Mauricio Pochettino: How PSG manager slipped down Man Utd pecking order

The conundrum Manchester United’s decision-makers will have been weighing up, you would suspect, is how much they should judge Pochettino on one nightmarish period of 17 minutes in one Champions League match.

A fairer assessment would be to analyse the job he has done – is doing – at a club that has at times seemed almost unmanageable.

The fact he spent 14 months in a hotel perhaps spoke to his own understanding that no PSG manager stays for long. But the 50-year-old has now moved to a flat and, whatever the critics say, has made strides forward with PSG.

For long periods of the Real Madrid tie he achieved what many felt was impossible – the creation of a functioning, coherent unit that got the best out of his three star attacking players.

Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe are all at their best when the team is set up to get the maximum out of their individual brilliance, so how do you make that work when all three are involved?

With a player like Mbappe you need a team that can play with a high rhythm and that looks to attack spaces. With Messi you have to give him freedom, play slower, build from the back, have the players close together and effectively organise your team around him. And if you have Neymar, with all his genius to beat defenders, you need a team that allows him to do his thing, often unpredictable, and be alert to those moments when he loses the ball.

The manager has to put all that together.

Before the Madrid meltdown, Pochettino had, during that tie, got as close as he has come to making an unworkable situation workable.

His predecessors at PSG, Thomas Tuchel and Unai Emery, both had a go at trying to find a way of playing that would accommodate two superstars in the shape of Neymar and Mbappe.

Bearing in mind Emery and Tuchel failed to maximise their potential yet still managed to win European honours with their next clubs (Chelsea and Villarreal respectively), it might be safe to assume the problem stems not from the coach but from the club itself.

One of the key themes that emerged from my conversations for this article with people who have been at the club in the past is that PSG’s players may be excellent footballers but they are also effectively brands, whose success and development ensures the exponential growth of the main brand – the club. It is the manager’s job to ensure the success of both elements.

The squad contains the captain of the Netherlands, Argentina and Brazil as well as the former Spain captain. That is a lot of huge personalities who grew to be so by leading, by being ahead of others. And they meet in a changing room where naturally plenty of people want to be heard.

This ‘Disneyworld’ approach is not dissimilar to the former Galactico philosophy employed by Perez at Real Madrid.

PSG is, it seems, not built with football as its main priority but rather as a vehicle to show the world the Qatari owners’ ability to put together massive projects.

Often, though, the choices are affected not by what is needed but have more to do with the club linking themselves with some of the best-known players around. That policy has created an excess of central midfielders, seven left-backs at some point this season, and signings like that of Donnarumma in place of a perfectly adequate Keylor Navas, for no reason other than that he was available.

When the priority is brand image and not football, then inevitably the role of the coach is never going to be that important either. “At PSG there are so many influences,” Tuchel explained after he left the club.

Every manager who enters the PSG world is convinced he can turn things around, that he can find the right balance between the needs of the stars and those of the team. That he can change what is now an ingrained philosophy.

But to play the stars together is completely different to saying they can play well together.