The image, for me, is from the second leg at Anfield. The seventy-second minute, Liverpool 0-2 down on the night and 0-4 on aggregate, the home crowd already negotiating with the result. Ousmane Dembélé picks the ball up on the edge of the area, takes a touch with his left, and sweeps a low shot past Mamardashvili into the corner. He turns, arms wide, in front of the Kop. He does not celebrate aggressively. He does not need to. The ball had been moving through PSG hands for thirty seconds before it reached him; the goal was the inevitable conclusion of a sequence Liverpool had not been able to interrupt.
This is the team Luis Enrique has built. Not fast, exactly — though it can be. Not flamboyant, although there is plenty of flamboyance in it. The defining quality is something closer to unhurriedness. PSG, in 2025-26, look like a team that knows what it is.
This is, you may have noticed, not how PSG have ever previously looked.
Where the team came from
Cast your mind back to the summer of 2024, which feels longer ago than it was. Kylian Mbappé’s contract had finally run out — after two extensions, three near-misses, and a public negotiation that lasted longer than several Eastern European democracies — and he left for Real Madrid on a free transfer. The most expensive footballer of the post-2017 era had cost PSG €180m once, earned a reported €100m a year for half a decade, and walked out the door for nothing. Voilà. That is the kind of detail that defines a club for a generation, and not in the way a sporting director would write up.
What Mbappé left behind, in tactical terms, was a team designed around one thing: getting the ball to him, in space, at speed. Everything else — the midfield shape, the pressing intensity, the defensive structure — was instrumental. The geometry was vertical. Win the ball, find Mbappé, watch him score. The system worked at domestic level (six Ligue 1 titles in seven years) and bumped repeatedly against the same ceiling in Europe. PSG had built one of the most expensive squads in football and had still never won the Champions League.
Luis Enrique arrived in July 2023, signed a two-year deal, and spent his first season cohabiting with this arrangement. The football was better than it had been under Galtier. The team still lost a Champions League semi-final to Borussia Dortmund. The Spaniard’s frustrations, by all accounts, were structural. You cannot coach a positional team around a player who is, by inclination and contract, positional only when it suits him.
The summer of 2024 changed the calculation. Mbappé gone. Recruitment focused on technical midfielders and press-resistant attackers. Désiré Doué from Rennes for €50m. João Neves from Benfica. Willian Pacho from Frankfurt. The headline-fee era was over. The squad was being rebuilt around the structure, not the star.
It was the kind of pivot French clubs are not supposed to make. Most of the time, they don’t.
The Luis Enrique system
What PSG play, on most days, is a 4-3-3 that becomes a 3-2-5 in possession. Hakimi inverts from right-back into central midfield. Nuno Mendes pushes high on the left, occupying the touchline. Vitinha and João Neves rotate at the base — one staying deep, one floating forward. The front three, nominally Doué right, Ramos centre, Barcola left, swap flanks during games as a matter of routine.
The phrase coaches use for this is positional rotation. It means the players do not have positions, exactly; they have zones, and the zones get filled by whoever the rotation has placed there. Doué can end a ten-pass sequence on the left touchline. Barcola can end it as a centre-forward. The shape is kept by the principle that every zone must be occupied, not by the principle that this player goes here.
It is the kind of football Pep Guardiola has been preaching for fifteen years. Luis Enrique was Pep’s captain at Barcelona for two of them. The lineage is not subtle.
What is interesting — and this is the part the foreign press has been slow to see — is that Luis Enrique has implemented this in a league, and at a club, that has historically resisted it. Ligue 1 is a vertical league. PSG, even under Tuchel, were a vertical team. To get a French squad of this profile to play positional football, in 2025-26, is closer to a coaching achievement than a managerial one. He has not bought the philosophy. He has installed it.
The animation: Vitinha cues, Doué arrives
The mechanism that defines the 2025-26 attack is the one I want to draw, because it is the one PSG win matches with.
The pattern: Vitinha receives between the lines, body open, eyes already up. Hakimi has overlapped from right-back and is pinning the opposition full-back to the touchline. Barcola occupies the left half-space, holding the wide centre-back’s attention. Ramos pulls the other centre-back deep, dropping into the channel between the lines.
The seam in front of the back four — the one zone no defender can cleanly claim — empties. Doué starts wide right. He waits. Then, in the moment Vitinha shapes to play the pass, Doué runs diagonally inside, across the front of the right-sided centre-back, into the seam.
