Real Madrid rediscover their belief as Neymar and PSG set sights on history

Even on the night Real Madrid may have wrapped up La Liga, it was all about Europe. On Saturday, the day Paris Saint-Germain were losing 1-0 at Nice, Carlo Ancelotti’s team produced possibly their best performance of the season. Coming from a goal down, they defeated Real Sociedad 4-1 at a noisy Santiago Bernabéu where well after the final whistle the players came back out to greet their fans and a defiant chant went round, a message of hope. “Sí, se puede!” it ran. “Yes, we can!”

They weren’t talking about being able to win the league. Having just pulled eight points clear of Sevilla – a lead never overturned at this stage of the season – that seems likely now. Instead, they were talking about being able to turn round the 1-0 deficit from the first leg against PSG. This, after all is the competition that truly measures them and obsesses the 13-times winners of the European Cup.

It is the competition that obsesses PSG too of course, the only one that truly appears to matter for a club at the opposite end of the European scale when it comes to trophies. “The Champions League is special, you’re motivated even more and I want to produce a great game, make history and take Paris where they should be,” Neymar said here in Madrid. “What we most want is the Champions League. The excitement and hope will always be there with the Champions League.”

If the “unlike Ligue 1”, still less the French Cup, went without saying it was pretty explicit there and also in the words of Mauricio Pochettino, who insisted that “the Cup, the league, and the Champions League are different challenges”. It was even more explicit when the PSG coach added: “Neymar was signed a few years ago to try to win the Champions League: that was said in every