Here's a fun question with no answer: who is the best manager since Qatar Sports Investments took over Paris Saint-Germain?
By club chairman Nasser Al-Khelaifi's standards, they're all failures.
Since the takeover in 2011, the club has hired five managers... and none of them have done the only thing that Al-Khelaifi wants. "Our aim is to make the club an institution respected around the world," he said in 2016. "If we are going to make that happen, we have to win the Champions League. That will take the club to a new dimension.
"Any team that wins it is seen differently by everyone else."
That might seem like a ridiculous binary, but that's the situation they defined when they bought into the French league. Since the start of the 2012-13 season, PSG have spent $1.55 billion on transfer fees, according to the site Transfermarkt. They've seen players leave for combined transfer fees of $502.87 million. That puts their net transfer spend at about minus-$1.05 billion. Only three other French clubs have a negative net spend, and second behind PSG is Marseille at minus-$129.36 million.
Backed by the trillion-dollar Qatar Sports Investments fund (QSI), PSG have outspent their domestic rivals so heavily that decimal points no longer mean the same thing for them. Given that they're playing a different game from everyone else, winning eight of the past 10 league titles feels like it's the bare minimum. Ownership clearly feels this way too, as PSG's last two managers were both fired in a matter of months after winning a Ligue 1 title. Meanwhile, their newest manager, Christophe Galtier, has only won one domestic title (Lille, 2020-21) across his 13 years coaching in Ligue 1. Oh, and he's never coached in the Champions League before, either.
Despite the universal inability to meet the club's Champions League-or-bust aspirations, not all of the previous five managers produced teams of equal quality or style. While their seasons all ultimately ended in the same way, some were better than others, and no two tenures were the same. So, let's see how the five previous managers stack up with each other -- and what it all might mean for number six.