The great problem for Paris Saint-Germain is that they have almost never been a football team. They were only created in 1970 to try to solve the problem of the French capital not having a side and now they are the most egregious example of an age in which football clubs are increasingly agents of wider political games, a symbol of Qatari soft power expressed through the grinning, tattooed form of Neymar.
But Neymar will not be there on Tuesday as they try to overturn a 3-1 first-leg deficit against Real Madrid. Everybody agrees that he is injured, but it is a measure of his status that various conspiracy theories have emerged about the nature of the problem with the French newspaper L’Équipe reporting wild claims that the Brazil team doctor has diagnosed a fracture of the fifth metatarsal when it is only a fissure to try to make sure Neymar is fully rested for the World Cup. What is sure is that he had surgery last week and that he will not be available on Tuesday.
It feels almost callous and yet it is hard to avoid the thought that PSG may be better off without him. This is the problem when you spend €222 million ($273 million) on a player and make him your icon, or when you change your away kit to yellow to replicate his national team’s shirt. The club becomes subordinate to the player and everything revolves around him. Revelations in Spanish daily El País about Neymar’s lifestyle have been extraordinary. This is not a player living in the way a top professional might be expected to live.
The suggestion from that first leg is that he does not really play in the way you might expect a top professional to play. His performance in the Bernabeu was extraordinarily self-indulgent — a medley of tricks, flicks and dribbles down cul-de-sacs. He and the center-forward Edinson Cavani exchanged just one pass, suggesting an almost complete breakdown in attacking cohesion. All season there have been rumors of splits, rows and jealousies undermining team harmony, which is only natural if one player has so many privileges.
The midfielder Adrien Rabiot, perhaps the only PSG player to play well in that first leg, was notably scathing afterwards, pointing out that it is all very well to beat teams like Dijon 8-0 but that it was in games against the likes of Madrid that players have to “stand up and be counted”. It wasn’t difficult to work out who he was talking about.
But now PSG do not have Neymar and the temptation is to wonder whether they may not be a better side without him. There is the possibility, like the fate suffered by Brazil at the last World Cup, that a team that has become so dependent on one star will suffer an emotional collapse in his absence). PSG, after all, can reasonably point out that for long spells, before folding late on, they had the better of the first leg. This Real Madrid is far from unbeatable: they’re letting in more than a goal a game in La Liga this season; they are vulnerable.
And who knows what PSG might achieve if they actually play properly, rather than to indulge the whims of a superstar, if they play passes to the man in the best position rather than with half a thought on the politics of the dressing-room and beyond? In the end, it all comes back to Neymar.
KEY CLASH: MBAPPE v MARCELO
The key supporting actor in the psychodrama of Neymar is Kylian Mbappe who, if the stories in El Pais are to be believed, has been cast in the role of Snow White to Neymar’s Wicked Queen, a young and emerging talent who has provoked insecurity and jealousy in the established power.
He was quiet in the first leg in Madrid but, particularly in the second leg, he will be vital, and not just because, at €160 million ($197 million), he is the second-most expensive player on the world (or he will be when the deal is formalized in the summer after Financial Fair Play-dodging year on loan). He not only has to offer creative spark coming in from the right, but must also prevent Marcelo, Real Madrid’s attacking left-back, from getting forward to add pace and width on the left, something that’s become ever-more vital to Madrid’s attacking plans as Cristiano Ronaldo has become more static.
