😳 Will he shine in the Champions League clash? Teenager benches £65m star | OneFootball

Paris Saint-Germain is facing major injury concerns this evening against FC Barcelona. With Ousmane Dembélé, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, and Désiré Doué all out, three of the team’s four best attacking players are missing. That makes things quite tricky for Luis Enrique when planning his starting eleven. And yet, a youngster is likely to be preferred over an expensive star.

It is expected that PSG’s coach will once again, as he did on the opening matchday against Atalanta Bergamo, rely on the just 19-year-old Senny Mayulu to lead the attack against Barcelona, instead of Gonçalo Ramos, who cost around 65 million euros just a year and a half ago. But who is this 19-year-old who is pushing the Portuguese star to the bench in such an important Champions League clash against Barça?

Mayulu joined PSG’s youth academy in the summer of 2018 from the Académie de Football d'Epinay at just twelve years old, and finally made the leap to the professional squad in January 2024. He is considered one of Paris’s most promising talents, though he long stood in the shadow of the equally young Warren Zaïre-Emery. It was only in the last Ligue 1 season that Mayulu had his breakthrough, making 20 appearances and recording four goal contributions—a solid debut season. Since then, he has even overshadowed Zaïre-Emery as PSG’s most promising homegrown talent.

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Mayulu stands 1.83 meters tall, is relatively slim, and thus has the perfect build for a striker. But in fact, he is a trained midfielder. Since this year’s Club World Cup, coach Enrique has repeatedly played him as a number nine, retraining him for a much more attacking role than the young Frenchman was used to. But the switch paid off right away at the Club World Cup: On the opening matchday against Atlético Madrid, Enrique brought Mayulu on ten minutes before the end, and just moments later, the new striker scored PSG’s temporary 3-0 goal.

And so it happened that the talent was even preferred in the starting eleven on the first Champions League matchday over the usually first-choice, big-money striker Ramos. In the press conference after the CL match, Enrique explained his decision to start Mayulu ahead of Ramos as follows: “We thought that, given Atalanta’s high pressing, it would be better to use a striker like Mayulu—a very mobile player with many qualities, who can run in behind the defense, receive the ball at his feet, and create a numerical advantage.”

What is the reason for Enrique’s sudden obsession with his new striker Mayulu? The PSG coach has a soft spot for number nines who can also drop back into midfield. The best example of this is Dembélé’s role last season. In this system, a player like Ramos, who is more of a classic penalty-box striker—less technically skilled and slower than Mayulu—tends to fall by the wayside.

So now the youngster will very likely get to start from the beginning against Barcelona as well. Perhaps today will be the day he scores his first goal in the new Champions League season. In the 4-0 home win over Atalanta Bergamo, the 19-year-old was still left empty-handed.

Even in last season’s Champions League campaign, the young Frenchman was able to showcase his talent. He crowned himself as the third-youngest final goalscorer in the tournament’s history with his goal to make it 5-0 in the final against Inter Milan.

He is now expected to build on that, and today’s match shows that Mayulu is indeed getting his chances behind Dembele & Co.—even at the expense of expensive stars like Gonçalo Ramos.

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

📸 FRANCK FIFE - AFP or licensors