Despite fielding some of the sport’s most famous and highly paid athletes, Paris Saint German is again out of the running in the Champions League.
On Wednesday night, Bayern Munich beat PSG, 2-0, in the round of 16 — a loss that could signal big changes for the French club.
“It’s a big disappointment,” PSG coach Christophe Galtier told ESPN. “I don’t know if there’s a lesson to be learned, but there’s a lot of frustration. If we’d scored first, it would’ve been different, but we didn’t.”
Bayern Munich’s defensive trio of Matthijs de Ligt, Dayot Upamecano and Josip Stanišić marked PSG’s forwards out of the game entirely, forcing PSG’s 36-year-old defender Sergio Ramos to move forward as its primary attacking threat.
This opened space in the back for Bayern’s strikers to exploit, and they did so with gusto. Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting side footed a shot home in the 61st minute and ex-Arsenal prospect Serge Gnabry doubled the lead in the closing stages.
“We have to swallow it,” Galtier told the media. “It’s too soon to talk about my future.”
Nasser Al-Khelaifi, PSG’s chairman, may not agree.
The Qatari investor has clearly stated his intention to win a Champions League trophy and fired coaches who couldn’t deliver one. That list includes Thomas Tuchel, Mauricio Pochettino, Unai Emery and Carlo Ancelotti.
With 2022 World Cup stars Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé underperforming under Galtier, questions are being asked about the coach’s ability to manage big personalities.
Mbappé himself admitted that his teammates weren’t capable of delivering more.
“Our maximum is this. That’s the truth. We need to do some self-reflection,” he told the media after the match.
Bayern, meanwhile, felt victorious on and off the field.
Bayern’s fan-owned financial model was able to trump the hundreds of millions of dollars PSG’s Qatari investors pumped into the club.
Three weeks ago, Bayern board member Uli Hoeness made waves when he warned that “money doesn’t score goals.” That warning seems prescient.
“We defended better in the second half and we were dangerous on the ball,” Bayern coach Julian Nagelsmann told the media, via the AP. “In the end we deserved to win.”
