Paris-SG will find FC Barcelona in poor form in the quarter-final of the Champions League – Libération

Chance has spoken: the Parisian club will meet the Barcelona team, which crucified it in the quarter-finals in 2017, on April 9 for a first leg match at the Parc des Princes.

If you look twice, every draw has to do with some form of schizophrenia. Because the entity drawn is twofold: there is the team and the club on which it is in some way based. That is to say the past of this team, its ability to pull and even resurrect invisible threads, its propensity to bring buried know-how to the surface. Sometimes, in a circumstantial way, the team can appear as strong as the club which houses it: a conjunction of the planets. Which, however, is never completely perfect, as if the imbalance was consubstantial with the fragility of the balance of power between the (very) great people of this world.

Wobbly training

FC Barcelona 2023-2024, which Paris-SG was offered in the quarter-final of the Champions League this Friday in Nyon (Switzerland), is the big gap. A team in pain, crushed by the years when Lionel Messi alone siphoned off a third of the payroll with emoluments exceeding (bonuses included) 100 million euros annually and whose current coach, the former great player of the Xavi house, has already announced with bitterness that he would not extend his lease at the end of the season while knowing perfectly well that his management would not have offered it to him. A shaky formation saved by its youth (Fermín López, Lamine Yamal) in the previous round against Napoli and whose physical impact is no longer in line with the standards of a Champions League where things play at a thousand miles an hour. But there is the club.

Installed powers

Where the embers of the prosperous years remain (the beginning of the 2010s) and where we could occasionally find something of the old reflexes capable of resuscitating the few very great players, certainly aging, who still patrol the locker room: the German goalkeeper Marc -André ter Stegen, his compatriot Ilkay Gündogan or the Polish center forward Robert Lewandowski, still capable of flashes capable of turning a match around. Not to mention the gaze of the refereeing body, always more tender towards the established powers: Paris-SG had the bitter experience of this in 2017, when the famous comeback (1-6 at Camp Nou on the return, 4-0 for the Parisians on the outward leg) had put an end to the career of referee Deniz Aytekin, a DJ in his spare time and who thus returned to his decks. For its part, Paris-SG has left a paradoxical impression since this winter, not really serene in the game but undefeated for four months.

Quarter-finals (April 9-10 and 16-17)

Arsenal – Bayern Munich ; Atlético de Madrid – Borussia Dortmund ; Real Madrid – Manchester City ; Paris-SG – FC Barcelona

Suffice to say that there will be a match (going to the Parc des Princes on April 9, returning to Spain on the 16th) and that the opportunity is great since in the event of qualification, it is Atlético Madrid or Borussia Dortmund, that the Parisians dominated (2-0, 1-1) in the group this fall, which will stand between the reigning French champions and the final on June 1 at Wembley. The other quarters: Arsenal-Bayern Munich and Real Madrid-Manchester City, otherwise tough confrontations.