In Rewritten Recipe, P.S.G. Grinds and Real Madrid Crumbles
On Soccer
Two Champions League fixtures part ways for a night. Only one seems to know where it’s going.
PARIS — Idrissa Gueye was at the end of the line, anxiously hovering on the fringes of a little clutch of Paris St.-Germain players. Their coach, Thomas Tuchel, was walking slowly toward them, in no great rush, making sure first to shake the hand of each member of what — in a contractual, if not spiritual sense — is apparently a Real Madrid team, to offer a few consoling words to P.S.G.’s vanquished opponents.
Only once that was done did Tuchel turn his attentions to his own players. He congratulated each of them as they passed him, too, clasping outstretched hands and clapping shoulders. He did not stop walking, though, until he had reached that last group — handshake here, and there, and one for you, too — and found Gueye.
Fairly or not, Tuchel has developed a bit of a reputation for coldness: he is a coach’s coach, a technician, a theorist, obsessed with counter-pressing positions and detail rather than the human touch. There was always a suspicion at his former club, Borussia Dortmund, that he was not really a people person, that he lacked the charisma and warmth and magnetism of, say, a Jürgen Klopp.
At first, it seemed as if Gueye would just get a fleeting pat on the back, like all of the others, friend and foe alike. But Tuchel lingered. He and Gueye spoke for a couple of seconds. And then Tuchel — this detached, almost aloof figure in soccer’s collective imagination — leaned down and kissed Gueye on the cheek. He embraced him, and he held on. He held on like a man who did not want to let go: as if to an old friend, thought lost, or a child with a favorite toy.
It was easy to miss Gueye’s signing for P.S.G. this summer. The deal, for a not insignificant $35 million, to take him to Paris from his former club, Everton, went through on July 30. Everton was busy that day, announcing a coup of its own: the capture of the Juventus striker Moise Kean.
P.S.G., as it was all summer, was trying to keep track of the endless, spirit-sapping saga over Neymar’s future, waiting impatiently for Barcelona to make plain its intentions toward the striker. The signing of a defensive midfielder — especially a 29-year-old one — who had spent the last few years toiling in the mud and sawdust of the Premier League’s mid-table battleground could not compete for intrigue or attention. Gueye did not have a grand unveiling. Lines of fans did not materialize outside the Parc des Princes to buy a jersey emblazoned with his name. One day, he was at Everton, and the next day, he was in Paris. From the outside, it just kind of happened.
Internally, though, it was different. Tuchel had pulled out all of the stops to sign Gueye. P.S.G. had been scouting him for months. Tuchel had tried to bring him to Paris last January, but was stymied by Everton.
In the summer, he called Gueye, outlining his vision of what his role would be in Tuchel’s team, a personal touch that meant a lot to the player. Among his friends, Gueye is now teased for being something of a teacher’s pet. The hug will have given them considerable ammunition. On his first day, Tuchel told him “not to change” in his new environment. He wanted the rest of his team to adapt to Gueye, to be more like him, not the other way around.
That kiss, that embrace, suggested that in defeating Real Madrid — not just defeating, but stripping away its luster, cracking apart its identity, exposing all that is bare and empty beneath in a 3-0 thrashing — Tuchel feels Gueye, so unassuming as to be almost surreptitious, is starting to do just that.
It is not just superstars who can change the character of a club, who can alter the direction of a game, or a season. There was a moment, after Gueye had been running for 80 long minutes, up and down, up and down, when Karim Benzema picked up the ball just inside his own half.
There was no real danger. Real Madrid, trailing by 2-0 by that stage, was beaten, though the third goal — the one that compounded the humiliation, P.S.G.’s two fullbacks exchanging passes in Real’s box, taunting Europe’s most illustrious club — did not arrive until a little later. The game should have been idling toward its inevitable close.
Gueye does not really work like that, though. Instead, he darted back to Benzema, burst into a tackle, swept the ball away from him, picked himself up, and passed it rapidly forward, searching for another goal. The Parc des Princes roared and crowed and sensed blood. This has always been a blue-collar club, just one with a lavish, state-funded “sporting project” artificially imposed upon it. It is a club that identifies more easily with martial values than superstar indulgence.
The tackle summed up P.S.G.’s performance, a performance that could have only come in the absence of Neymar and, for all that neither of them lack work ethic, Kylian Mbappé and Edinson Cavani. It was a performance, and a victory, rooted in talent, of course — Ángel Di María’s two goals were sumptuous — but in effort and intelligence, application and energy: Gueye’s traits, in other words.
P.S.G. has tried, for seven long years, to conquer Europe by acquiring superstars, by hoping to happen upon a magical formula by which gathering enough talent together means it multiplies. It has not worked. Signing Gueye, making him a central part of his plan, is a sign that Tuchel has recognized that. The challenge for him now is convincing his owners that Neymar, Mbappé and the rest must fit into this new identity, rather than his vision being subsumed by them.
If he needs any supporting evidence, he might offer Real Madrid. Madrid would, of course, not have looked twice at Gueye. It has instead spent its summer equipping the returned Zinedine Zidane with a raft of eye-wateringly expensive teenagers that he does not seem to want to play, building a team packed with current or coming superstars but without any clear sense of what they might do, or how they might fit together.
This is its reward: a performance so wan that it is difficult to believe this team was the champion of Europe just 16 months ago. Its time has passed so quickly, so completely, that it seems impossible it was so recent.
Zidane was restored as manager because he is seen, in Madrid, as a guarantee of Champions League success — he has won every single one he has competed in as a manager — but it would be faintly miraculous if he maintained that streak this year. It is not necessarily guaranteed that he will even see out the season.
Real Madrid has the look of everything P.S.G. has been, rightly, chastised for being: a disjointed team of disparate parts, collected by the sort of selection criteria generally used by magpies. P.S.G., for now, seems to have moved beyond that, at long, long last. What it needed was not another superstar, but the antithesis: the quiet man at the end of the line.
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