The Athletic FC ⚽ is The Athletic’s daily football (or soccer, if you prefer) newsletter. Sign up to receive it directly to your inbox.
Hello! Paris Saint-Germain painted a masterpiece with four passes. Hang it in the Louvre.
Coming up:
🎨 PSG’s work of art
👊 Another Madrid dust-up
🇲🇽 Mexico squad meltdown
🏆 Panini loses World Cup rights
PSG perfection: How early goal stunned Bayern and clinched place in final
At full tilt, Paris Saint-Germain are out in front, the world’s best club team bar none. Their progression to a second successive UEFA Champions League final tells you that, but so does the artistry of the goal we’re going to talk about now.
As a demonstration of an end-to-end attack, the third-minute blow they landed on Bayern Munich last night was perfect — and on reflection, it killed their semi-final stone dead. Ousmane Dembele applied the finishing touch, but the build-up was so good that it asked him to do no more than stick his laces through the ball. Elite play is made of this.
It began with Willian Pacho’s searching ball from deep, into the feet of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia 30 yards in front of him.
Kvaratskhelia’s lay-off to Fabian Ruiz (line one in the image below) while turning away from Dayot Upamecano (those clever little spins of his are a proper trademark) exploited Bayern’s man-to-man marking, where they bravely did not double-up on any of PSG’s attacking superstars. The return pass from Ruiz (line two below) was sublime to the point of being telepathic.
Kvaratskhelia ran and looked, and ran and looked. Warren Zaire-Emery made things easier for him by sprinting for the goal line and attracting three defenders (circled below).
Dembele, meanwhile, stepped away from the back post, when often the instinct is to get closer to the goal, and into space. He met Kvaratskhelia’s measured cut-back with a booming finish. The entire passage of play was flawless.
A strike so early in Munich, giving PSG a 6-4 lead on aggregate, was effectively game over. This incarnation of PSG are a complete team, devoid of prima donnas, and their out-of-possession work squeezed the life out of Bayern. In Arsenal, they’ll face one of Europe’s top defences in the final on May 30 — but very rarely do Arsenal encounter attacking genius on this scale.
Handball claims
Nothing went Bayern’s way, which isn’t to say they deserved to win over two legs. They went punch for punch with PSG in Paris last week but little by little, their opponents’ class made them toil. A Harry Kane strike on 94 minutes (a beauty though it was) arrived too late to turn the tide. It was just about the only occasion when Kane got free of Pacho and Marquinhos.
Refereeing controversy was rife again, particularly after a Vitinha clearance struck Joao Neves on the arm inside PSG’s box. Bayern screamed for a penalty but the VAR wasn’t interested, and while Neves had his left arm in an unnaturally high position, the handball laws do make exceptions when a player accidentally hits his own team-mate, as Vitinha did.
It didn’t help that Bayern had fallen foul of a contentious handball decision in Paris eight days earlier, awarded against Alphonso Davies, and what the past week has shown us is that teams are entirely at the mercy of how match officials choose to interpret and apply the laws; in many ways, football as we’ve always known it. Sometimes I’m not sure that they really know how to call handball either.
“If you look at the two legs, probably too much went against us,” Bayern head coach Vincent Kompany said. That’s true — but all the same, the better team won. The Athletic FC Podcast asked recently if Bayern are the best team in Europe. Sadly for Kompany, the answer is no.
News round-up
Real trouble: Madrid players in third big row ahead of Barcelona match
Aurelien Tchouameni and Fede Valverde (Denis Doyle/Getty Images)
Real Madrid should come with a side serving of popcorn (I know that’s often the case, but this week it’s more true than ever). Far from keeping their heads down at the end of a pernicious season, they’re at each other’s throats.
We reported yesterday about a flashpoint involving Antonio Rudiger and an argument in training between Kylian Mbappe and a first-team coach. Mbappe is getting it from all sides. Even though he’s injured, the club’s fanbase took the hump over him taking a short holiday in Italy. An online petition aimed at turfing him out of the Bernabeu had 26million signatures when I checked it this morning, although it’s never easy to know how seriously you should take these things.
