Three minutes in against Aston Villa last week, Paris Saint-Germain showed that Luis Enrique has coached them into one of the most aggressive pressing sides on the continent.
Ousmane Dembele, positioned on the edge of the box, took off too early as he tried to shut down Pau Torres at a Villa goal-kick during the Champions League quarter-final first leg. The referee pulled him back for encroachment.
Torres took it again, passing short to his goalkeeper, Emiliano Martinez, but he had to immediately kick it long when Dembele sprinted towards him. The ball sailed out of play for a PSG throw-in.
That could be chalked up as early adrenaline getting the better of Dembele, but PSG ended the game with nine final-third regains, their most in a European home match for three years (since 12 versus Real Madrid in February 2022).
It was the fifth-consecutive Champions League game where they kept their opponents to a pass completion rate under 80 per cent — Villa completed 217 out 290 passes (75 per cent), meaning one in four did not find a team-mate. Aggression was the plan, not a coincidence.
The context is that, this time last season, PSG lost their Champions League quarter-final first-leg at home 3-2 against Barcelona. They had tried to defend aggressively, only to come unstuck when Barcelona went over the press. Luis Enrique sat Kylian Mbappe down one-on-one, and in Spanish, was half-demanding, half-pleading his winger to press centre-back Pau Cubarsi more aggressively in the return leg.
He cited Michael Jordan as evidence of a “true leader” who led by example and took his team-mates with him to defend, making a “f*cking team machine”. Mbappe was speechless until Luis Enrique asked, “Si?”, and he nodded.
Amazing talk between Luis Enrique and Mbappe:
¨I read you like Michael Jordan, well, he defend¨😉I Highly recommend to see Luis Enrique Documentary.
All the work behind how he built this team 📖To watch the 3 episodes with english subtitles send me DM!
Follow me for more! pic.twitter.com/eprzX4vr01— Juani Jimena (@JimenaJuani) April 10, 2025
PSG recovered in the second leg, winning 4-1 (6-4 on aggregate), though they relied on attacking star power to mask out-of-possession flaws. In 2023-24, Mbappe had his best-ever scoring season (44 goals), yet only recorded 12 tackles plus interceptions. There is a French idiom for the day Mbappe would contribute defensively: quand les poules auront les dents. When hens have teeth. Alternatively: when pigs will fly.
Last season was not as problematic as watching PSG under Mauricio Pochettino, when Neymar, Lionel Messi and Mbappe all had little-to-no defensive responsibility and the remaining seven team-mates were forced to defend passively.
However, the awkwardness of Mbappe out of possession meant Luis Enrique’s side were defending with 10 players during the last campaign and, with those dynamics, he was never going to see his high-possession, high-pressing aspirations completely come to fruition.
The hyper-focus on PSG losing Mbappe to Real Madrid (for free) last summer meant few were thinking about the implications for the French side’s press. PSG have the second-most final-third regains in the Champions League this season (75, behind Bayern Munich with 91).
That equates to a final-third regain once every 16 minutes this term, more regularly than last season (18.3, Luis Enrique’s first year) and 2022-23 (21.2). And this is with fewer opportunities, because PSG’s possession has gone up under the Spaniard, with opponents, now wiser to the pressing threat, increasingly playing over them.
Against PSG during this season’s Champions League, half of all goalkeeper passes in open play and 58 per cent of goal kicks are being ‘launched’ — kicked 40-plus yards — the highest and second-highest proportions.
This is why Luis Enrique’s only point of concern for the tactical acclimatisation of left-winger Khvicha Kvaratskhelia — a winter window singing from Napoli — was if he could bring enough to the press: “We already know his technical quality. What impressed me was his capacity to adapt to the defensive work.”
The viz below could be hung in The Louvre, as they say, let alone the PSG dressing room. It is a trend line of their Passes Per Defensive Action (PPDA), which is the average number of opposition passes in a match before PSG make a defensive action, a useful proxy for measuring defensive intensity.
Last season was about coaching PSG into a pressing side. Luis Enrique memorably described it as a “nightmare” when Real Sociedad’s aggressive approach had them pinned in their own half in the round of 16 in February 2024.
Then, it was unfathomable they might do that to another team. Fourteen months on, with the 3-1 home victory over Villa being Luis Enrique’s 100th in charge at PSG (70 wins), they produced one of their finest defensive displays against particularly stubborn opponents. PSG showed sides to their game: pressing plenty, playing keep ball at 2-1 and defending Villa’s transitions.
