Paris Saint-Germain travel to Spain to face Real Madrid tomorrow evening at a sold-out Santiago Bernabeu. A place in the quarter-final of the Champions League is at stake and PSG will hope that their star trident of Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe and Neymar Junior are fit and firing; that’s not always been the case so far.
According to data used by Olocip, a company specialising in Artificial Intelligence, and reported by Diario AS, the trident haven’t lived up to expectations since coming into being when Messi left Barcelona to join PSG in the summer transfer window.
PSG have played 27 Ligue 1 games so far this season and the trident have coincided in seven of them; four wins, one draw and two defeats. The French side have lost just three games this season and two of them had the trident playing in them.
The thought is that having the trident on the pitch together harms the balance of PSG as they don’t press as much as the rest of the team. In modern football, this can pose a real problem.
The flip side of this is that Neymar has been injured for much of the season and there has been moments where the trident shone together, like against Madrid at the Parc des Princes. Whether they perform at the Santiago Bernabeu will be interesting.
