PSG Won the Champions League Last Season — Here Is Why Defending Is the Hardest Thing in Football

PSG won the Champions League for the first time last season with a 5-0 win over Inter. Here is the specific challenge of defending the title and whether their squad can do it.

PSG's 2024-25 Champions League victory — their first, achieved in the final at the Puskás Aréna in Budapest against Inter Milan with a 5-0 win that was the most emphatic Champions League final result in decades — ended twenty years of Qatar-funded near-misses and produced the particular catharsis that sustained commercial and competitive investment eventually generates when it finally achieves its objective.

Defending a Champions League title is among the hardest things in football's elite competition because the specific conditions that produce a first victory — sustained performance, specific tactical preparation across eight months, the particular psychological unity of a team chasing something it has never had — are qualitatively different from the conditions required for retention. The defending champion faces every opponent's elevated motivation, their own reduced urgency, and the specific mechanical reality that opponents have a full season of footage to analyse.

For PSG's specific defence: their squad has maintained structural continuity under Luis Enrique, whose tactical system is built around principles rather than specific players, which creates a specific resilience to individual departures that the previous PSG eras — defined by specific individual stars — didn't have. Kvaratskhelia, Barcola, Mayulu, Dembélé: the attacking department has the specific collective quality that Enrique's system maximises.

For the Liverpool quarter-final specifically: Liverpool represent PSG's most dangerous specific quarter-final opponent because their approach — the pressing, the specific transitional quality that Salah, Díaz, and the midfield trio provide — most directly challenges the specific elements of PSG's system that are most vulnerable under pressure. Enrique knows this and will have prepared for it specifically.

For the historical challenge: only three clubs have won back-to-back Champions Leagues since the competition's current format was established — Real Madrid (2016, 2017, 2018), Bayern Munich (2013 with different format), and Barcelona (2006). PSG attempting to become the fourth is the specific historical context that elevates their campaign from very good to potentially historic.