Kylian Mbappé sat in a room at Paris Saint-Germain and watched footage of himself not defending. The clips came from a Champions League quarter-final against Barcelona, and the scene later appeared in a documentary about Luis Enrique’s first year as the club’s coach. Luis Enrique opened with basketball. “I read that you like Michael Jordan,” he told the club’s record scorer, and went on to describe how hard Jordan defended.
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The point was that a leader who cannot score helps by pressing. Mbappé did not take it. His mind, he later admitted, was already “half-thinking about Madrid”. He also conceded that he never got the best out of his coach.
A year after he left, PSG won the trophy he never brought them. On May 31, 2025, in Munich, they beat Inter Milan 5-0 to win the Champions League for the first time. No final in the competition’s 70 years had been won by a wider margin. The win completed a treble of league, French Cup and Champions League. Britannica calls it the first by a French club. A year later, in Budapest, they won it again.
How much had PSG spent chasing this?
Qatar Sports Investments took over PSG in 2011. Britannica describes it as a Qatari government-operated shareholding organisation that bought a majority stake and invested heavily. Britannica says Zlatan Ibrahimović arrived in 2012, and David Beckham, Marquinhos and Edinson Cavani followed in 2013. It adds that the club signed Mbappé and Neymar in August 2017, and Lionel Messi joined in 2021.
The league titles came, but Europe did not. Before 2024-25, PSG had reached the knockout rounds 12 seasons running and never won the competition. Their one final before Munich came in 2020, against Bayern, in a Lisbon stadium closed to fans by the pandemic, and they lost.
Inside the club, the stars ran things. Unai Emery, one of a line of coaches who could not make the parts fit, said after leaving in 2018 that at PSG, Neymar had to be in charge. Emery was followed by Thomas Tuchel, Mauricio Pochettino and Christophe Galtier.
Opponents noticed. Yunis Abdelhamid, then the Reims captain, said it was easy to play out from the back against PSG because their front three did not defend.
Why did they choose Luis Enrique?
PSG appointed him in July 2023, and the BBC read the hire as a turn away from the superstar culture. Messi and Neymar left that same summer.
The French football writer Julien Laurens told the BBC that the club wanted a coach who would build, with patience. Laurens said the club considered Antonio Conte and José Mourinho. He called them winners who win now and do not really build.
Mbappé’s exit gave Luis Enrique his chance. The BBC says he convinced Al-Khelaifi and Campos that he could build a younger, more cohesive side without him.
He also asked for control. Pierre-Etienne Minonzio of L’Equipe told the BBC that earlier coaches had lacked the authority to stand up to the stars. Galtier, in his account, could not face Mbappé, and Pochettino never took a decision against Messi and Mbappé. Minonzio said Luis Enrique told the club plainly that he would be the boss.
He brought a winner’s record and an athlete’s habits. He had already won the Champions League with Barcelona in 2015. In 2007 he finished the Frankfurt Ironman, and in 2008 he ran the Marathon des Sables, a 155-mile race across six days in the Sahara. At the club’s training ground he walks barefoot on the grass every morning, a practice called earthing.
What happened when Mbappé went?
Mbappé’s last season had started badly. In July 2023, after Mbappé declined the option of a one-year extension, PSG left him out of the pre-season tour to Japan. He was also dropped for the opening league game, and the club insisted it would sell him rather than let him leave for free. He credited Luis Enrique and the football adviser Luis Campos with getting him back into the side. “Without them I would never have played,” he said.
Mbappé told the club president, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, in February 2024 that he would leave at the end of the season. He announced it in a video on X rather than through the club. At his last home game, against Toulouse, some fans jeered him.
He left as PSG’s all-time record scorer, with 256 goals, after a final season of 44 goals in 48 games. He signed a five-year deal with Real Madrid.
Luis Enrique had made a bet in public. In February 2025 he reminded reporters that he had been brave enough, the season before, to predict a better team in attack and defence. Marca says his first season had already taken PSG to the Champions League semi-finals. In early April 2025 they sealed a fourth Ligue 1 title in a row with a 1-0 win over Angers. By then the numbers backed him. PSG’s Ligue 1 win rate of 82.1% was their highest in the Qatari era. They averaged 68.3% possession and 653 completed passes a game, the most in the league.
Who replaced the stars?
