Pre-season friendlies, as we’ve discussed at length in the last few weeks, often don’t hold much value when it comes to what you want to accomplish throughout the course of your domestic season. You could even argue that this is the case even more so than usual given the recent success of the World Cup, because this tends to be the ‘dull period between one international tournament ending and another big season of European football beginning (disclaimer: yes, we know football exists outside of this continent, but let’s not pretend like Europe isn’t where it’s at).

One team who seem to be in something of a ‘funny’ position are Paris Saint-Germain, with not long to go until Ligue 1 gets underway once again. It’s no secret that they’re the top dogs in French football, and given that France are now world champions for the second time, there’s a certain degree of pressure that comes with that – or, so you’d think.

Because of the vast gulf in quality between domestic French football and European football, it’s almost like PSG can’t win. We all know that they’ve spent outrageous amount of money to get to where they are and we aren’t knocking them for that, because the thing that fans quickly seem to forget is that most teams have been forced to do that in order to succeed. However, with Juventus, Barcelona, Real Madrid & more continuing to go from strength to strength, the inner pressure seems to be rising as other sides come sniffing around their players.

This next season is going to be an absolutely massive one for them, and they seem to be going about things in a very strange way. They’ve allowed seven fairly notable names to leave the club and they haven’t been shy about that, only officially bringing in Kylian Mbappe and Gianluigi Buffon – with one being on the verge of retirement and the other being heavily linked with a move to the Bernabeu.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftA_xYTZPAE

At this point, what do PSG need to do in order to gain some kind of recognition? It certainly isn’t winning the French league again and it’s not like they can transfer over anywhere else, so this season, they really need to put all of their eggs into one basket regarding the UEFA Champions League.

It’s not like they won’t be able to walk through the rest of Ligue 1 even if they don’t prioritise it, and in an imaginary scenario that we’ve just concocted, do you really think fans will care if they don’t win Ligue 1 but they do become the champions of Europe? Just go back and look at Liverpool winning the UCL in 2005 – nobody really remembers how poor they did domestically that season, and for good reason.

They’ve struggled so far to pick up any kind of positive results in pre-season, narrowly beating Sainte-Geneviève Sports before 4-2, 3-1 and 5-1 losses against FC Chambly, Bayern Munich and Arsenal respectively. Again, that might not mean a thing by the time May comes around, but it’d be interesting to see whether or not they go all out to try and secure a result against Atletico Madrid.

From an attacking point of view, they’ll certainly want to put as much pressure on them as they can from the word go, in order to gain a bit of confidence before things really start to pick up again in the lead-up to the new season. Atletico are strong defensively but they probably won’t be as invested in this game as PSG, which makes the odds for the French side all the more surprising. It’ll be a fun battle of wits between these two, but we’re backing Paris Saint-Germain to come away with just their second pre-season victory in Singapore.

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