Of all the achievements that Lionel Messi may have hoped to tick off upon signing for Paris Saint-Germain last summer, being jeered by an entire stadium of his own supporters was probably not among them.
Yet in PSG’s 3-0 home win over Bordeaux, that is precisely what happened. Messi was booed when his name was read out prior to kick-off. He was booed every time he touched the ball. He was booed even when he supplied the passes that led to PSG’s first and second goals. Neymar, scorer of that second goal, was booed too, along with practically every single one of his team-mates. Four days on from PSG’s latest Champions League capitulation at the hands of Real Madrid, the mutinous atmosphere at the Parc des Princes on Sunday marked the biggest display of dissent since the club’s Qatari owners first planted their flag in the French capital in 2011.
On Monday morning, staff reporting for work at the Parc des Princes, the club’s Camp des Loges training base and the PSG offices in Paris’s chic Boulogne-Billancourt district discovered walls tagged with graffiti calling for the PSG president, Nasser Al-Khelaïfi, and the sporting director, Leonardo, to resign. “Paris will never be Qatari” read one message spray-painted in black on a wall beside the stadium’s main entrance. According to the newspaper L’Équipe, further protests are planned for PSG women’s Champions League quarter-final home leg against Bayern Munich on March 30 and the men’s clash with their arch-rivals Marseilles on April 17.
Even with PSG 15 points clear at the top of Ligue 1, the dissent had been fomenting for weeks. During a 1-0 league win over Rennes in February, fans unfurled a series of banners protesting against the club’s management, denouncing the absence of a coherent sporting project and deploring the marketing motives that have led to PSG playing games in their third and fourth kits rather than their traditional colours of blue, red and white. PSG’s history may date back only 52 years, but it is a history to which the club’s supporters cling fiercely. There was anger, too, over PSG’s limp penalty shootout defeat by Nice in the last 16 of the Coupe de France — a competition that the club had dominated in recent years.
PSG’s second-half collapse against Real Madrid last week, which recalled previous Champions League calamities against Barcelona in 2017 and Manchester United in 2019, left supporters seething. With PSG having broken through their own glass ceiling by reaching the club’s first Champions League final in 2020, such humiliations were supposed to have become a thing of the past. Messi was no more culpable than any other player for the meltdown in Madrid, but he and Neymar seem to have been explicitly targeted during the Bordeaux game because they symbolise a project in which superstar players are piled on top of each other without any apparent forethought as to how they might play together.
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Messi has frequently looked a shadow of the player he was at Barcelona, traipsing around the pitch uninterested and seemingly shorn of the burst of acceleration that would leave opponents floundering during his pomp at the Nou Camp. While the 34-year-old has supplied a league-leading ten assists in Ligue 1 (level with his team-mate Kylian Mbappé), he has scored only twice in the league and flickered sporadically in the Champions League. Neymar has appeared comparably diminished. The one player spared by the boo boys against Bordeaux was Mbappé. With 26 goals to his name in all competitions, he – alone – is living up to his billing, yet for all PSG’s determination to hold on to him, there is growing expectation that he will join Real Madrid when his contract expires at the end of the season.
The head coach, Mauricio Pochettino, also seems certain to leave. Obliged by the club’s recruitment strategy to build his team from the front with forwards who do not even pretend to take part in defensive work, he finds himself piloting a group of players who drift through matches, almost entirely reliant on flashes of inspiration from Mbappé. French champions-elect they may be, but they are a world away from the snapping, snarling machine of a team that the Argentinian built at Tottenham.
There is speculation in the French media as to how far the shockwaves from the Bernabéu debacle might spread. While there seems little danger of Al-Khelaïfi being removed from his post by the decision-makers in Doha (not least after using last year’s Super League controversy to enhance his status within Uefa and the European Club Association), Leonardo’s position as sporting director – a role to which he returned in 2019 – looks much less secure.
With the World Cup in Qatar on the horizon, 2022 should have been the crowning glory of the Qataris’ PSG project. Instead, the club are, once again, a laughing stock, humiliated abroad and derided at home. The galacticos model has not yielded Champions League success and has been noisily, angrily rejected by the fans. A crucial crossroads awaits.
