UCL: Pochettino, Guardiola Talks Tough As PSG Tackles Man City

Mauricio Pochettino’s first few months in charge of Paris Saint-Germain have shown great promise, but with minimal time on the training ground since his February appointment, the tactical cohesion on show is mostly a new-manager bounce.

Win or lose in the Champions League this week, there are challenges lying ahead, most notably how to fit together two diametrically opposed ideas; how to meld Pochettino’s hugely demanding tactical system of the collective with PSG’s superstar and ultimate individualist.

Everything at PSG must be built for Neymar, must swirl around the rogue genius whose presence in Paris is the defining emblem of the Qatar Sports Investments era. So far, it has been the perfect fit for club and player, his symbolic importance to PSG allowing Neymar to play with unheard-of freedom.

As such, he is an outlier in the modern game: a true individual in a sport increasingly defined by a tactical complexity built on hard pressing and hard work – on “blood, sweat, and tears, that kind of stuff.”

But if Pochettino wants advice on how to eventually integrate a player like Neymar into a refined tactical regime, he could learn a thing or two from the man sitting in the opposite dugout on Wednesday night.

Pep Guardiola’s poor relationship with Ibrahimovic infamously ended with the two men speaking just twice in six months, during which time the striker’s form tailed off badly before he left after a single season with Barcelona. His style of football, and his attitude, simply did not mesh with what Guardiola was trying to do at Camp Nou.

The comparison with Pochettino and Neymar is not direct, and not only because, in the current instance, the player has considerably more power.

Those who know Neymar say he is hard-working and humble, while Pochettino is renowned for his warmth – a complete contrast to Guardiola’s quiet intensity with all but those in his clique.

Nevertheless, Neymar has shown little interest in working for the team throughout his time in Paris: in tracking back; holding his position; hovering in an exact zone of the pitch for the greater good. It is a problem that will surely define Pochettino’s tenure at PSG.

In these early months – as the ex-Tottenham manager begins to turn the dial away from Thomas Tuchel’s more conservative possession football towards a more vertical, direct, and furious tactical philosophy – the signs are not particularly good. Neymar has scored five goals in 12 games for Pochettino, compared with 10 in his previous 12.

This is partly the result of Pochettino creating different attacking lines, and Neymar is yet to adapt. The new manager sits his full-backs much higher than Tuchel, stretching the pitch to encourage passing through the central column, and that means Neymar is now surrounded with attackers in the middle.

Previously, he had simpler options in his centre-left pocket – an overlapping full-back, a striker – whereas now there are four or five players rotating through the middle, while the wide option is largely closed off.

This is the only real difference from the Tuchel era: the former built slowly from the back; the latter wants piercing vertical football, and it is the positioning of the full-backs that defines how the rest of the team interact.

To date, Pochettino has made more concessions than Neymar, not least because Kylian Mbappe presents a secondary, Neymar-ish conundrum.

In the Champions League, he has deployed a low-block 4-4-2, sitting back against Bayern Munich before counterattacking through Neymar and Kylian Mbappe in a major departure from Pochettino’s core tactical beliefs.

Clearly, he realised that crowbarring two out-and-out attackers – neither of whom will press or follow instructions closely – requires a safer defensive shape.

It worked for long periods, although tellingly in both games the formation lost its shape as the match wore on; the banks of four dropped deeper and the top two lost interest, opening a big gap in which Bayern should have created better chances.

PSG will probably deploy a similar tactic against Man City, a team more conformist – more automated, less egotistical – than perhaps any in the history of the sport.

At times, Guardiola’s City are like faceless drones, their rhythms so immaculate as to erase all sense of individual charisma. Pochettino may never wish to go quite this far, but it serves as an interesting comparison point at the beginning of the Argentine’s spell in France.

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Guardiola just couldn’t cope with a player like Ibrahimovic. But maybe that is because he already had one maverick, one rogue player who refused to fit the system. Perhaps for Pochettino to learn from this week’s opponent he should forget the Ibrahimovic fallout and instead watch tapes of Lionel Messi under Guardiola.

Here is proof that the tension of opposites can create magic; that ultra-structured possession and short bursts of flair can curb each other’s excesses. Guardiola never tried to get Messi into a high press and certainly never told him where to roam, but rather ensured his fine-tuned system continually re-adapted around the No.10.

One player working against the grain can be symbiotic for the collective and the individual. The structure is strengthened by the need to constantly adapt – to ripple out from that one attacker, keeping them on their toes – while the star player’s moments of quality are all the more unexpected, catching opponents off guard after long periods of rhythmic football.

This is the task facing Pochettino, a manager not quite as extreme an exponent of collective football as Guardiola, but nevertheless a demanding tactician who must find a way to work with one of the game’s great free spirits.

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The temptation will be to tame Neymar, to inspire him to work hard for others and temper a disruptive force to the system. But those improvisations, those unpredictable jinks and darts, can in fact be all the more potent when hidden and allowed to flourish within a structure that, to the untrained eye, seeks to curtail them.

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