The pass and the arrival happen in the same instant. The opposition defensive midfielder is caught flat. The centre-back has to choose: step out and chase, or hold and trust the cover. Both options lose. From the seam, Doué can shoot, cut back to Barcola arriving from the left, or slip Hakimi at the back post.
This is not a sequence I have invented. It is the sequence that produced the Doué assist for Hakimi in the Champions League final against Inter in May 2025 — eighth minute, the ball rolled across the six-yard box, Hakimi finishing — and it has produced a meaningful percentage of PSG’s most-watched goals all season. The mechanism is now so well-rehearsed that opposition coaches plan around it. Liverpool, in the first leg of the quarter-final two weeks ago, conceded the second goal of a 2-0 home defeat to almost exactly this pattern. Doué finished it himself.
The point is not that the move is unprecedented. Plenty of teams have run versions of this. The point is that PSG run it three or four times a match, with three or four different combinations of personnel, and at no point in the previous decade have they been able to do this. The Mbappé team did not have the patience for it. The current team has nothing else.
The midfield platform
Vitinha is the conductor; everyone else dances around him.
This is not how he was billed when he arrived. Vitinha came from Wolves in 2022 for €40m as an industrious double-pivot midfielder, the kind of player Ligue 1 scouts struggled to value. For two seasons he was a useful piece in a misshapen jigsaw. Last summer he was given the keys.
What he is, in 2025-26, is the most complete deep-lying playmaker in European football. The passing volumes from Champions League nights are absurd — high touch counts, a forward-pass success rate that holds up under pressing, line-breaking ball percentages that put him in the conversation with Pedri among midfielders in the competition. But the volumes underplay it. The point about Vitinha is not how many passes he plays. The point is the shape the team takes around him. He is the reference point. When he is in possession, every other PSG player has somewhere to be.
João Neves is the partner. Twenty-one years old, signed from Benfica for €60m last summer — at the time, another piece of post-Mbappé recreational shopping; now, looking like the bargain of the European market. He is the runner of the pivot. While Vitinha holds the central reference, Neves moves: forward to receive between the lines, sideways to cover Hakimi’s overlap, back to plug the channel when Mendes is high. The two of them rotate so cleanly that the team rarely loses its positional balance, which is the part of positional football that most teams break first.
The one I would not have predicted is Fabián Ruiz, who was supposed to be a passenger and has instead been the third gear. He plays as the more advanced of the three, drifts left to combine with Mendes and Barcola, and finishes when he arrives. Plus français qu’on ne le dit, the locals say of him. A Spanish midfielder who plays like he was raised at Clairefontaine.
Hakimi, evolved
The most interesting individual evolution at PSG is Achraf Hakimi’s, because it is the least obvious.
Hakimi has been one of the best right-backs in football since Inter Milan, where his job description was simple: stretch the touchline, bomb forward, score the occasional sensational goal. He was, structurally, an attacker with defensive duties. The first PSG version of him played the same role.
The 2025-26 version is different. Luis Enrique has made him an inverted full-back — the John Stones role, essentially, the player who steps from the back four into central midfield in possession. When PSG have the ball, Hakimi tucks inside. The back four becomes a back three with Marquinhos and Pacho holding the centre and Mendes pushed high on the left. The centre of midfield, which would otherwise be only Vitinha and Neves, becomes a three.
He still overlaps. He still scores spectacular goals. But he does it from a different starting point, and the team is stronger for it. He scored in the Champions League final last May. He scored at Anfield two weeks ago. The output has not dropped; the structural utility has gone up. Cela ne se voit pas, et pourtant.
The defensive structure
I will be brief here because this is the section the British press writes well and I have less to add. The back four — Marquinhos and Pacho centrally, Mendes left, Hakimi inverted — defends a high line, presses aggressively, and trusts Lucas Chevalier in goal as the sweeping last man.
Chevalier. Là, le bât blesse. Donnarumma’s exit last summer was the one piece of structural surgery that looked, at the time, like a mistake. The Italian had been the goalkeeper of the treble. He had wanted to stay. PSG sold him to Manchester City for £26m and signed Chevalier from Lille for less. The reasoning was technical: Donnarumma was not a sweeper-keeper, and Luis Enrique’s high line needs one. The football reasoning was correct. The optics were terrible. Donnarumma, who had been excellent in Munich the previous May, said publicly that PSG had let him down. The Italian press has not forgotten it.
