient in performing part of its role, then other parts have to compensate. And because none of Mbappé, Messi and Neymar is entirely reliable in fulfilling his defensive duties, whether because of age or inclination, that means the midfield three has to be packed with grafters.
That is fine, up to a point. Lesser opposition will be bullied off the ball, so PSG will dominate possession. And with those three forwards and a lot of the ball, the result ought to be goals. So PSG wins Ligue 1 more often than not. But better teams aren’t intimidated by that midfield. They can hold possession. They can keep the ball from the front three. Or they can sit off and let the front three have the ball, knowing that there can only be a limited number of runners from deep. PSG becomes predictable because roles within the side have to be so rigidly defined.
Worse than that, because the midfield is forced to drop so deep when out of possession while the forward line remains high, a huge gap can appear, in which high-class opponents can make hay, untroubled by the three players behind them. If the ball isn’t getting to them, it doesn’t really matter how talented they are.
Ancelotti, perhaps, as a laid-back ego-whisperer, was the manager who might have made it work, but he was probably involved in the project too early. Since Laurent Blanc’s departure in 2016, PSG has appointed a string of hard-pressing coaches who demand discipline, a weird disjunct given a squad that has no time for such things. The stories from the squad are legion: Neymar’s three-day birthday party, the stars drifting back from holiday when they feel like it, objections about the effort a game plan in a big European game demanded, players moaning to their agents who pressured the sporting director if they were left out. How can anybody manage that? But when PSG has paid so much for those forwards, it’s little surprise if its directors are unwilling to see them left out.
Perhaps with the removal of Leonardo as sporting director and the appointment of Luís Campos, the culture of the club will change. Christophe Galtier, formerly of Lille and Nice, is lined up to take the job, although more flashy names such as Zinedine Zidane, José Mourinho and Conte have all been linked with it. But the truth is that until the culture changes, it doesn’t really matter. PSG is trapped on a frustrating mezzanine: too powerful for domestic success to matter, too wrapped in celebrity culture and too obsessed by image to prosper against the very best.