Emery’s expectations of PSG pressing man-for-man were justified. They do that most weeks in Ligue 1, typically leaving their centre-backs one-v-one on halfway and jumping right-back Achraf Hakimi to the opposition full-back, because the PSG right-winger teams up with Dembele to press the centre-backs.
Here are wide angles from recent Ligue 1 away wins over Rennes (4-1, between the Liverpool round of 16 legs) and Saint-Etienne (6-1) that show their approach — and two opponents who ambitiously tried to build-up short.
The game plan has been the same in Europe. Here is a sequence from the 4-2 league phase win over Manchester City in January, when Pep Guardiola’s side tried to go through the press.
Phil Foden was converged on by three PSG midfielders and fouled.
In an almost identical spot at the Parc des Princes, the same happened to John McGinn when he was the only Villa midfielder bold enough to receive between the lines and play on the half-turn, spinning Fabian Ruiz.
Vitinha and Joao Neves reacted quickly, got on top of him and the latter made the foul before McGinn could cross the halfway line.
If teams do get through the press, PSG have no issues in getting stuck in — only PSV (111) have made more midfield-third tackles in the Champions League this season than Luis Enrique’s side (97).
Man-for-man pressing at home against Premier League Champions-elect Liverpool in the last 16 first-leg? Check. Liverpool head coach Arne Slot explained the physical significance of aggressive tactics: “They did exhaust us a bit by constantly pressing us and if you get the ball, sometimes you’re a bit too tired to make the perfect execution.”
You get the picture. Only the picture changed against Villa. Luis Enrique took particular pride in the fact his side “forced” Villa to play longer than usual, and thus felt PSG “deserved the result”.
They did so by dropping Hakimi deeper to defend Jacob Ramsey, with right-winger Desire Doue pressing Villa left-back Lucas Digne. Nuno Mendes, PSG’s left-back, stayed deep as the spare man, meaning PSG were five-v-four on the halfway line but five-v-six closer to Villa’s goal.
It gave extra protection against long balls, and Marcus Rashford’s threat especially, but being underloaded meant Dembele had to press with particular aggression (hence him encroaching three minutes in).
Dembele’s job was to press either centre-back, or Martinez, using intense, curved runs to cut lateral passes and lock Villa in down whichever side they passed to first.
Here is one example, where Torres gives the goal-kick to Martinez and he returns it. Dembele pounces on the second pass, forcing the Spaniard out to the channel and then…
… into playing a long pass, by which point the rest of the PSG players have locked on.
Lucas Beraldo ensured Rashford did not win the aerial duel on the halfway line, only to then miscontrol Willian Pacho’s pass to him after the Ecuador international had picked up the loose ball, and Villa ended up with a shot on target. PSG making a mistake is about the only way teams can make anything against their press.
After playing short with the first two goal-kicks, Villa realised what they were up against and pushed the defence up to kick for territory. They did start to mix their approach later in the first half, and PSG were quick to shut them down when Villa started bouncing passes from central midfielders to centre-backs.
Perhaps the example of the game came from the one pass Martinez did try and play through midfield. On the hour mark, with PSG in a high block but not chasing Martinez — Doue and Dembele were temporarily in each other’s positions — he tried his luck. No dice. Hakimi read the pass from McGinn’s blindspot and jumped ahead of him to intercept.
It presented PSG with a six-v-six against a stretched Villa defence, only for Doue to pick a cautious pass to Dembele, and he was tackled by Digne when he went one-v-one.
Before the Villa game, Luis Enrique was asked about PSG’s current form and the need to peak late in the season for European competition. He said they were going “to continue to see a great version of PSG, with the same intensity — perhaps even greater. The legs will be there”.
Pressing the way they did — with such intensity and opponent-specific tweaks — was fundamental to them stifling Villa’s build-up and dominating the game, just how they had done when City and Liverpool came to Paris.
In the post away-goals era, 35 of the 38 teams who took a two-goal lead into the second leg of a European knockout game have won the tie. PSG have experienced more than their fair share of collapses and heartbreak in the Champions League, though that looks long in the past. They could, or would, not press then like they do now.
Forget possession, dribbles and stylish passing sequences, Luis Enrique has finally coached PSG to press like the “f*cking team machine” that he always wanted.
Don’t expect them to sit back at Villa Park. “Play in a low block… we don’t work on it,” he said in the late Parisian night after the first leg. “It’s going to be difficult, but these are our weapons”.
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