Now word emerges of a dust-up between midfielders Federico Valverde and Aurelien Tchouameni, described as a fight which “started at the end of training and carried on in the changing rooms”. You’d surmise from all this that head coach Alvaro Arbeloa has lost control completely, and it’s one of many reasons why Madrid will replace him in the summer.
The big question now: can Madrid channel this rage in Sunday’s El Clasico against Barcelona? Or will Barca get the result they require to wrap up La Liga’s title? I think I know where my money would go.
Mexico meltdown: Players told: Don’t miss training camp or you won’t go to the World Cup
No World Cup goes by without a pre-tournament meltdown somewhere, and Mexico are ticking that box for 2026. Simmering tensions between the country’s football association and its top division, Liga MX, spilt over yesterday in a way that could cost key players their places at the upcoming finals.
The Mexico Football Federation (FMF) called a pre-World Cup training camp for this week, even though we are outside FIFA’s designated international windows — and even though the Liga MX season is at its height. Clubs there, understandably, don’t want to compromise their interests by losing big names to the national team.
Toluca and Chivas are two sides that tried to secure dispensation. The dispute also affects Guadalajara, where Brian Gutierrez and Mexico’s first-choice goalkeeper, Raul Rangel, play. But the FMF isn’t budging, and yesterday afternoon, head coach Javier Aguirre held his ground by warning that anyone who refused a training call-up would not be picked for the World Cup.
Mexico aren’t fancied to push through to the latter stages of the knockouts, but they’re strong enough to be competitive, and as co-hosts, they’d surely like to present the best picture of themselves. As it is, they run the risk of draining the pool of national goodwill before they’ve kicked a ball. All eyes are on June 1, when Aguirre officially names his squad. Madrid might have to hand over the popcorn.
Around TAFC
- Ambitious collectibles company Fanatics is set for another huge win. It is poised to secure FIFA’s trading card and sticker licence in 2031, replacing Panini. The rights have been in Panini’s hands for 60 years.
- Despite all the apparent demand, the prices of World Cup tickets appear to be on the slide. Analysis seen by Henry Bushnell found that in the past two weeks, costs for 76 of the 78 matches being played in the United States have fallen.
- Serie A’s Sassuolo are an example of an Italian team getting it right on and off the pitch (which definitely isn’t true of everybody over there). James Horncastle spoke to CEO Giovanni Carnevali about the road to stability.
- If you want to know why Brentford are having such a good season, it’s partly down to their skill in creating big chances (defined by Opta as a situation where a player should reasonably expect to score). Pound for pound, they’re as good as anyone on that front.
- Most clicked in Wednesday’s TAFC: U.S. Soccer’s sparkling new training base.
Catch a match
Selected games (times all 3pm ET/8pm UK)
UEFA Europa League semi-finals, second legs: Aston Villa (0) vs Nottingham Forest (1) — CBS, Paramount+, Fubo, DAZN, ViX/TNT Sports; Freiburg (1) vs Sporting Braga (2) — Paramount+, ViX/TNT Sports.
UEFA Conference League semi-finals, second legs: Crystal Palace (3) vs Shakhtar Donetsk (1); Strasbourg (0) vs Rayo Vallecano (1) — both Paramount+, ViX/TNT Sports.
And finally…
Confession: as massively popular as the Jack Reacher books are, I’ve never actually read one. And only through this interview by Jacob Tansley with their author, Lee Child, did I discover how prominent Aston Villa are in them.
Child is a Villa fan and he populates his writing with the names of their players. John McGinn, Jacob Ramsey and Matty Cash (Matthew, to give him his Sunday name) featured in a short story published by Child last year. Naming a villain after one of the club’s worst-ever signings, striker Savo Milosevic, is a supporter’s pettiness at its best, and I’m all for it. Time to give Reacher a whirl, I reckon.