Younger players, and more willing ones. Britannica lists Ousmane Dembélé as a 2023 signing and Désiré Doué as a 2024 one. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, a Georgian winger, came in during the season.
They were not cheap by every measure. The Guardian noted that only two of PSG’s starters in the final had cost less than about €30m, the price of Inter’s dearest signings under Simone Inzaghi. What changed was what each of them was asked to do.
Rai, who played in the PSG side that won the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1996, put it in terms of commitment. A team needs talent, he told the BBC, and also total effort from every player, with or without the ball. What impressed him was how quickly Luis Enrique got that from such young players.
The forwards accepted it. Dembélé has said, grinning, that he will be benched if he does not press. In the 2025-26 season, no player in Europe’s top five leagues made more presses per 90 minutes than Doué.
How did the run to Munich go?
Not smoothly at first. In October, PSG lost 2-0 at Arsenal, and Doué was taken off after 64 minutes. They recovered to beat Manchester City and then knock out Liverpool, Aston Villa and Arsenal in the knockout rounds.
In the final, Inter never settled. After 12 minutes Vitinha found Doué, who slid the ball across for Achraf Hakimi to score. Eight minutes later Doué’s shot deflected off Federico Dimarco for 2-0. He scored again in the 63rd minute, Kvaratskhelia made it four, and the 19-year-old substitute Senny Mayulu added a fifth in the 86th.
At 19 years and 362 days, Doué became the youngest player to score twice in a European Cup or Champions League final, beating a record Eusébio set in 1962. He was also the first player to have a hand in three goals in a final, with two goals and an assist. Luis Enrique became only the sixth coach to win the competition with two clubs.
The captain, Marquinhos, lifted the trophy in the Allianz Arena, home of the Bayern side that had beaten PSG in 2020. Luis Enrique recalled his first day at the club’s training campus. He had told people then that the aim was to fill the trophy cabinet, and that only the Champions League was missing.
“Paris had never won the Champions League,” he said afterwards. “We did it for the first time.”
After the match, PSG’s ultras unfurled a giant banner of Luis Enrique and his daughter Xana planting a PSG flag. Xana died of bone cancer in 2019, aged nine. After Barcelona’s win in 2015 she had planted a Barcelona flag in the centre circle with him, and he had said he hoped to do the same in her memory.
Why could PSG press like that in May?
The Guardian pointed to the French game itself. Ligue 1 cut to 18 clubs in 2023, and the Coupe de la Ligue was scrapped in 2020. PSG also earn far more than any French rival. The paper listed these among the reasons PSG can perform at that level so late in the season, and noted Bayern Munich are in a similar position in Germany.
The pressing itself showed up in the numbers. PSG led the 2024-25 Champions League in ball recoveries by some distance. The image many people kept from Munich was Dembélé waiting to pounce on a goal-kick from Inter’s keeper, Yann Sommer.
Could they do it again?
Repeating it was harder. On May 30, 2026, PSG met Arsenal, the new Premier League champions, in Budapest. Kai Havertz scored an early goal for Arsenal. Dembélé, by then a Ballon d’Or winner, levelled with a penalty. Sky Sports says it came after Kvaratskhelia was fouled.
The game went to a penalty shoot-out. Arsenal’s Gabriel, taking his first penalty for the club, sent his kick over the bar, and PSG won the shoot-out 4-3. Sky Sports says it was Arsenal’s fifth penalty. Le Monde reports that Luis Enrique had started ten of the players who beat Inter a year earlier. It also says Dembélé’s penalty was PSG’s 45th goal of that Champions League, equal to the competition’s record, and that the club had already won three trophies on penalties that season.
BBC Newsround says PSG became only the second club to retain the trophy since 1993. Le Monde says it was Luis Enrique’s third Champions League, which put him among only five coaches to win three. It quotes Mikel Arteta, Arsenal’s manager, saying that in his opinion PSG are the best in the world. Marca reported that Luis Enrique had reached 50 Champions League wins faster than any other manager, passing a record held by Pep Guardiola.
By early May, Kvaratskhelia had 10 goals and five assists in that season’s Champions League, a PSG record for one campaign. Dembélé had warned his teammates in February to put the club before themselves, as they had the year before.
The Guardian saw a lesson in the scene Mbappé was shown on a screen. PSG then won the Champions League twice with a forward line that presses.
