When Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) became Paris Saint-Germain‘s majority owner in 2011, the club was Europe’s 48th-best team, according to the numbers at EloFootball.com. And this was a major improvement — they were 90th a year earlier.
They had just finished fourth in Ligue 1, their best placement in more than a decade. They had fallen to Benfica in the UEFA Europa League round of 16, and it was encouraging. At this moment in the summer of 2011, PSG were a VfB Stuttgart (tied with PSG for 48th at EloFootball) or a Werder Bremen (41st) — a club with a proud and intense fan base, and no major history of success.
Fourteen years later, they are European champions. They won their first UEFA Champions League title — and became only the second French club to do so — with a jarring 5-0 statement win over Inter Milan in Munich on Saturday. It might have been the best performance ever in a Champions League final, and it gave them as many European titles as Manchester City, among others.
Saturday’s win was the culmination of a more than decade-long story of lavish spending and heartbreak and missteps and all the things that modern soccer exhaustingly forces us to think about at all times (sportswashing, legal fights, nation-states, geopolitics). It also provided us with a chance to look back at the twists and turns that got PSG to this point.
Their rise was very fast, then very slow. How did they fall short in the past? What made this year different?
A fast rise, followed by stagnation
2011-12 season
Manager: Antoine Kombouaré, then Carlo Ancelotti
Ligue 1 finish: 2nd
Europe: Europa League group stage
EloFootball end-of-year rank: 28th
2020-21 season
Manager: Thomas Tuchel, then Mauricio Pochettino
Ligue 1 finish: 2nd
Europe: Champions League semifinals (lost to Manchester City, 4-1)
EloFootball end-of-year rank: 4th
Getting that close to glory didn’t earn Tuchel any favors. A bumpy start to the 2020-21 campaign — four losses in league play, two in the Champions League group stage — meant he was ousted in December. Pochettino produced a bit of an energy boost in the new year, and PSG seemingly exorcized a couple of demons with wins over a flagging Barcelona and defending champion Bayern Munich in the Champions League knockouts, but PSG were picked apart by Manchester City in the semis.
2021-22 season
Manager: Mauricio Pochettino
Ligue 1 finish: 1st
Europe: Champions League round of 16 (lost to Real Madrid, 3-2)
EloFootball end-of-year rank: 7th
The summer of 2021 ended up transformative in a couple of different ways. Long term, PSG brought in a trio of youngsters that would become major building blocks for the eventual championship team of 2025, landing 22-year-old right back Achraf Hakimi, 19-year-old left back Nuno Mendes (Sporting CP) and 22-year-old goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma (AC Milan). But in the short term, they made their biggest ever move, plucking away Lionel Messi when Barcelona, cash strapped from years of reckless spending following Neymar’s departure, couldn’t afford to keep him. They also brought in veteran former Champions League winners Sergio Ramos and Georginio Wijnaldum. They were clearly all-in for 2021-22.
Instead, they won one trophy. They easily won Ligue 1, but with Messi seeming only half engaged and Neymar missing almost half the season to injury (not exactly unusual at that point), they bowed out quietly against Real Madrid, again watching an early lead disappear.
“The secret against PSG is to press them,” Real Madrid’s Karim Benzema told L’Equipe. “The matches they’ve lost in Ligue 1 are the ones where they’re being pressed from all sides. And then when we scored, they told themselves they’d lost the game. … That often happens to them, they give up mentally.”
Ouch.
In retrospect, subtle statistical shifts signify a huge difference.
PSG allowed just 44.1 progressive carries per match in the Champions League knockout rounds, easily the lowest they’ve allowed in the competition. That’s a clear sign of their improved pressing abilities. Meanwhile, they averaged 18.6 shots per 90 minutes in the knockouts, a higher total than they ever averaged with Mbappé, Neymar, Messi & Co. They could attack however the occasion warranted, with either long possession sequences or quick strikes: Their 4.1 direct attacks (sequences starting in the defending half and producing a shot within 20 seconds) and 3.1 shots from counterattacks were their highest ever knockout-round averages, but their 0.92 meters-per-second direct speed (the average distance the ball moves upfield in a given sequence) was also their lowest average.
They had every club in the proverbial bag.
This was a comprehensive turnaround, one that even the players themselves said began with a comeback win over Manchester City on Jan. 22. City themselves were attempting to work through their most fragile run of results in the Pep Guardiola era, and they took a 2-0 lead with two quick second-half goals. Starting with a Dembélé goal on a breakaway, however, PSG scored four goals in the final 35 minutes and stoppage time, attempting 18 shots to City’s two in the process. They ran City into the ground.
