Paris Saint-Germain’s long chase for Europe’s biggest prize ended under Luis Enrique, who delivered the club’s first Champions League title and a treble after years of spending that had produced noise, not the trophy that mattered most. By the time Kylian Mbappe left for Real Madrid, PSG had become a different club.
That is why Mbappe’s name is back in the middle of the conversation now. The forward once asked Zlatan Ibrahimovic for advice at Marco Verratti’s wedding, and Ibrahimovic told him to go to Real Madrid and learn a club with different philosophy and codes of conduct. He also said PSG had too many stars making too few sacrifices, and too little discipline for a club that wanted to rule Europe.
Ibrahimovic’s complaint was not just about attitude. He said PSG used only half its potential, that the base would be weak if the top of the pyramid was weak, and that life in Paris had become too comfortable for players who did not push each other hard enough. He later made the same point in sharper form, saying that if there were more rigour, everyone would run on the pitch, nobody would be late to training and nobody would be allowed to do whatever they wanted.
That is the world Nasser Al-Khelaifi decided to change when he hired Enrique, whom he called his best decision. Over 15 years since Qatar Sports Investments took control, PSG authorised €2.5 billion in signings, or about £2.2 billion and $2.9 billion, and still had to live with the fact that Neymar, Lionel Messi and Mbappe never brought the Champions League title to Paris. Enrique did what the galacticos era never could: he made the team harder, sharper and more coherent.
Mbappe got a taste of that directly at the PSG Campus, where Enrique sat him down for a one-on-one analysis session and told him that if he liked Michael Jordan, then he needed to lead by example: defend like Jordan, grab his teammates and set the tone first as a person and then as a player. That was the difference. Enrique did not build around the stars. He made them work to his standards.
He also brought the same style he had used with Barcelona in 2015, when he won his first treble. At PSG, that approach finally matched the club’s spending with structure, and the result was the title it had spent years trying to buy. The unanswered question is not whether Enrique changed PSG. He did. It is whether the club can keep that standard now that the stars are gone and the next cycle has to prove the change was real.
