An Asturian with character and feet on the ground has achieved what French pride and Qatari money could not for years. In France, there is unanimous consensus that Luis Enrique has been the true architect of PSG’s success in the Champions League, the club’s obsessive goal, because the Spanish coach, as a providential man, has worked the miracle of transforming the team, not only football-wise but in spirit, method, and soul.
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The man from Gijón has been capable of the prodigy where so many others failed. Since the wealthy gas emirate bought the club 15 years ago, there has been a nonstop parade of coaches in Paris, some of them true legends, like Carlo Ancelotti. The PSG owners, too impatient to geopolitically capitalize on the investment, also spared no expense to hire the brightest superstars on the market (Ibrahimovic, Beckham, Mbappé, Neymar, Messi, etc.) at an astronomical cost and sometimes very disappointing results. The checkbook was not enough. It almost never is. What was missing was the basics of football, a truly cohesive and dedicated team. Someone to make it possible was missing. And he appeared.
According to the newspaper Le Parisien, Luis Enrique has entered forever into “the pantheon of coaches,” alongside Helenio Herrera, the inventor of catenaccio, Rinus Michels, the precursor of total football, or Pep Guardiola, “the guru of possession.” The capital’s daily even jokes that “he would be elected mayor of Paris without running.”
In recent days, several media outlets—this Sunday La Tribune Dimanche—have highlighted the technical team accompanying the Asturian and the internal harmony. First mentioned is Luis Enrique’s right-hand man, Rafel Pol, with whom he has worked for 14 years. Another key element is the psychologist, Joaquín Valdés, who has been with the coach since 2008. The Parisian Sunday paper counts up to 41 collaborators in Luis Enrique’s well-oiled machine. The triumph, therefore, is no improvisation. Much work has been done, but perhaps it arrived sooner than they themselves expected.
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For the editorialist of L’Équipe, the great French sports daily, the Asturian coach is someone who still possesses “a thirst for victory, an obsession with perfection, and an unbreakable management.” The commentator took the cultural liberty of quoting the great sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin, whose death at 104 years was announced the morning of the Budapest final. Luis Enrique’s secret would be having internalized, probably unknowingly, Morin’s theory that “complex thought helps to face error, illusion, uncertainty, and risk.”
The praise for Luis Enrique also reached the formidable pen of Pascal Praud in Le Journal du Dimanche. This journalist, a star of the CNews channel and one of the main propagandists of the hard right and far right, decided for one day not to rant about Macron or talk about France’s decline. In an article titled “Jurisprudence Luis Enrique,” the author argued that “football is craftsmanship” and that today it suffers “a mortal illness” which is impatience, the impossibility for coaches to build their projects and consolidate them because immediate results are demanded. In this sense, Luis Enrique would have been lucky that the Qatari owners have learned the lesson. This is how he describes the Asturian’s work: “Luis Enrique does not compose a team. He installs a language. He invents a syntax. He finds a style. How to run. How to attack. How to defend. Training creates automatisms. The players learn, understand, assimilate the method. None of this is done in six weeks.”
As has always been the case with Rafa Nadal, the other eternal king of Paris, the French press values Luis Enrique’s human quality and his overcoming the tragedy of the death of his daughter Xana, a victim of cancer. Le Parisien dedicated an extensive report on Friday to the work of the foundation that bears her name, with an interview with the coach’s sister-in-law, Bela Cullell, who runs it. The initiative serves to provide logistical support to families whose children are ill and undergoing treatment in Barcelona. This project, the newspaper recalls, allows “continuing to keep Xana alive and maintaining the memory of a girl who gives strength to the whole family and to Luis Enrique.”
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