How Enrique used tragedy to fuel fearless PSG to final

Luis Enrique is getting exasperated but, as usual, there's a wicked smile underneath. It is his first weeks at Paris SaintGermain, in autumn 2023, and he is trying to introduce the squad to a new approach.

- MIGUEL DELANEY

"Chaos," he shakes his head as yet another star fumbles an instruction. "At the moment, this is a bit shocking." Luis Enrique's grand mission statement was to finally impose a modern ideology on PSG, the game-leading "positional play" of Barcelona. The problem is not just that this jars with "the French school", to quote PSG's sporting director Luis Campos.

It is that it jars with everything that the PSG have been for over a decade.

Throughout all of this, Campos was watching absurd training sessions and actually laughing. He could laugh, however, because he could see what was really happening.

"If we don't win this year, I'm sure we'll win next year," Campos proclaimed. Tonight in Munich, Campos could be proved correct. Many would celebrate a PSG victory over Inter Milan, despite the French club's controversial Qatari state ownership.

That support is largely down to the manager. In truth, it's also about the manager. It is as if many questions about PSG as a sportswashing project have faded next to a public will for Luis Enrique to do this.

Much of that is down to one moment, which is now poignantly shared when the manager enjoys some glory. Luis Enrique is sitting at PSG's training ground, and discussing his "whirlwind, marvellous" young daughter, Xana. In 2019, she was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer. She sadly passed away a few months later, at the age of nine.

Given that he is a man who is so spiky about everything in football, it would be easy to understand Luis Enrique being angry at the sheer injustice of this. That isn't the case. What is so touching about the scene is that he only looks to the good.