In 2022, there is no better. PSG-Real Madrid at the opening of the knockout matches of the Champions League already exudes the scent of the final, with the fall on March 9 in the return match of a powerful European player. There will then be a defeated defeated who can at best only console himself with winning his national championship.
But we don’t build 700 million euro machines to watch the competition slip away into the Arable Spring, with the final on May 28 in Russia. With at least four semi-finals in the last six editions for Real and two for Paris, this poster brings together the eternal contender, the most successful in the competition, and the new candidate from a different economic model, which is also rampant. at Chelsea or Manchester City, clubs that never know the crisis.
But PSG-Real, a huge concentration of stars with Ballon d’Or in each camp and future winners at least in one, remains above all a sporting summit, a huge factory of fantasies and dreams, with the possibility of already tearing themselves away. at one vertex to jump to the next. “In Paris, we aspire to win. It would be a dream. We don’t have the experience or the history of Real but we’re not going to play the victims either. I have confidence in my group”, explains Mauricio Pochettino, less Droopy than usual. Paris looks straight in the eyes of Madrid. There is no longer one side, the big favorite and the nice outsider. The PSG can overcome the obstacle, it has the codes and the instructions for use.
Paris knows how to transform
Because it’s always the same with this special club, ultra-dominant in Ligue 1 but impervious to emotion and contested by some of its supporters. He knows how to transform in a flash the night he decides. PSG is the Arturo Brachetti of football, able to change outfits in a fraction, to drop the tinsel to put on its clothes of light. He already did it last season against Barcelona and Bayern Munich and it’s time to remember the good things. The European Cup transcends them and transforms them because they only live for that, basically, like their leaders but not their fans who fume after going off the road in the Coupe de France.
But that’s all about PSG: being bogus against Nice on the last day of January and royal against Real in mid-February. The art of the split even if it’s only an 8th. PSG will never form the best team in Europe this season but they will always instil the idea that they are made up of the best players on the planet at the weigh-in. A way like any other to win the event.
He can win his Grail with a Leo Messi who has become infernal again or a Kylian Mbappé who has decided in a World Cup year to climb the steps of the Ballon d’Or. At the end of the contract, so more than ever likely to leave the capital for another, further south, he will want to leave a complete trace. Hoping that the idea will be contagious and shared by all. Like a final night.