(Football news) Luis Enrique rejoins his previous employers after leading La Blaugrana to a 4-2 victory over Italian champions Napoli and a 4-1 aggregate victory over Real Sociedad in the round of 16.
Enrique might be just five games away from finally breaking PSG’s agonizing Champions League curse and giving Kylian Mbappe the best possible send-off present, all nine years after raising the fabled European championship with Barcelona.
Les Parisiens were not expected to have too many issues in a last-16 matchup with Real Sociedad. In fact, Enrique’s club easily defeated Imanol Alguacil’s team 2-0 and 2-1, with Mbappe accounting for three of PSG’s four goals in the two legs.
However, after being forced to bat away repeated questions regarding his early withdrawals of the Real Madrid-bound attacker, Enrique added more petrol to the fire by benching him for the weekend’s top-versus-bottom Ligue 1 showdown with Clermont, who miraculously led until the 85th minute at the Parc des Princes before Goncalo Ramos saved the day.
Despite failing to beat the worst team that the French top flight has to offer, PSG already boast champions-elect status – sitting 10 points clear at the top with six games left to play – and Ramos’s late leveller over the weekend stretched the hosts’ stellar unbeaten run in all tournaments to 27 matches.
Les Parisiens’ most recent defeat came in a Champions League trip to AC Milan back in November, though, and little more needs to be said about the hosts’ penchant for catastrophic European collapses, one of which Enrique oversaw as Barcelona manager seven seasons ago.
La Blaugrana’s unbelievable 6-1 pummelling of PSG in 2016-17 would not precede Champions League stardom for the Catalonian giants, though, but the visitors now return to the promised land of the quarter-finals for the first time since the coronavirus-ravaged 2019-20 season.
On that occasion, Bayern Munich memorably dismantled their La Liga counterparts in an 8-2 romping, but Barcelona make the relatively short trip to Paris with the wind in their sails, and all it took was head coach Xavi announcing his decision to step down at the end of the season.
Since dropping his resignation bombshell after a 5-3 loss to Villarreal in January, Xavi has presided over an 11-game unbeaten streak across all competitions, a sequence which includes an emphatic 3-1 home beating of Napoli in the second leg of their last-16 tie following a 1-1 draw on Italian soil.
Before traveling to Paris on Wednesday, Barcelona defeated Mallorca, Atletico Madrid, and Las Palmas in their previous three top-flight games in Spain, recording three clean sheets in the process. This victory over the Partenopei was the second of four consecutive for the La Liga champions.
Barcelona may not be able to catch up to Real Madrid, who lead by eight points with eight games remaining, but PSG is well aware that the Blaugrana have a history of incredible comebacks. However, the French powerhouses destroyed Lionel Messi’s goodbye in a 5-2 aggregate blowout in their two-leg last-16 match in 2020–21; Barcelona can now exact the finest possible retribution by subjecting Real Madrid-bound Mbappe to the same punishment.
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