On Saturday, the entire Parc des Princes crowd (attendance: 45,000) rose suddenly with a collective scream of excitement. The fans were fixated on a Paris Saint-Germain player who’d grabbed their attention — something that didn’t happen too much during the 2-1 win over Toulouse in which, once again, the Ligue 1 champions were average.
The noise increased as this PSG player continued an impressive run, dribbling beyond several tackles. Was it Lionel Messi? Neymar? Kylian Mbappe? No. The guy responsible for this thrilling moment was 16-year-old midfielder Warren Zaire-Emery.
On the right wing close to the touchline, he ran the whole length of the pitch, escaping two slide tackles before squaring the ball on the edge of the box to Messi, who didn’t do much with it. A few days before the Toulouse game, Zaire-Emery made history by becoming the youngest scorer in PSG history at 16 years and 331 days old, converting against Montpellier (3-1) to seal the win for his team — not long after becoming the youngest PSG player to play for the first team. He had come on 20 minutes earlier and, a bit like on Saturday, made a great run down the right flank before entering the box. Instead of passing the ball to Messi, he smashed an unstoppable shot across goal.
The France U19 international is a prodigy. Born in March 2006, the kid from Paris is a product of the club’s academy and arguably the leader of the next golden generation of PSG players. He is the A-list star of the Gen-Z set.
One story sums WZE up very well. After Vitinha arrived from Porto in the summer and had settled in following a few training sessions, he said to his agent Jorge Mendes, who also represents Zaire-Emery: “Who is this kid that you got in your team? He is an alien!” Vitinha was so impressed by the young box-to-box midfielder, just like anyone else who’s played with him, played against him or even just watched him play.
Veteran midfielder Marco Verratti could not believe what he saw when his young teammate, aged just 15, joined the first team for his first training session with them. Since that day, Zaire-Emery has beaten record after record to the point that PSG decided not to recruit a new midfielder in January so they could give him more game time.
The other notable “phenom” in the PSG squad is El Chadaille Bitshiabu. He is slightly older at 17, but is just as precocious and impressive as Zaire-Emery. The central defender was already 6-foot-2 at 12 years old and he has continued to develop: now 6-foot-5, he’s blessed with great awareness and a keen left foot when it comes to building attacks from the back. He’d also broken a few club records before Zaire-Emery came along to one-up his teammate.
Bitshiabu is now getting more and more game time with the first team. He came on at the weekend after 24 minutes, when Renato Sanches got injured against Toulouse. He started against Strasbourg at the end of December in Ligue 1, playing 79 minutes in PSG’s 2-1 win.
When Mauricio Pochettino arrived at the club in January 2021 and watched the reserve team train, Bitshiabu was the one who caught his eye. He gave him his first training sessions with the first team and his debut as well, which came in the Coupe de la France at just 16 years and 213 days old. He makes mistakes, of course, as you’d expect at his age — just like like Zaire-Emery, whose poor pass led to Reims’ equaliser 10 days ago — but he is learning very quickly and could be a fully enter the centre-back rotation next season alongside Marquinhos, Milan Skriniar (who is arriving this summer from Inter Milan) and Presnel Kimpembe.
In addition to those two, PSG have several other talented academy players breaking through.
