Opinion – Has Luis Enrique created chemistry that wasn’t there? | OneFootball

At Paris Saint-Germain, Vitinha and João Neves seem made to play together. With Portugal, however, Jorge Jesus has almost treated them like two competing options. As L’Équipe pointed out this Monday, one started against Wales, the other in Norway. A difference in interpretation that perhaps says something especially flattering about Luis Enrique’s work.

At Paris, the puzzle has no fixed pieces

Two players who seem naturally complementary

After seeing them together so often, you could almost end up believing that Vitinha (26) and João Neves (22) came in the same box. The first organizes, directs, and sets the tempo. The second runs everywhere, presses, attacks spaces, and brings that energy that sometimes seems to let him be in two places at once. Handy.

At PSG, their partnership now seems so obvious that people do not even really wonder anymore whether it works. The real question is how the opposition will manage to disrupt it. And yet the start of Jorge Jesus’s (72) spell with Portugal is a reminder of something quite simple: this complementarity is not universal.

Against Wales, Vitinha started while João Neves only came on in the dying seconds. Three days later in Norway, the roles were reversed: Neves was in the starting lineup and Vitinha replaced him in the 55th minute. Two matches, two choices, and above all not a single start together.

Vitinha as a “number 6” is already not the same player anymore

The most interesting part lies in the explanation. Jorge Jesus simply does not see Vitinha the same way Luis Enrique (56) does. The Portugal coach believes his midfielder has too much dynamism to be locked into the defensive role he regularly occupies with Paris. In his system, he prefers to place a more positional player behind him and free Vitinha to play higher up the pitch.

And that is where the subject becomes far more interesting than a debate over whether Jorge Jesus or Luis Enrique has found the instruction manual. There probably is not just one.

Luis Enrique is not only looking for the right players

He is above all trying to make them compatible

PSG work precisely because the positions there do a poor job of telling you what the players actually do. Vitinha can start in front of the defense without spending his whole evening camped between his center-backs. João Neves can be deployed as a box-to-box midfielder and burst into the penalty area seconds later. Positions serve as a starting point, rarely as a cage.

This may be one of Luis Enrique’s great achievements since his arrival: he has not just identified each player’s qualities. He has organized some players’ movements in order to allow others to express theirs.

Put another way, Vitinha and João Neves may not be naturally complementary in every system. They have become so in PSG’s.

The nuance matters. It also explains why some Paris combinations now feel so self-evident. When everything works, you end up forgetting the mechanisms that make everything work in the first place. That is a bit of the problem with good teams: by making things look simple, they give the impression they were simple from the start.

Jorge Jesus, moreover, is nothing like a heretic

It would therefore be quite unfair to turn Jorge Jesus into a coach who, on some strange whim, decided to separate two two-time European club champions. A national team works less together, has different players, a different balance, and a different project. The Portuguese coach wants a clearly identified holding midfielder. From that point on, Vitinha and João Neves can logically find themselves competing for other roles.

And in the end, this apparent contradiction makes the case even more interesting. Because if two players can seem almost inseparable in Paris and much less so with the national team, the credit does not belong only to their individual talent.

It also says something about the current PSG: Luis Enrique has not simply assembled very good footballers. He has built a framework in which their qualities stop getting in each other’s way and start feeding off one another. Vitinha and João Neves are excellent separately. In Paris, they sometimes give the impression that they were designed to play together. Portugal’s national team has just reminded everyone that maybe that was not written on the box.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇫🇷 here.