It is difficult to pinpoint when exactly the demise of PSG’s $2 billion project began, but it is easy to identify the final blow. Borussia Dortmund handed him over on Tuesday night in Paris. It was 90 minutes of torment, an imposing header and the culmination of unfulfilled expectations.
It was Dortmund 2, PSG 0 in two disappointing games in a Champions League semi-final, but it was more than that.
It was another round of 16 defeat in the same competition that Paris Saint-Germain had built superteam after superteam to win.
It has been a decade since PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaifi proclaimed that the club “has to win” the Champions League within four years. It has been a decade of disappointments.
And it is, in a way, the end. It is not the end of ridiculous spending in pursuit of soft power and success, but the end of building that pursuit around megastars. Kylian Mbappé leaves. Like Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Lionel Messi and Neymar before him, he will leave without the trophy he and his hometown club so desperately coveted. And unlike the others, he will leave without a successor.
Mbappé was the last of The super stars. He stayed one last season in Paris and dreamed of saying goodbye on the biggest stage of all, in next month’s Champions League final at Wembley. He tempted the Parisians with audacity and goal after goal. He pulled off a thrilling comeback to beat Barcelona in the quarterfinals.
But his dream died like so many others.
During Tuesday’s 90 minutes at Parc del Príncipe, hope turned to irritation, then exasperation and anger, then despair and stares from miles away.
PSG were the favorites, even after a 1-0 loss in the first leg last week. But each foray forward, this week and last, ended with a misplaced pass or a Dortmund intervention, or some new form of misfortune, each a little crueler than the last.
The Parisians finished twice in nine seconds last Wednesday. This Tuesday, in the second half alone, they hit the post four times.
They slipped at vital moments. They won free throws that They looked like penalties, but they occurred inches from the penalty area.. They touched headers just off the mark.
They fired 31 shots in total, but only five hit.
They created 5.3 expected goals in two games, but zero actual goals: just agony and howling.
“Football,” PSG coach Luis Enrique would later say say“sometimes it’s very, very unfair.”
For the second year in a row, they were eliminated from the Champions League without a goal in 180 minutes. In 2023, it was Messi stroking his beard sadly. In 2024, some characters were different, but the scene seemed remarkably similar.
And the result was devastatingly familiar.
For the twelfth spring in a row, a PSG Champions League campaign ended ahead of schedule, with the only acceptable result.
This era of expectations began in 2011, when Qatar Sports Investments, a company operated by the Qatari government, bought PSG and began pumping money into the club. A summer of spending took a once mediocre team to the Champions League. A second brought Ibrahimović and Thiago Silva, Lucas Moura and Marco Verratti, Ezequiel Lavezzi and an unprecedented stir.
David Beckham also arrived that winter. PSG reached the quarterfinals and went blow by blow with Barcelona. The Parisians lost on penalties, but this, as the rest of Europe feared, was just the beginning of their rise to the top.
But then they lost again in the quarterfinals, and again and again.
In 2017, they regressed and lost in the round of 16. They responded by paying more than $400 million for Neymar and Mbappé.
Apparently, his solution to each problem was another eye-watering sum. Since 2011, they have spent more than $2 billion on transfer fees and billions more on salaries. They spent years throwing money at failure. After three consecutive eliminations in the round of 16, they finally reached the Champions League final in 2020, but lost to Bayern Munich. By 2022 and 2023, they had returned to the round of 16.
They had also gone through coaches, tactics and styles. Finally, they recently seemed to realize that in football, superteams (in the traditional sense, with a few megastars and an ignored supporting cast) often don’t work. And they concluded that the era must end.
Of course, they hoped it wouldn’t end like this. They tried to persuade Mbappé to stay, and even when it became clear that his sights were set on Real Madrid (he is said to be moving to Spain as a free agent this summer), they imagined one last run, one last dance under a sunset. Parisian sun .
But none materialized.
Tuesday’s defeat, to be clear, will not be the end of PSG as a French power. They have won 10 Ligue 1 titles since 2011. Qatari owners have not only shattered world transfer records with nine-figure fees; They have paid €30 million or more for 27 players, many of whom will remain in a squad that should continue to win trophies at the national level. In fact, technically, PSG’s biggest transfer outlay in a single season was the nearly $500 million spent on a dozen players since last summer.
But the big names will soon disappear. The big European games could be too. The PSG project, as we have known it since 2012, is over.