Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) coach Luis Enrique said he was relieved not to face his former club, Barcelona, in the Champions League final.
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Enrique relieved that PSG avoided Barcelona in UCL final
PSG defeated Arsenal with a 3-1 semifinal aggregate win against Arsenal.
Enrique said he wanted Barca to win if his team dropped out of the competition.
“To be honest, playing in a Champions League final against Barcelona would have been the worst thing for me,” he said.
“If we hadn’t been there, I would have loved for Barcelona to have been there and to have won it.”
Enrique previously guided Barca to Champions League trophy in 2015.
Hansi Flick’s side suffered a painful 6-5 semifinal aggregate loss to Inter on Tuesday.
Even Enrique himself felt disappointed when Barca absorbed a heartbreaking loss.
“Without a doubt, because if you tell someone that after scoring six goals in a semifinal you get knocked out, you don’t believe it,” he said.
“They clearly could have been in the final and should have been in the final.”
An exciting project
Meanwhile, Enrique hopes to replicate his success at Barca and guide PSG to their first European title.
The French side reached the Champions League final in 2020, but lost to Bayern Munich 1-0.
“This is an exciting project,” Enrique said.
“It’s very different from the one I had at Barcelona because in Barcelona I had to get a team that had already worked well to work well again. I think we achieved that comfortably.”
Since losing France star Kylian Mbappe to Real Madrid last summer, Enrique has built a young, hungry PSG side that has delivered.
“Here [at PSG], it’s about creating a team and, even if players leave, continuing to believe that we can turn young players into stars,” he said.
“We now have many stars in the team and, in that sense, I feel very good and very happy.”
