Difficult to make projections after the draw for the Champions League, the competition being cut in two by the World Cup in Qatar. The fact remains that the Parisian club is not doing a bad operation and that fate leaves the Marseillais still believing in it a little.
A Champions League in blitz mode, six matches in nine weeks (instead of thirteen or fourteen) with a window reserved for the scheduled selections as soon as the clubs entered the competition. A first group round with no real future or possible projections, the Qatari World Cup (November 20-December 18) cutting the competition in two and imposing, according to the Auxerre coach Jean-Marc Furlan, two seasons in one… While the international players concerned will enjoy themselves in the air-conditioned Qatari stadiums at the end of the autumn, the others will start over from scratch: physical preparation, oxygenation course at altitude, tactical work, etc.
Thus, the initial round of the Champions League, the draw of which took place this Thursday in Istanbul, must be taken literally: a degreasing of one team in two, neither more nor less. Before the big Qatari reset, the return to their club of the players concerned by the World Cup who we imagine mentally and physically drained in December, a mid-term reset of a European competition reconfigured by an unprecedented interlude of almost three months .
The greatest comfort
The idea was therefore to benefit from maximum comfort by November. By pulling Juventus from Turin into hat 2, Paris-SG is not doing a bad job: the Piedmontese club has been suffering for two seasons since it gave up the title of Italian champion to Milanese clubs and some big predators ( Liverpool, FC Chelsea, Atlético Madrid or even FC Barcelona or RB Leipzig) were hanging around there. Whatever the case, a Parisian team posting a goal difference of +14 after three Ligue 1 games had no reason to fear anyone, the reigning French champions having moreover always passed the round of group of the Champions League since the arrival of Qatar Sports Investments in the capital of the club in 2011. However, Benfica Lisbon is not a gift: if the two Champions Leagues start to go up (1961, 1962), the Portuguese club, quarter-finalists last year, have become accustomed to presenting a tough team, difficult to move tactically or physically, without weaknesses.
To conclude, PSG will somehow meet itself or rather it will meet its own history with Maccabi Haifa, a burning memory of its other life, when Qatar had not put it out of reach of insults: the Israeli club released him in 1998 in the round of 16 of the Cup Cup on an own goal at the end of the return match (2-3, 1-1 on the way to the Park).
Petite perspective
Second and last French club entered since AS Monaco jumped from the preliminary round, Olympique de Marseille arrives in the competition weighed down with a few saucepans. Eleven defeats in the last twelve games played at this stage. But that’s not all: Marseille president Pablo Longoria having had the bizarre idea of completely dismantling the team which had completed the 2021-2022 financial year in second place in Ligue 1, the Marseille team has already seen the arrival of eleven new players (one week from the end of the transfer window, there is still room) which gives him an air of selection, with technical affinities to be created from scratch in a terribly short time. But it’s as if fate had contrived to leave them a small perspective: Eintracht Frankfurt has been doing badly since the start of the season, Sporting Clube of Portugal looks complicated to maneuver but there was much worse (Inter Milan, Benfica, RB Salzburg, Borussia Dortmund) and Tottenham is neither Liverpool nor Chelsea, even if the step is high all the same. OM will live on hopes, at least for a while. When you have an owner (the American Frank McCourt) who has cut off supplies or almost, that’s already it.