Chevalier has been good. Not great. Good enough that the defensive line works, which is what matters. There is a version of this story where the goalkeeping decision haunts PSG in the second leg in Munich on the 6th of May. There is also a version where Chevalier saves the night and the call looks visionary. Both versions are alive in the data.
Results and the larger question
So: what have they actually won?
The continental treble, in 2024-25. Ligue 1, Coupe de France, Champions League, in that order. The 5-0 against Inter at the Allianz was the largest winning margin in a Champions League final and Doué — at nineteen, three days off twenty — became the first player to be involved in three goals in a final. Luis Enrique became the second manager after Pep to win the treble at two clubs.
The 2025-26 season, with the league closing out, has them six points clear at the top of Ligue 1 and into a Champions League semi-final against Bayern, first leg at the Parc des Princes on the 28th of April. The Liverpool tie was won 4-0 on aggregate. The team is, on every meaningful measure, performing better than the Mbappé-era PSG ever did, and this without any single player at the world-class plateau Mbappé occupied.
The numbers, before the inevitable counter-argument: PSG’s Champions League goals scored in the league phase (no longer a group stage; the format changed) put them tied with Bayern at 38, the most of any team. Their xG-difference is the highest in Ligue 1 by a distance. They have lost three matches all season across all competitions. The team is, by every conventional measure, having one of the great PSG seasons.
The counter-argument — and I find it half-convincing — is that they are running on a peak coaching cycle. Luis Enrique’s contract was extended last summer to 2027. He has been at PSG for three years. The Spaniard’s career at Barcelona ended after three years; his career at Roma ended in one. He is a great coach with a known ceiling on stamina. The system that has produced this season requires daily maintenance — the rotations are coached, the pressing triggers are coached, the build-up patterns are coached — and there is no version of this team that runs by itself. If Luis Enrique leaves in 2027, the structural risk is real.
There is also the Bayern problem, which is specific. PSG have lost five consecutive matches to Bayern across recent seasons. The most recent was 2-1 at the Parc des Princes in November of this year, in the league phase, a Luis Díaz brace. Vincent Kompany has Luis Enrique’s number, in the way certain coaches simply have other coaches’ numbers. Bayern come to Paris on Tuesday with Kompany suspended after his third yellow of the campaign. Bayern come to Paris the favourites anyway.
If PSG go out to Bayern, the conversation about the system’s sustainability gets louder. If PSG win, the conversation becomes who can stop them? Both versions are compatible with the data we have.
The honest answer
The question this piece is supposed to answer — new identity, or just a new problem? — has two parts.
The first part, the identity, is real. PSG, in 2025-26, are tactically something, in a way they have not been since the late Tuchel era, and possibly not for longer than that. They are recognisable. They have a system. They have a structure that produces consistent outputs. The treble validated the choices; the current Champions League run is consolidating them. Le PSG existe enfin. The PSG, finally, exist as a team.
The second part is harder. The choices that produced this — selling Donnarumma, building around Vitinha, demanding press-resistance from a 19-year-old, replacing the world’s most expensive forward with a positional rotation system — are the choices of a coach who knows what he wants and an institution willing to back him. PSG have not historically been an institution willing to back coaches. The Qatari ownership has, for a decade, preferred star purchases to sporting projects. The current arrangement is the exception, not the rule.
The risk is that this is a one-cycle peak. Luis Enrique leaves in two years; the next manager arrives; the squad is sold off in pieces; the institutional preference for stars reasserts itself. Doué goes for €120m, Vitinha for €100m, Neves for the same. The treble becomes a memory. The structural achievement becomes a parenthesis in the longer story of a club that mostly buys footballers and occasionally accidentally builds a team.
The version that does not happen — the version where PSG keep the squad, extend Luis Enrique, and turn this into a five-year European cycle — would be unprecedented in the modern French game. Lyon’s golden generation lasted four seasons. Monaco’s lasted one. PSG’s previous attempts at coherence have all been undone by ownership impatience.
But the football, at the moment, is excellent. Profitons-en, as my mother used to say about good weather in March. Enjoy it while it is here. The next two weeks will tell us what the rest of it is worth.