Opinion – PSG not quite clicking yet, and that’s not worrying | OneFootball

Paris Saint-Germain won away at Olympique de Marseille on Sunday (1-2). Another win, then. And yet, it’s hard to watch this start to the season and tell yourself that Paris are already playing really well. In the end, maybe that’s exactly where the way we look at this team deserves a bit of recalibration.

No, not everything is going perfectly well

We should be careful not to fall into the opposite trap. Just because PSG are winning doesn’t mean we have to find hidden virtues in every sloppy moment, turn every average match into a show of character, and explain that everything was planned. No.

In Marseille, Paris lacked spontaneity, precision, and above all that attacking fluency for long stretches—the kind that, when the team is really clicking, makes it feel as though chances come almost by themselves. Several players are still searching for their best level, and the team as a whole is functioning more in spells than over the full 90 minutes.

Vitinha (26) is ultimately a good example of that. The Portuguese midfielder currently looks less sharp, less commanding, sometimes even a little less accurate. That hasn’t stopped Luis Enrique (56) from continuing to rely heavily on him. And that makes perfect sense: being below your very best level does not suddenly mean you’ve become a bad player.

That sentence sounds terribly banal. In today’s football, apparently it isn’t quite so obvious anymore.

The problem may also be what PSG have put in our heads

Paris are coming off two consecutive Champions League titles. More importantly, they have gone through periods in which their football was so controlled that even the slightest drop-off now stands out immediately. When you’ve seen this team move the ball quickly, press together, and create openings almost mechanically, a simply decent performance can very quickly end up looking bad.

That is where the trap lies. We no longer really compare PSG to their opponents, or even to what a team normally looks like in September. We compare them to the very best version of PSG from the past two seasons.

Obviously, they lose that game.

And yet, since the defeat to Monaco (1-2), Paris have beaten Slovan Bratislava (6-1), Brest (0-1), and then Marseille. Three very different matches, three wins. That does not prove that everything has been fixed. It simply shows that in the middle of a period when their football remains imperfect, PSG are still moving forward.

And that is not entirely insignificant.

There will come a point when they have to play better

The danger, of course, would be getting too comfortable with that reading. You can win without being brilliant for a few weeks. It is much harder to do it over an entire season. PSG will need to rediscover more rhythm, more consistency, and above all that sense of control that accompanied their biggest performances.

But it is still only September. That is probably the detail people forget most easily.

Just a few months ago, this team were finishing an outstanding season. Since then, the bodies have kept going, competition has grown tougher, certain automatisms have shifted, and several key players are simply not yet at their peak. It would be surprising if everything immediately picked up again as though someone had pressed “continue game.”

So yes, PSG can and must play better. To say otherwise would be to close our eyes. But there is a huge difference between a team playing less well and a team that no longer knows how to play. For now, Paris look much more like the former.

And if they are already managing to win during this period, all the better. The real problem will begin on the day their best football does not return—not on the day when, in September, they are still taking a little time to wake up.

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