History of Paris Saint-Germain’s absurd eliminations from the Champions League

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The second leg of the Champions League semi-final between Paris Saint-Germain and Borussia Dortmund was played on Tuesday evening. Borussia won 1-0, as had happened the week before in Germany, and therefore qualified for the final despite the favorite team being Paris Saint-Germain. This is also why the result was surprising, considering that in two games PSG failed to score a single goal. On the way out he hit two posts and on the return he hit two posts and two crossbars. In the entire competition this year, in 12 games they hit 14 “woodwork”, as they say in jargon, i.e. poles or crossbars: more than all the other teams.

Since Nasser Al-Khelaïfi’s Qatari sovereign wealth fund bought the club in the summer of 2011, Paris Saint-Germain has become one of the richest and strongest teams in Europe, where some of the best players in the world have played and continue to play. world. Since then it has almost always dominated the French championship (it has won 10 of the last 12), but it has not yet managed to win the Champions League, the most prestigious trophy for club teams, despite ownership having spent over 2 billion euros .

It seemed that this could be the good year for a series of reasons: PSG was playing well, Borussia Dortmund was an opponent within reach and above all this will almost certainly be the last season in Paris of the French striker Kylian Mbappé, one of the best players in the world, who has decided not to renew his contract and there is a lot of talk about his probable transfer to Real Madrid. Instead, another elimination arrived characterized by several almost incredible episodes, as had already happened several times in the past.

In the 2013-2014 season Paris Saint-Germain played against Chelsea in the quarter-finals. That year he was coached by Laurent Blanc, he scored 16 goals in 6 games, while in the round of 16 he easily eliminated Bayer Leverkusen, winning 4-0 in Germany and 2-1 in Paris. It was perhaps not the best PSG, but it was a strong team, with many players arriving from Serie A (including Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Thiago Silva, Edinson Cavani and Thiago Motta). In the first leg, played at home, PSG won 3-1 with goals from Lavezzi, David Luiz and Javier Pastore, who scored in injury time. However, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who was PSG’s best player that year, was injured and had to miss the return match.

The following week, in London, PSG could have even lost by a goal to go through. In the 32nd minute André Schürrle scored for Chelsea, who attacked for much of the match, hitting two crossbars. In the 76th minute the Uruguayan striker Edinson Cavani had the opportunity to equalize, but missed an easy goal, and in the 86th minute Chelsea made it 2-0 with a cumbersome and chaotic move, with many rebounds. The Senegalese striker Demba Ba scored, who has scored a total of 3 goals in his career in the Champions League.

Then in injury time the Chelsea goalkeeper stopped a shot from defender Marquinhos with a great save. The match ended 2-0 for Chelsea, who went through due to the away goals rule, which was still valid at the time.

In general, the quarter-finals have often been the moment in the tournament where Paris Saint-Germain stops working. Already in the 2012-2013 season he had emerged with a double draw against Barcelona (2-2 at home, 1-1 away). In 2015 they were eliminated again by Barcelona (losing 3-1 in Paris and 2-0 in Spain), and in 2016, still in the quarter-finals, they went out against Manchester City (2-2 in Paris, 1-0 for City in England). The media began to talk about a “curse” and an “obsession” (they still do today), even though the most sensational and in some ways inexplicable of Paris Saint-Germain’s eliminations, that of 2017, had not yet arrived.

For the third time in five years, PSG was drawn to play Barcelona, ​​this time in the round of 16. On 14 February 2017, at the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris, PSG played one of the best matches in its history in the Champions League: it won 4-0 against what was at the time still considered the best team in the world, Barcelona Messi, Neymar and Suárez, but also Iniesta and Xavi. Among other things, Barcelona was coached by Luis Enrique, current manager of PSG.

It was a match dominated by PSG, marked by the play of the Argentine Ángel Di María who scored two goals, while the other two were scored by Julian Draxler and Cavani. Winning in that way against Barcelona, ​​who had eliminated PSG twice in the last four years, seemed like the perfect way to erase the “curse”. However, there was still the second leg to play, three weeks later.

On March 8, 2017 at Camp Nou the match started well for Barcelona. After three minutes Luis Suárez scored, once again with a rather casual move. In the 40th minute, PSG defender Layvin Kurzawa scored an own goal and the first half ended with a score of 2-0 for Barcelona. Five minutes into the second half, Neymar earned a penalty kicked by Messi: 3-0. However, in the 62nd minute, after also hitting the post, Cavani scored the 3-1 goal, which seemed to definitively cancel out hopes of a comeback. To go through, in fact, Barcelona had to score 3 more goals, given that the 5-1 would have qualified Paris Saint-Germain, again due to the away goals rule.

Three minutes from the end the score was still 3-1. Then there were seven minutes that PSG fans will probably remember well.

