between sporting failure and controversial remarks, chronicle of a ruined season

Christophe Galtier was to embody a return to reasonableness. By returning the reins of the team to a French coach and Ligue 1 specialist, Paris Saint-Germain had decided to stem the spiral of foreign coaches who have succeeded each other since 2016, from Unai Emery to Mauricio Pochettino, in passing through Thomas Tuchel. “We are happy and proud that he is French, because we want to start a new project”insisted President Nasser Al-Khelaïfi during his enthronement last July.

The new project lasted only one season, which did not leave the expected taste. Despite the title of champion of France which he will have managed to keep, Christophe Galtier leaves behind him a wasteland PSG. The last image of him will remain this closed face and his salute with his hand when leaving the podium where his team lifted Hexagoal, Saturday July 3, in front of the public at the Parc des Princes. At the same time as his departure, the very short Lionel Messi era (2021-2023) comes to an end, but also Sergio Ramos’ passage in the capital. Above all, Galtier left the club after a gloomy end to the season, during which poor sporting performance and media storms mingled.

The wind quickly turned

Everything had however started well: 21 goals and four victories in the first four games. A promising new tactical device, which finally seemed able to allow Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappé to express themselves at the same time. A much warmer attitude to the media, after a year and a half of lukewarm water under Mauricio Pochettino. Christophe Galtier has, for a time, brought a breath of fresh air, quickly coming to sweep away the disappointment of seeing the native of Marseille sit on a bench that many wanted to see be occupied by another Phocaean, but with a more prestigious name: Zinédine Zidane.

But the idyll did not last long. As early as September, even before the first evening of the Champions League, the coach made people cringe after a bad joke about the movements of his team, following the trip to Nantes made by private jet. “We are trying to see if we can not move in a sand yacht”, he had fun at a press conference, arousing the hilarity of Kylian Mbappé right next to him. What to be caught publicly by the Minister of Sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra.

In the wake of this affair, PSG lost some steam and experienced a first real brake in early October, chaining three draws, including two against Benfica, who turned out to be the main opponent of their group. in the Champions League. Disappointing results that cost him first place and tipped the team on the wrong side in the draw for the round of 16.

Burrs as far as Bavaria

But, when it was time to give way to the World Cup in November, Paris was still undefeated and largely leader of Ligue 1. We were still waiting for the season to start in earnest with, in everyone’s mind, the first highlight of the season, set for February 14 against Bayern Munich in C1. A year after the Madrid debacle, there is no question of going out again from the first knockout confrontation. It was all the credibility of the new project promised by Nasser Al-Khelaïfi at the start of the season that was at stake.

When the truce returned in January, nothing went as planned. The capital club staggered, losing four times in eleven games just before their round of 16 C1, including suffering an embarrassing elimination in the Coupe de France against Marseille. With Kylian Mbappé and part of the convalescing squad, Christophe Galtier unveiled a very defensive game plan in the first leg against Bayern. Harmless until the entry of the triple scorer in the World Cup final, his players limited the breakage to stay alive (0-1).

The three victories acquired before the return, including the revenge in Marseille in Ligue 1 (3-0), and the record of Kylian Mbappé, now top scorer in the history of the club, have kept hope alive. So much so that some observers wondered if Neymar’s injury against Lille was not ultimately good news. But, like almost every season, PSG fell again, this time at the Allianz Arena, remaining silent for 180 minutes against Bayern Munich far from their usual level (0-2). As if the capital club’s season had ended before it even started.

A tense communication

“I let people judge about the qualifier linked to our season, whether it is good or not (…). I have one regret: that we were not able to fight with all our strength in this double confrontation with Munich.”, had then minimized Christophe Galtier, hot. The latter had paradoxically been spared thanks to this weariness specific to Paris Saint-Germain, nourished year after year by the failures of his predecessors, almost all of whom have been there.

Despite the disappointment, the coach had the opportunity to end the season calmly. In the league, the mass seemed already said when Paris left the Champions League through the back door since its runner-up was eight points behind at that moment. But poor results and miscommunications followed.

In January, he had already had to apologize after implying the dismissal of Presnel Kimpembe from his status as vice-captain, who had expressed his misunderstanding on his social networks. Ten days after the elimination in Munich, he attributed his team’s lack of investment against Rennes (0-2 defeat) to the overrepresentation of the club’s youngsters in its workforce: “Put yourself in the shoes of the players who are preparing for a match, who see eight players absent and who enter the locker room with young people from the academy that they must have seen once or twice in training”.

serious charges

One more step was taken in Nice, in early April, despite the victory against his former team (2-0), when he came to ironically applaud the Ultras from Nice who had held up a banner insulting his mother. Taken to task by some of his ex-players, including Khéphren Thuram and Jean-Clair Todibo, Galtier did not hide his anger at a press conference: “If these people in the stands see European Cup matches, it’s thanks to my work last season”.

The tension did not have time to fall as the storm turned into a storm. Three days after the Allianz Riviera incident, the PSG coach was accused of discriminatory remarks, made during his previous mandate, in Nice precisely. A controversy triggered by the revelation by several media, including RMC Sport, of an email written by its former sports director Julien Fournier, in which Galtier would have declared that he “couldn’t have so many blacks and muslims in the team”.

Enough to push the opening of an internal investigation at the club, when its position was already well weakened. Even if he denied the facts and that the affair very quickly ceased to make the headlines, it is as if the death knell of his Parisian experience had already sounded (it was only three months later that he received a summons before the Nice Criminal Court for charges of “moral harassment” and of “discrimination”). At the same time, the PSG season already had no real flavor anyway. Symbolically, Christophe Galtier ended his term with an embarrassing defeat at the Parc des Princes, against Clermont (2-3) on June 3.

After this meeting which concluded the 2022-2023 season, the head was not at the party, despite the validation of the eleventh title of champion of France in front of his public. The serious accident of goalkeeper Sergio Rico, still in critical condition today, had logically put the festivities in the background until a fireworks display illuminated the stadium with beams as bright as they were incongruous. Even if this evening had all of a clap of end, it was necessary to wait one more month to record the end of the Galtier era.