Paris Saint-Germain go to Etihad Stadium on Wednesday sitting sixth in Ligue 1, with three wins, two draws and one defeat from their opening six matches. Nobody in Paris is panicking. Luis Enrique’s side started slowly last season too, and the coach was relaxed about it then as well. “Do you want to bet against us?” he said recently.
The wider picture explains the calm. The back-to-back European champions could become only the second team to win three consecutive Champions Leagues, and they are also chasing a third successive league title. Johan Cruyff, a man Luis Enrique deeply admires, used to say the hardest thing in football is winning after winning. This season has been designed with exactly that problem in mind.
The first part of the answer was contractual. Luis Enrique recently signed a deal running until 2030, and when the club announced it they confirmed new terms for Joao Neves, Fabian Ruiz, Willian Pacho, Lucas Beraldo and Senny Mayulu. It was a message to the dressing room that this remains a long-term project. The big danger, as those around the club see it, is a group who have won everything believing they can relax without anyone noticing.
Much of what Luis Enrique has built is aimed at preventing that. There has been remarkably little change in the technical staff since he arrived in 2023. Assistant Joaquin Valdes has been with him since their Barcelona B days, is the one who speaks to players on a personal level, and helps keep his boss grounded when Luis Enrique’s mind drifts too far. He can be seen in the background at every news conference. Rafel Pol, who handles strategy and acts as second in command, is another constant. Training has barely altered in three years: players are not shown a huge amount of video, but there is a big screen on the training pitch to correct them, and two cranes so the coaches can watch from a height.
The one real change is depth, and it proved decisive last season. Luis Enrique can now leave out a couple of key players without the team suffering. Ousmane Dembele was not in the squad for the win over Le Mans on Saturday, and earlier in the season it was Lucas Digne who was left out. Against bigger opponents such as Manchester City and Barcelona, the starters arrive rested. Against Le Mans he used eight players who would not start the bigger matches, then, with the game level, brought on four of his stars to secure the win.
The attack has been renewed as well, with Goncalo Ramos, Bradley Barcola and Lee Kang-in all departing. Dani Gil, Paris correspondent for the Spanish radio station COPE, explained the thinking: “Barcola could not be given the minutes he wanted, they had won everything and been paid well for it, and the club could do with players who were hungrier.” In Mika Godts and Ferran Torres, Gil argues, PSG found exactly that – neither has yet won at club level what the men they replaced had won. Barcola was not rated by the coaches as someone who could reach the level Dembele sets, yet his flashes of brilliance were enough to convince Liverpool to pay £123m for him.
Torres is the more intriguing case. He went through a psychologically difficult stretch, worked on his mental strength, and now calls himself “the Shark”. He was unhappy at Barcelona when he was not playing regularly, even though last season produced his best numbers. Having netted the winner for Spain in the World Cup final, he has scored seven goals in France and, for the first time in his career, feels genuinely wanted. He also knows what kind of team he has joined: in a Luis Enrique side the star is Luis Enrique, and the forward is content with that.
The way of playing, the standards and the habits all belong to the coach, and the players slot in around them. That is why the club have been able to sell famous names without the team losing its identity. Luis Enrique has taken a space that PSG’s Qatari owners had never handed to any other coach, turning a club once seen as a collection of expensive signings into one envied elsewhere – by signing wisely, but also by drawing value from the academy. Four homegrown players, Warren Zaire-Emery, Mayulu, Quentin Ndjantou and Ibrahim Mbaye, played in the Champions League last season.
The first-team headquarters sit at the top of a hill and the academy at the bottom, so young players have to climb, literally and metaphorically, to make it. The campus was officially opened in November 2024 after investment of 350m euros, and for the first time the professional teams, the men’s and women’s academies and the school share one site. The method is imposed from the top down: the under-23s coach is a former player, but the style comes from Luis Enrique’s first team, with constant meetings between the two and academy directors. Yohan Cabaye, director of the training centre, speaks often to director of football Luis Campos and to Olivier Gagne, the deputy director of professional football, and Campos, Gagne and Luis Enrique attend youth league games whenever they can.
The recent international break showed that way of working in practice. Only four first-team players remained at the club, while 16 academy players were away with their national teams. Luis Enrique spent the three weeks on the training ground with the youngsters, who had a rare chance to impress him.
His relationship with the media is distant. When asked what he had done during the three-week break, he replied that it was of no interest to anyone – his way of marking distance. He keeps friendships with two or three Spanish journalists, who might get an answer to a phone message, but in France he has drawn a firm line: no off the record, no coffee with reporters, no one-to-one interviews for anyone. In his first year he answered questions in Spanish; now he replies only in very good French. Yet when football is the subject he is compelling. Before the Le Mans game he opened by saying that, as usual, we worry about the most banal things in football, then explained how French perception works: when PSG win their rivals are considered inferior, but when they struggle it is declared a catastrophe. The view from the media, in his telling, is always extreme.
Next comes the Etihad. It will be fascinating to see how Luis Enrique handles the subject of former manager Pep Guardiola, who will be at the game, and the charges brought against City by the Premier League. The sense is that he will stand up for him. There will obviously be a meeting between the two, and that in itself is Luis Enrique’s way of saying something – not necessarily about the case, but about what he thinks of Guardiola’s legacy. They know the questions may arrive in Manchester, but the PSG media team has no plan to prepare a coordinated response. That is how much they trust the manager. Whatever he is asked, expect the same Luis Enrique: sharp, managing the pressure and comfortable at the top.