In the 88th minute Neymar scored with a great free kick. Three minutes later he scored the 5-1 from a penalty (a hotly contested penalty). The last minutes were very exciting. At the Camp Nou stadium there were 96 thousand fans who at that point began to really believe in it and push the team. Given how things had gone the last few times in the Champions League, the Paris Saint-Germain players panicked a bit. In the 95th minute, in the last action of the match, Neymar threw a ball into the area which Sergi Roberto, a footballer who has scored 3 goals in 62 Champions League games in his career, hit on the volley and extended. The ball went in and the match became the greatest comeback in the history of the Champions League.

It couldn’t have been easy being a Paris Saint-Germain fan that day

In 2016-2017, however, Paris Saint-Germain didn’t even win the French championship: they finished second behind Monaco. To try to recover from the sensational elimination against Barcelona, ​​in the summer of 2017 the club’s ownership spent 400 million euros to buy two players from the two teams that had prevented them from winning. The Brazilian Neymar arrived from Barcelona for 220 million. The then 19-year-old Kylian Mbappé arrived from Monaco for 180 million, Parisian by birth, at the time considered one of the most promising young people in the world.

Even the two new signings, however, did not prevent Paris Saint-Germain from continuing to exit the Champions League in unpredictable ways. In the first year of Neymar and Mbappé, they were eliminated in the round of 16 by Real Madrid (who however were almost unbeatable in the Champions League at that time, given that they won the tournament in 2016, 2017 and 2018). In the 2018-2019 season there was another psychodrama. In the first leg of the round of 16, PSG won 2-0 away at Manchester United. United were no longer the strong team that dominated England in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and PSG seemed decidedly stronger and better equipped to go through.

However, in the return, Manchester United striker Romelu Lukaku scored after two minutes, taking advantage of a trivial missed pass from defender Thilo Kehrer. In the 12th minute PSG equalized through Bernat, but in the 30th minute Lukaku again scored the 1-2 goal, helped by an error by goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon (someone who hasn’t made many mistakes in his career). If they had lost 2-1, PSG would still have qualified. In the second half he even came close to equalising, several times, hitting the post again with Bernat. Shortly before, Mbappé had found himself alone in front of the United goalkeeper, but had slipped. In the 90th minute, PSG defender Presnel Kimpembe deflected Diogo Dalot’s shot with his arm. The referee gave the penalty to United, Marcus Rasfhord scored the 1-3 and eliminated Paris Saint-Germain.

Romelu Lukaku, here between Buffon and Thiago Silva, has scored only 5 goals in his career in the knockout phase of the Champions League: 2 of these he scored that evening against Paris Saint-Germain (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

2020 and 2021 were Paris Saint-Germain’s best years in the Champions League. In 2020, from the quarter-finals onwards, the competition was played in a single match (and not a home and away match) in the same stadium, the da Luz in Lisbon, due to the pandemic. Paris reached the final for the first time in their history, but lost 1-0 against Bayern Munich, who won all their matches in the competition that year, including a historic 8-2 against Barcelona. The decisive goal was scored by Frenchman Kingsley Coman, who grew up in the Paris Saint-Germain youth team. In 2021, PSG finally managed to eliminate Barcelona, ​​thanks above all to the 4-1 victory obtained in the first leg at Camp Nou. In the quarter-finals they also eliminated Bayern Munich, playing two very high-level matches, but in the semi-final they went out against Manchester City, losing both the first leg and the second leg.

Before the elimination against Borussia Dortmund on Tuesday, there was another dramatic one for Paris Saint-Germain fans, that of 2022. In the round of 16 they faced Real Madrid. In the meantime, Lionel Messi, one of the best players in the history of football, had also arrived at PSG, even though he was 34 years old and not at the best moment of his career. PSG won 1-0 in the first leg with a goal scored in the last minute by Kylian Mbappé. On the return leg, on 9 March 2022 in Madrid, Mbappé scored again, assisted by Neymar: that time too the game seemed closed, but it wasn’t. Real Madrid’s French striker Karim Benzema scored three goals in seventeen minutes, between the 61st and 78th, Real Madrid won 3-1 and PSG was eliminated.

Until the 60th minute of the return match, PSG had been superior to Real Madrid and had played better. But once again, at the first difficulty (in that case Donnarumma’s error which equalized Benzema), he went into confusion. It’s as if every time Paris Saint-Germain plays carrying the weight of all the disappointments and expectations of these years, and as soon as something goes wrong they stop playing. The opposite happens to Real Madrid, a team very used to playing under pressure and winning the Champions League: they have won fourteen, including five in the last ten years.

Before the match against Borussia Dortmund, a journalist asked coach Luis Enrique what would happen if PSG were eliminated. Luis Enrique https://twitter.com/giraltpablo/status/1787617343222215082 a little agitated, saying that life would go on and that they would try again next year.