It was in the era of time. According to sources close to the club, Argentine coach Mauricio Pochettino has been sacked. Christophe Galtier takes his place.
After several days of negotiations, an agreement was therefore reached between the Argentinian technician and the Parisian club to end a contract which would run until June 2023. No amount has been announced but the severance pay for Mauricio Pochettino and his staff would come in at around 15 million euros.
Appointed at the very beginning of 2021 to replace Thomas Tuchel, the Argentinian will never have managed to win in a club he knew as a player (2001-2003). But in 20 years, Paris Saint-Germain has changed a lot and Pochettino has never seemed to take the measure of what the capital club has become.
Successes in the Champions League, failures in France
Paradoxically, it was the results in France that hampered the Argentinian’s passage. In a season and a half, Mauricio Pochettino will only have won a Ligue 1 (2021/2022), a Coupe de France (2021) and a Champions Trophy (2021). While he can boast of having taken his team to the last four of the Champions League (defeat against Manchester City), and, despite an early elimination this season, of having done more than equal play with Real Madrid , before the Bernabeu crash (3-1). But beyond the results, it was his inability to install a style of play that cost him his place.
From “winning in style” to “we weren’t picked up to build a project”
The beginning of the mandate of the former manager of Tottenham began however with optimism. Mauricio Pochettino repeated with envy his desire to “win, but in style“. A polymorphic style, sometimes made of possession, sometimes of transition. For in the end never to know what was really the style Pochettino at PSG. Among his feats of arms, there are many matches accomplished, we think in particular of the round of 16 first leg of the Champions League, in Barcelona, with the masterclass of Kylian Mbappé at Camp Nou. Or the quarter-final return against Bayern Munich, certainly lost, but of an excellent level in the collective expression of the team.
But Mauricio Pochettino finally decided to sit on his principles. With a speech that radically changed in the space of a season. “PSG wants to win. To win the Champions League, the Championship, the Cup, all the matches. They didn’t come looking for us to build a project, asking us what we needed to develop our ideas, or what that we love”, he recalled in November 2021, in the newspaper The Team.
Only here, despite the workforce made available, the recruitment of Leo Messi, Sergio Ramos, Georginio Wijnaldum or Gigio Donnarumma, Pochettino was unable to develop the game of his team. Moreover, our PSG consultant at France Bleu Paris, Eric Rabesandratana ultimately regrets the arrival of the Argentinian technician:
He is the worst coach of the QSI era. We lose the Champions Trophy, we are eliminated from the Coupe de France, we are eliminated from the Champions League… These are the worst results of the QSI era. Fortunately there is the championship, it’s almost a white season. In terms of shows, in terms of all of that, it’s a mistake to have taken Mauricio Pochettino.
Risky management of young people, broken link with supporters
And this is not the only area in which Mauricio Pochettino has failed. His management of “Titis” has been singled out, with a permanent change of speech. Elements like Xavi Simons, Edouard Michut, Ismaël Gharbi or Junior Dina Ebimbe were confined to the role of simple foil during the passage of the Albiceleste manager. This wouldn’t be a problem if he hadn’t announced throughout the season that he was counting on the youngsters at the centre. For example, he had promised tothrow young“Once the title had been acquired, a promise remained a dead letter, so much so that some decided to look elsewhere, such as Edward Michut.
Finally, Mauricio Pochettino, supported at first by the supporters, saw the reports slacken over the months, until the point of no return, the Argentinian being copiously whistled by the Parc des Princes during the presentation of the teams ahead of matches. The man from Murphy, Argentina finally suffers the law of the same name. With him, “the worst is never certain” at PSG, and he paid a high price for it.