Obsessed with Champions League glory, PSG kick off another bid

PSG are the perennial favourites for the Ligue 1 title – but the least their fans expect is for them to win the French league, the weakest of Europe’s major top flights. The Champions League is the theatre of PSG’s most passionate hopes for glory, and over recent years the tournament’s knockout rounds have provided stages for the tragic denouement of those hopes.

The Parisians only managed to reach the final once since sugar daddies Qatari Sports Investments took over in 2011, pumping in cash and pumping up hopes – a 1-0 defeat to Bayern Munich in 2020, in one of the most lacklustre Champions League finals in living memory.

The remarkable defeat to Barcelona in the 2017-18 second round still haunts PSG. In the first leg at the Parc des Princes, PSG showcased all the prowess that money can buy, with a 4-0 victory. It looked like PSG had joined the ranks of the giants.

But in the second leg – or La Remontada (“The Comeback”), as Barcelona fans christened it – the French side collapsed in the face of a Catalan masterclass in attacking football. It was a 6-1 beating that seemed to expose the Parisians as amateurish parvenus with no place at football’s top table.

The phenomenon repeated itself the following season when PSG beat Manchester United 2-0 at Old Trafford in the 2018-19 quarter-finals. Instead of consolidating their lead, they collapsed in the second: Man U – even as a sad shadow of the team from the Sir Alex Ferguson glory days – thumped them 3-1.

Then 2021-22 saw PSG’s knockout round collapse happen yet again – history repeating itself not as farce, but as an increasingly banal tragedy. Or, in the words of The Guardian football writer Barney Ronay, an “oddly life-affirming humiliation” demonstrating that football