How ditching the stars has transformed PSG into the best team in Europe | OneFootball

This is it: the culmination of 13 years of work, the end of a long-term plan, the final hurdle which has been oh so difficult to clear. For Paris Saint-Germain, 90 minutes of football is all that stands between either marriage to European glory, or another year condemned to bridesmaid status.

Of course, this isn’t the first time they’ve made it this close. Back in 2020, against a ghostly backdrop of 64,000 empty seats at the Estádio da Luz in Lisbon, a star-studded but markedly uneven PSG side came within one goal of that elusive Champions League trophy.

Their squad was embellished with the stars of the day, from serial winner Ángel Di María, to the now legendary Thiago Silva, all the way to the crème de la crème of the club, the duo upon whom the club broke the bank and placed all hope: Kylian Mbappé and Neymar.

Yet, elsewhere in the team were players whose reputations are rather different. At left back was Juan Bernat, a capable but unremarkable defender. His opposite on the right was Thilo Kehrer, who soon after would be moved on to West Ham United and then AS Monaco. In the midfield sat Ander Herrera and Leandro Paredes – both good footballers, but you wouldn’t like to see either in your starting lineup for the biggest game in club football, and indeed your club’s history.

For every star, there was a utility man, a workhorse, a decent player for another club or another occasion, but not one this monumental.

The result? PSG lost. They faced a Bayern Munich side which lacked perhaps the star power (or, perhaps, marketing power) of Mbappé and Neymar, but who were far more balanced across the pitch.

To add insult to injury, the player who won the game for Bayern was none other than Kingsley Coman, born and raised in Paris before being moved on to Turin and eventually Munich, this dagger a teaching point to his boyhood and former side.

It took PSG a while to heed the message. After focusing all their resources on huge names in the attacking department and neglecting the rest of the team by comparison (Mbappé and Neymar cost a combined €402 million; the rest of the squad that started the final in 2020 cost them €233 million), they continued to bank on big names.

The summer of 2021 epitomised this. In came Gianluigi Donnarumma, Achraf Hakimi, Sergio Ramos, Georginio Wijnaldum and the biggest transfer perhaps in the history of football: Lionel Messi. This was the roll of the dice. Since Qatari investment in 2012, they’d won seven Ligue 1 titles and six Coupes de France. Now, with their most recent Champions League final defeat still fresh in the memory, they had all the tools to take the leap towards the trophy for which they’d been yearning.

That’s not how it happened, though. In two years with the most star-studded forward line football may ever have seen, PSG faced the relative ignominy of eliminations the round of 16, once against Real Madrid and another, fittingly, against familiar foes in Bayern Munich.

This, finally, was the wake-up call. This was when Paris Saint-Germain realised that a couple of huge names do not equate to success: a team does.

Messi departed to a chorus of boos, his time in Paris the least favourite spell of his career. Neymar, choosing the riches of Saudi Arabia over those of Qatar, followed suit. The next year, Mbappé’s agonising transfer saga with Real Madrid finally concluded with a thoroughly unsurprising move, putting an end to a front-three which was more bark than bite.

Their replacements? Young, French talent – the message they should’ve taken from losing a Champions League final at the hands of Coman, one of their own academy graduates.

Ousmane Dembélé was the big name, but hardly stratospheric like his predecessors: a player yet to reach the heights long forecasted. Bradley Barcola and Randal Kolo Muani joined alongside him. The next year, it was Desiré Doué and João Neves joining a midfield which already boasted Fabián Ruiz and Vitinha.

Finally, PSG had realised that the key to success isn’t names: it’s footballers. They now had a team not reliant on one or two iconic figures, but on every single player.

The result has been the best PSG team in history. Dembélé’s output exploded to the tune of 46 goals and assists in 48 games, Barcola and Doué have dazzled onlookers and defenders alike, and the midfield three of Ruiz, Vitinha and Neves is perhaps the most functional in Europe. The addition of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia hasn’t exactly hindered them, either. There might not be a more put-together team on the continent than this one, and they’re in the Champions League final having dismantled Liverpool, Aston Villa and Arsenal on the way. And it only took 13 years of constant investment to get this far.

It should be remembered that the story of Paris Saint-Germain is not a fairytale. They’re still the holders of the world record transfer fee paid for Neymar in 2017. According to the Cies Football Observatory, only Chelsea and Manchester United outspent the €1.01 billion of PSG between 2014 and 2024. That they’re likely favourites to defeat Inter and go all the way to the promised land is not coincidence, nor a feel-good story. It’s the culmination of a business venture which, after years of trial and error, has finally found the winning formula.

They may have won all but two of the last 13 Ligue 1 titles, but that was never what it was all about: it was about old big ears, the trophy for which they’ll contest in Munich, and they’ll do so having learned lessons from their past. Their turnaround in tact is a lesson for any cash-rich club in how to recruit, just so long as you’re willing to dig rather deep in the pockets.