For the fifth time in the last seven seasons, Paris Saint-Germain were knocked out of the Champions League in the round of 16 - a statistics which looks much worse when considering the colossal amount of money which the club's Qatari owners have spent to bring the biggest prize in European club football to the French capital for the first time. In their second-leg match against Bayern Munich, PSG offered little resistance as they slumped to a 2-0 loss, going out of the competition by an aggregate scoreline of 3-0.
As has become the norm, PSG floundered when the lights were brightest and the pressure was highest. This is the weakest Bayern team in years - one which is at risk of relinquishing the club's decade-long stranglehold over the Bundesliga title. In addition, Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé are not far removed from iconic, all-time great individual World Cup runs. There may arguably have never been a better opportunity for PSG to claim a signature victory, knock out one of the pre-tournament favourites, and take an enormous step towards the Champions League title.
This latest PSG disasterclass is unique for one notable reason: it took place despite the absence of Neymar. Notice that I said "absence", not "presence"; again and again, the Brazilian striker has failed to show up when his team has most needed him. Additionally, both his club and country clearly play better without him than with him in spite of his immense talent. Nevertheless, even in this scenario, PSG once again capitulated.
Messi, Mbappé, and Achraf Hakimi looked nothing like the players who turned in many dominant performances for their respective countries in Qatar. Along with their teammates, they were utterly stymied by a Bayern team with which they should have at least been able to keep pace.
PSG's complete lack of fighting spirit against the Bavarian club was obvious. At no point over both legs of this fixture did PSG even so much as appear to put up any resistance whatsoever. The substitutions they made only reinforced this point - they brought on unproven youngsters instead of more established players, essentially conceding defeat by doing so.
It's painfully obvious at this point - PSG has been thoroughly "infected" by a losers' mentality. Despite all their big-name players and the eye-popping financial resources available to them, they themselves obviously do not believe that they can actually win it all. The club itself fears the big moments - they fully expect to come up short when in the limelight. Barcelona 2017, Manchester United 2018, Real Madrid 2019 - and many, many more. It almost seems as if the moment any player steps onto the field in a PSG jersey for a crucial match, that player's performance level immediately plummets.
Never has a club squandered so many opportunities to win the Champions League over such a comparatively short timeframe. This is a team that should have been bona fide contenders for the Champions League title every season for the past decade or so. However, ever since their acquisition by Qatar Sports Investments in 2011, PSG have only advanced beyond the tournament's quarterfinals twice. To make matters even worse, one of those two deep runs was the 2019-20 season when the tournament, like everything else in the world, was disrupted and subsequently restructured owing to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic; that season would inherently have been an outlier no matter the eventual results.
The problems at PSG clearly go far beyond the players, coaching staff, or even ownership and the front office. This club has seemingly accepted the fate of being European club football's perennial underachievers. This not only affects PSG's current squad - every player who they will go on to sign will, for the foreseeable future, be "poisoned" by the mentality that pervades the club.
After the match against Bayern, Mbappé said in an interview that PSG have peaked - that there is no further level they can attain. When a player who is a legitimate Ballon d'Or contender goes from taking apart the world's best to making such an admission after yet another lifeless Champions League performance in such a short timeframe, it really speaks volumes.
We will almost certainly be back next year with the same story but in different words.
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