On the very day last week that Manchester City announced that the best young centre-forward in the world, Erling Haaland, had committed himself to them for a scarcely precedented 10 years ahead, the club most envious of City’s aura were facing a trio of problems with star attackers past, present and future.
Paris Saint-Germain couldn’t get rid of one, Randal Kolo Muani. Another, Kylian Mbappe - who had breezed away from PSG six months earlier refusing a contract extension they had pleaded with him to sign - was meanwhile chasing his former club for unpaid debts.
There was better news with the arrival in Paris of a dazzling new winger. But that had a downside, too: Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, signed from Napoli, would not be eligible to play in their most seismic match of the season, on Wednesday at home to City.
All of which makes for a less than comfortable lead-in to what some in France call the “Gulfico”, a fixture that has the status of a pan-European “clasico” and features the two clubs most transformed by investment from the Gulf, Qatar in the case of PSG, Abu Dhabi for City.
That backing has established both as modern superclubs, although to glance at the Uefa Champions League table, now a single, 36-team division under the competition’s new format, is to see both underachieving.
City’s irregular form this season has spilt alarmingly into their European assignments. But for PSG, the peril is greater. Lose tonight and, if results elsewhere conspire against them, they could be eliminated in this, the first stage of the competition. It would add on-the-pitch embarrassment to what has been an untidy new year off it.
At the very least, PSG have been clumsy. They had hoped, during the current transfer window, to move on the France international Kolo Muani. Signed only in the summer of 2023, he has not convinced head coach Luis Enrique that he is the man to lead the front line of a PSG who have, in the past 18 months, said farewell to Neymar, Lionel Messi and Mbappe.
Last week, a loan deal for Kolo Muani, with an option to buy, was all but agreed with Juventus. It soon emerged PSG had not done their homework. The club have six players already out on loan elsewhere at clubs outside France.
Fifa rules deem six as the maximum number a club is allowed to have loaned out abroad, a regulation designed to stop bigger clubs stockpiling players. The only way Kolo Muani can join Juventus on loan would be if PSG made another of their exiled loanees into a permanent sale or brought him back.
It was a careless oversight, but a blunder in keeping with previous contract sagas at the club. Not so long ago, PSG proudly had Mbappe posing with a jersey that boasted he had committed to being in Paris, under contract, until 2025. That turned out to be wishful thinking.
Mbappe let his last, hugely valuable contract with PSG expire last summer - 2024 - to join Real Madrid. Not only did PSG receive no transfer fee, but the France captain is now in litigation with the club over around €55m his advisers claim the club still owe him.
Earlier this month, PSG did sign the exciting Georgian Kvaratskhelia, a 23-year-old around whom, potentially, a decade of brilliance can be envisaged. Alas, he’s not able to register for his new employer in the Champions League until February - that’s if PSG are still involved in the competition then.
In the light of these glitches, of the unfulfilled hopes of Mbappe being a legacy PSG star, or of Paris-born Kolo Muani becoming a figurehead, PSG can only watch Haaland confidently ally himself with City - the Norwegian penned a 10-year deal last week - with a degree of awe.
These are two institutions whose parallel recent histories mean they tend to look at one another’s planning processes with a special interest, and sometimes jealously.
Just as City’s Abu Dhabi era, begun in 2008, has coincided with their establishing domestic dominance in England’s Premier League, Qatari backing, since 2011, has made PSG into Ligue 1’s most powerful team by a distance.
There is also a shared vision in the sort of football they aspire to play. Not least of the intrigue this evening is the tactical contest between two old friends on the touchline.
City’s Pep Guardiola was the manager PSG wanted after he achieved such startling success with Barcelona between 2008 and 2012. Luis Enrique would, later, be the one Barcelona head coach who came closest to matching Guardiola’s achievements there. He is now in his second season in charge at PSG.
They were once teammates at Barca and with Spain. “It’s a special game not just because of its importance but because I’ll be seeing a friend I spent so many years with, as a player and as a coach,” said Luis Enrique, who still refers to Guardiola as “Pepito”, an affectionate nickname from when they were in their 20s.
“What ties us is our basic ideas about football, to be better with your use of the ball than your opponent, to maximise pressing, although we each have our own way of developing that model.”
“We’re going to have to be focused,” said Ousmane Dembele, the PSG winger. “We’re up against a team who have won six of the last seven Premier League titles, who have a great coach and a superb goalscorer.”
By that he meant Haaland, who, in the long list of forwards - including Neymar and Messi, Mbappe and Dembele, Kolo Muani and Kvaratshkelia - who have been courted by PSG over the last seven years is the one they most regret failing to convince.
The French club made a series of approaches when Haaland was at Borussia Dortmund, and chased him hard in the months after PSG had reached their first and so far only Champions League final, in 2020.
Ultimately, City would make a more compelling case to the Norwegian. With Haaland on board in the first of what his new contract says will be at least 12 years at the club, in 2023 they won the trophy – the European Cup – that PSG still crave.
Europe is what most differentiates the clubs’ rolls of honour. The story of the clubs’ previous duels in the “Gulfico” era will be of little comfort to Luis Enrique.
Of their six Champions League meetings in the last decade, City have won four, PSG just once, in a group-phase encounter. On both occasions they have collided in the knockout stages, PSG were eliminated.
Wednesday feels like a knockout, as Luis Enrique admitted. PSG have just seven points from six matches so far, City a mere eight. “I don’t think anyone would have predicted, with the new format, we’d have this number of points at this stage,” said the PSG coach. “This is our most important game of the season.”
