Paris Saint-Germain are nothing if not consistent in the Champions League. When they exited at the quarter-final stage in 2013, their first full campaign fuelled by the wealth of their Qatari patrons, manager Carlo Ancelotti exited at the beginning of the next summer.
Laurent Blanc, the successor, tasked with working out how to blend an expensively assembled collection of attacking stars, reached a quarter-final. Then another quarter-final. And after his third Champions League season in charge ended at the same stage yet again, he was told to pack his bags.
His employers, determined that Europe’s most glamorous tournament should be the platform that confirms PSG’s status as a superclub, had become frustrated at this glass ceiling: quarter-finals in the Champions League are not enough; PSG want to be in finals.
Yet the more they spend, the lower that ceiling seems to drop. Unai Emery, Blanc's replacement in 2016, reached the last 16, where he oversaw a 4-0 destruction of Barcelona in the first leg, and then lost 6-1 in the return. Emery survived, but once PSG could not go beyond the last 16 again in 2018, Emery was shown the door.
He left a trail, a pattern, a stubborn deja vu. Thomas Tuchel, next man in, felt a comfort after, in last season’s first knockout round, PSG had won 2-0 against Manchester United at Old Trafford.
Though the second leg would not be quite as dramatic as the turnaround at Barcelona that left Emery aghast, it followed the same template. A dramatic late collapse, an improbable reverse: 3-1 to United in Paris, amid howls of protest at the awarding of a United penalty for a controversial handball.
All of which has left PSG nourishing the idea they are somehow cursed in the Champions League. The circumstances around Wednesday night's second leg of their last-16 tie against Borussia Dortmund, who lead 2-1 from the Germany leg, feed into that. The fixture will be played in front of no supporters in the Parc des Princes, a scenario which may become the 'new normal' during the coronavirus crisis, but it was strongly resisted by France's dominant football club.
PSG sent an army of hygiene experts, with an array of sanitising equipment around the Parc ahead of the decision by unmoved Paris authorities to ban spectators. PSG’s appeal to central government that their Dortmund game should circumvent an emergency law prohibiting gatherings of over 1,000 people via a clause that exempts "events useful to the life of the nation” was also rejected.
A sense of siege has built up among the 50 or so players, coaches and support staff who will be allowed entry to a ghostly Parc. "It would have better to cancel [postpone] it," complained Marquinhos, the Brazilian defender, of the behind-closed-doors decision. "Dortmund had their supporters when they were at home. We wanted to have ours."
“It is a handicap,” said Tuchel, and it will feel a very heavy one should his team not earn the 1-0 win that would put them through on away goals, or a better margin of victory.
This "handicap" would then join the ample list that PSG feel they have borne in their agonising struggles through the shallower end of the Champions League knockout phases. There were the injuries to Neymar, the player they shattered the world record transfer fee to entice from Barcelona in order to make themselves true European Cup contenders.
He had metatarsal problems that ruled him out of the decisive last-16 defeats against Real Madrid in 2018 and against United last year. Neymar, watching from the sidelines, was so incensed by the penalty decision that put PSG out last March that he picked up a three-game suspension for his remarks about the refereeing.
Having served that in the group phase, Neymar scored PSG's equaliser in Dortmund three weeks ago, but he, and Kylian Mbappe, would be upstaged by the teenager Erling Braut Haaland, scorer of both Dortmund goals. Those were Haaland's ninth and 10th of this season's Champions League, a competition he started with RB Salzburg before his January move to Dortmund.
If Haaland thumps in another goal like the matchwinner in the first leg, a rocket from his left foot, it will probably be audible from outside the empty Parc. There, some PSG fans have promised to gather, to sing and chant so the players can hear, wafting over the grandstands, their backing.
Tuchel might welcome it. He knows he needs a big, rousing performance because he knows what happens to PSG managers if they fall short more than once in the Champions League.
