Boos rang around the Parc des Princes as soon as the final whistle blew to confirm Paris Saint-Germain were Ligue 1 champions. Mauricio Pochettino never imagined his first ever league title as a manager would be quite like this.
Finally, six years after missing out on the Premier League crown with Tottenham, his dreams dashed on an incendiary April 2016 evening at Stamford Bridge, Pochettino had the championship that his managerial career deserved. In truth though, it wasn’t the start of something great, but an ignominious end.
PSG would win the 2021-22 league title by a margin of 15 points but, knocked out of the Champions League by Karim Benzema’s dramatic hat-trick at the Bernabeu a month earlier, it wasn’t enough. Fans had grown so restless that many walked out of the title-clinching match against Lens at the Parc des Princes 15 minutes before the end in protest.
When the visitors bagged a late equaliser, the full-time whistle prompted only jeers – Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi sheepishly celebrated the title, their faces glum rather than joyous. Hell hath no fury like a Parisian scorned.
Coaching Les Parisiens, in many ways, is the impossible job – by season’s end, Pochettino’s exit was inevitable. Ever since, the Argentine has felt he has something to prove.
TEARS AND WHEELIE BINS
When Pochettino was offered his first job in management, aged 36, some warned him not to accept it. Espanyol were third bottom of La Liga and had already burned through two coaches during that 2008-09 campaign. “Many told me that I’d be crazy to take over a side in crisis, it would go badly and I’d disappear from the map,” he later explained in Guillem Balague’s book Brave New World. “But I followed my gut.”
Taking over a club with whom he’d had two spells as a player, the Argentine secured a surprise draw against Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona in his very first game, in the Copa del Rey. A month later, Los Pericos claimed their first