Over the next six weeks, they would add Kvaratshkelia and outscore 12 opponents by a combined 41-8. Then they drew Liverpool in the round of 16; after an unlucky 1-0 home defeat against the eventual Premier League champs, they responded with a win at Anfield and took the tie in penalties. They bolted to a 5-1 aggregate lead on Aston Villa in the quarterfinals, then withstood a late charge in a boisterous environment to advance. Dembélé scored in the fourth minute of the semifinal first leg at Arsenal, and they cruised 3-1 on aggregate. And then, having won every domestic trophy yet again, they humiliated Inter in the final.
The comeback against Manchester City was a great narrative device, but on paper, the turnaround had begun a month earlier. And it specifically began with surges from two key players in new roles.
With a more important role in Mbappé’s absence, Dembélé began the season in mediocre form. In his first 18 matches, he produced just five goals and four assists — zero and one, respectively, in four Champions League matches. In this span, 83% of his minutes came on the right wing. But starting with the win over RB Salzburg, he would play 82% of his minutes at center forward for the rest of the season. And as the focal point of the attack, he would suddenly turn into a Ballon d’Or candidate. Since Dec. 15, he has scored 27 goals with eight assists in 31 matches. He created a deluge of quality shot attempts for himself, and his side-to-side ball distribution proved equally vital.
(Source: TruMedia)
(Source: TruMedia)
Meanwhile, with Barcola struggling to make an impact in Champions League play — he had 10 goals and two assists in 14 Ligue 1 matches but zero and zero in the most important competition — Luis Enrique made a change to the lineup by giving Doué greater responsibilities.
Doué through Dec. 6: 17 games, 525 minutes (30.9 per appearance); zero goals, one assist; 0.45 xG+xA per 90 minutes
Doué since Dec. 16: 38 games, 2,424 minutes (63.8 per appearance); 15 goals, 13 assists; 0.74 xG+xA per 90 minutes
With eight combined goals and assists in 1,600 minutes at age 18 at Rennais last season, Doué was seen as an almost-surefire future star, but he hadn’t done much in Paris before Luis Enrique forced the issue and stuck him in the starting lineup. And with his ability to play on the right or left — important once Kvaratskhelia came aboard in January — he was an absolute game-changer in both attack and defense. Doué and Kvaratskhelia gave PSG a pair of tireless runners up front, Hakimi and Mendes had become the best fullback duo in the world, Vitinha shined as a pure ball-progression machine in the middle, Barcola thrived off the bench, and in his new role, Dembélé gave PSG the most prolific center forward in Europe in 2025.
(Source: TruMedia)
Aiming for pure star power and glamor helped PSG establish itself as a money-printing machine, but the club didn’t finally earn its greatest prize until it lost its biggest stars and learned to overwhelm opponents with depth, energy and a heaping dose of modern tactics.
Pulling off an encore performance tends to be even more difficult than the initial breakthrough. Luis Enrique knows this as well as anyone: Even with almost all of the requisite star power, his 2015-16 Barcelona team couldn’t match the heights of the all-time great 2014-15 squad that throttled PSG on the way to the Champions League title.
If he finds he needs to shake things up to avoid a hangover, though, he’ll have endless depth to pull from. Even while acknowledging that players like Dembélé (28), Hakimi (26), Vitinha (25) and Kvaratskhelia (24) are in no way old, it’s impossible not to notice just how many exciting young players PSG have at their disposal right now. Pacho (4,013 minutes in all competitions this year) and Ramos (1,612) are 23, Barcola (3,618) and Mendes (3,456) are 22, defender Beraldo (2,451) is 21, Joao Neves (3,692) is 20, and Doué (2,949) and Zaire-Emery (2,865) are 19. So, too, is midfielder Senny Mayulu, who played 1,068 minutes this year and scored one of the late goals on Saturday. And we haven’t even gotten to players like winger Ibrahim Mbaye (17), fullback Yoram Zague (19) or center backs Axel Tape (17) and Noham Kamara (18), each of whom played bit roles this season.
PSG slowly compiled the deepest and most frighteningly young roster on the planet. It is so young, in fact, that you could say it arrived ahead of schedule and might not peak for another year or two. It probably took longer than Al-Khelaifi & Co. expected for PSG to achieve the ultimate breakthrough — and there were certainly some devastating disappointments along the way — but now that they’ve made it here, they probably aren’t going anywhere for a while.
