Paris Saint-Germain players during training in Poissy (Yvelines), August 11, 2023. MIGUEL MEDINA / AFP
A pharaonic budget, divisive characters, rivalries, a storyline with twists and a good dose of suspense. The most commented series of the summer is not an “original creation” of TV screenwriters: far from being a fiction, it is the daily life of Paris Saint-Germain (PSG). A football club, decidedly apart, which begins the new season of the French championship with the reception of Lorient, Saturday August 12, at the Parc des Princes (at 9 p.m.).
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We rewind. On June 3, the fireworks fired in the Porte d’Auteuil enclosure after the last match of the 2022-2023 financial year (lost 2-3 against Clermont), badly masked the general indifference supporters for the club’s 11th French championship title. Because it was time for the season to end. Since the parenthesis of the World Cup in Qatar, the Parisian team seemed to be decomposing. Not only was PSG ingloriously eliminated in the Champions League, from the round of 16 stage (against Bayern Munich), but it only narrowly won the title, despite means incomparable with those of all its opponents. servants.
Management, coach, players: all were in the sights of the supporters who expressed their dissatisfaction in front of the Factory, the club’s headquarters in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine), on May 3. The contestation of the management of the club, expressed in a recurring way in recent seasons by the ultras, had then reached a level: dozens of fans had gone to sing “Neymar, break up! » in front of the home of the Brazilian star of the team, in Bougival (Yvelines).
Mbappé sits on 200 million euros
Since then, the off-season has been particularly eventful. A year after his arrival – with the promise of a new era – coach Christophe Galtier has been sacked. At the end of the contract, the Argentinian Lionel Messi and the Spaniard Sergio Ramos have not been extended. Other heavyweights on the club’s payroll, Neymar and the Italian Marco Verratti are now invited to find a new destination. As revealed by RMC Sport, they were among the players to whom the club – through the voice of its new coach, Luis Enrique, and the sports adviser in charge of recruitment, Luis Campos – announced, on Wednesday August 9, that it did not count not on them for the season.
Even more shattering, more divisive too, the Kylian Mbappé file. Figurehead of PSG for six seasons, the top scorer in the history of the club (212 goals) has been training for three weeks in the Parisian “loft” with the elements deemed undesirable by the club – on the sidelines, therefore, of the group led by the new coach. Placardized, the star was not invited this week to the traditional day to take official photos, and his name should not appear on the PSG-Lorient match sheet.
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