We hesitate: an allegory, a symbol, an element of the decor that has become over time – seven seasons at the club – the backdrop itself or a summary of all the mistakes, not to mention misinterpretations and perversities, sports management of Paris-SG since 2016 and the end of the term of coach Laurent Blanc. The capital club is on the verge of its tenth French championship title: a better result in Angers than Olympique de Marseille at the Vélodrome this Wednesday ahead of FC Nantes, and Neymar and others will end an endless 2021-2022 season (from their point of view) since Karim Benzema’s elimination in the knockout stages of the Champions League against Real Madrid.
And Angel Di Maria, 34, is a bit like everything we have just said: the gloom in the dreary Parisian daily life, a kind of cynicism – the price of everything, the value of nothing – and resignation that the sport of high level, however, rejects with all his might. Sunday, the Parisians beat (2-1) Olympique de Marseille thanks to referee François Letexier in a sinister atmosphere, weighed down by a discontent from the supporters who will have knocked out even the coach, Mauricio Pochettino, and the captain, Marquinhos. Valid, Di Maria remained on the bench until the end, even seeing the ghost of Mauro Icardi called to take over for two short minutes Kylian Mbappé: when you know Icardi’s rating in the Parisian locker room (a deserter, more or less ), we measure the extent of the disavowal striking the native of Rosario.
“A perpetual sketch”
To be honest, it now affects all strata of the club. The administrative services located at Camp des Loges have never been fooled: the Argentinian striker has long shared with his ex-Uruguayan colleague Edinson Cavani a little game consisting of waiting for the service entrance to be open – it was necessary to arrive at the very last moment – to enter the enclosure and thus avoid the selfie hunters who wait in front of the main entrance before each training session. A Gianluigi Buffon spoke to everyone in the same way, from the cleaning worker to President Nasser al-Khelaïfi, Neymar has never been reluctant to open up – at his times, of course – and Di Maria will have come full circle his Parisian adventure in June, since he is at the end of his contract and the management will not offer him anything, without ever trying to interact with the Parisian biotope. What looks at him.
But football also concerns him, and Pochettino will eventually get tired: no training on Tuesday because he feels something in his thigh, no training the following two days because he thinks he is suffering from a small flu, no more training on Friday because his knee creaks a little and a Di Maria who is surprised on Saturday, eyes wide open, not to be in the team for the weekend. “A sketch perpetuatesl, loose a regular in the locker room. At the same time, Angel shows surprise every time. However, the Argentinian knows how to count. Three attacking positions to be filled, Mbappé, Neymar and Lionel Messi to be played at all costs according to the will – presumed, but which we imagine very real – of Doha and since these do not like to go out during the game, Messi having offered a psychodrama in mondovision on the subject barely a month after his first Ligue 1 match, Di Maria remains on the bench, well seated.
The little people in the locker room
The injuries of Messi or Neymar will still have ensured him about twenty games this season. But these say resignation: three goals in Ligue 1 and an exponential tendency to exaggerate his initial flaw, “its propensity to disappear as soon as the opponent puts strands, which the whole Ligue 1 has come to understand”, says a relative of a player. A deletion which has the good fortune to please neither a Neymar who takes double the blows but who still goes into duels, nor the little people in the locker room (Idrissa Gueye, Danilo Pereira, Achraf Hakimi, Presnel Kimpembe), summoned to run for an artist who, in return, measures his efforts with a trebuchet. Di Maria has disappeared.
With good grace: never a word higher than the other and an extension of an additional season in spring 2021 for “services rendered”, according to a Parisian administrative source. You have to go back in time to find them, but not too far either. In February 2018, the Argentinian flew over Ligue 1 like no Parisian striker that winter, when the first leg of the Champions League quarter-final against Real Madrid took place. He won’t play a minute. Doha didn’t put 400 million euros on the table for Neymar and Mbappé six months earlier to see them on the bench in such a game.
The “Fantastic Four”
The then Parisian coach, Unai Emery, then handles the water bottles in front of the journalists to explain that “players are X” (interchangeable), the assembly still jokes about it years later and Emery’s successor, Thomas Tuchel, associates from his arrival in August 2019 Di Maria with his front three (Cavani, Mbappé, Neymar) under the label of “Fantastic Four”, way of saying that he is not fooled. Sportingly, the last “services rendered” thus date back to the winter of 2019-2020, before confinement in western Paris which will see the player “particularly rust”according to a relative of a player.
More political than Tuchel and obsessed with the supposed wishes of Doha, Pochettino will not have these respects: he is there to put Neymar, Mbappé and Messi on display. Starting, Di Maria slipped to the after. Like Julian Draxler or Layvin Kurzawa before him, oh so willing victims, since Paris-SG pays better than the others, of an environment that takes them away from their core business. What’s the point of training? Say hi ? The radical dissociation of the man who gets rich and the gambler who dies. Sad anyway.