How PSG and its masterful coach tore down a superteam to build a Champions League winner

In the penultimate month of Paris Saint-Germain’s superteam era, Kylian Mbappé sat motionless in a mostly dark room, and endured a rant that explains PSG’s 2025 Champions League triumph.

It began with a lesson about Michael Jordan. “Michael Jordan,” PSG’s first-year head coach, Luis Enrique, told Mbappé in expletive-laden Spanish, “would grab his teammates by the balls and defend with them.” Mbappé, soccer’s golden boy, wasn’t doing that.

And so, for a minute and a half, with his hands gesticulating and his animated body leaning in toward PSG’s last megastar, Enrique delivered a lecture that might as well have been a manifesto.

“You think that you only have to score goals,” Enrique told Mbappé. “ … But that’s not enough for me.” He explained that his striker also had to lead an impassioned, coordinated press. And if Mbappé would lead it, “you know what we’ll have?” Enrique asked. “A f***ing machine.”

That’s what Enrique envisioned when he took charge of PSG in the summer of 2023. But with pampered phenoms, he couldn’t quite build it. For more than a decade, PSG’s stars — such as Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Neymar and Lionel Messi — had been “treated like gods,” Enrique explained in a 2024 docuseries. By the time he arrived, only one remained; but one was enough to corrupt his vision.

Because a ferocious press doesn’t function with 10 or 10-and-a-half players.

Mbappé, of course, was brilliant, and unbenchable, “the cornerstone of the team” for a reason.

But he was also a burden.

“We defend in a way to avoid him tiring, and attack to give him freedom,” Enrique said last year. “The moment he leaves, the team becomes the cornerstone. I think we can be even better next season.”

That, in a nutshell, is the prologue to a fascinating story that culminated Saturday in Munich. Mbappé left, PSG improved and walloped Inter Milan 5-0 to win its first European title. Enrique, the story’s primary author, bounded around like a little boy, and honored his late daughter, and twirled his shirt in ecstasy.

And none of it, he knows, would have been possible with the type of players that PSG chased for a decade.

“PSG would never have been an option for me with the previous policy of signing superstar players,” Enrique said last year. “The PSG with Neymar, Messi, Mbappé … no chance.”

The PSG with Neymar, Messi and Mbappé captivated global soccer. But it didn’t win a single Champions League knockout game. For all their individual skill and accolades, as a team, they were stale and stodgy.

And they were disjointed. Most of all, they were fragmented. Messi was too old to press; Neymar was too fragile to press; Mbappé often chose not to. So they defended with eight, and attacked with maybe four or five. They were everything that modern soccer isn’t.

The sport’s best teams defend with 11, attack with 11, transition with 11 and move as one. The striker sprints at the opposing goalkeeper, and the winger charges down the next pass, and the fullback follows. They stifle opponents, and perhaps they don’t always win the ball, but they tilt the field and play the vast majority of games in enemy territory.

This, in two years, is what Enrique and PSG built.

Luis Enrique crafted a European monster not with superstars, but with sweat, structure and young legs willing to press, not pose. (Photo by Image Photo Agency/Getty Images)

(Image Photo Agency via Getty Images)

First, they spent around $800 million of Qatari money — but not like the club used to. They spent most of it on young legs and impressionable minds, on talented but not-yet-heralded players Désire Doué and João Neves. They spent it on teens and hungry 20-somethings who, sans ego, would heed Enrique’s demands.

And then, all together, they became the “f***ing machine” by committing to the press — by running, a lot, but also by adhering to principles, refining angles and internalizing triggers.

They went right at Liverpool in the Round of 16. “They did exhaust us a bit by constantly pressing us,” Liverpool coach Arne Slot admitted. They did the same to Aston Villa and Arsenal.

And then, on Saturday, they crafted a masterpiece.

They’ll be celebrated for what they did with the ball, which was, of course, wondrous. They’ll be hailed for their positional play and, most of all, their lightning-quick attacks. But they won the Champions League final in the first 20 minutes. With the very first kick of the game, rather than use the ball to fashion an attack, they simply dumped it into Inter’s end, and dared the Italian team to play through them.

Again and again, they pressed ravenously, as high up the field as Inter allowed them to go.

Around the 11-minute mark, Marquinhos, a center back, followed his man deep into Inter’s half; midfielders hunted the ball; Inter turned it over, and eight passes later, it was in the back of the net.

This is what Enrique envisioned.

On Saturday, and throughout a season that also yielded Ligue 1 and French cup titles, the vision came to fruition.

No Kylian Mbappés or Lionel Messis necessary.

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