The Chaos Before the Kickoff: Why I Bothered With This Game
Honestly, I didn’t plan on dissecting the PSG vs Brest match like this. You see the title: player ratings and analysis. Sounds professional, right? Like I sat there with my notes, charting defensive third entries and expected goals. Nah. The truth is, I usually skip these mid-week Ligue 1 clashes unless there’s something genuinely spicy happening, or unless I’m forced to.
And I was forced. Not by an editor or some deadline, but by my own dumb decision a few months back to get deep into fantasy soccer, which has become less fun hobby and more a raging obsession. I had three players in this specific game, and watching the live feed was a total disaster. The stream kept buffering. My youngest decided 8 PM was the perfect time to demand a detailed explanation of why the moon follows the car. So I missed maybe 40 crucial minutes of the action.
The practice isn’t just watching the game; the practice is the remedial work. The practice is firing up the replay at 11:30 PM, after everyone is asleep, volume muted, squinting at my laptop screen, trying to figure out if
Bradley Barcola’s dribble was genuinely impactful or just flash, all while the screen glare hurts my eyes.
I committed to these ratings because I needed to justify swapping out Dembélé last week. If he flopped, I was golden. If he shined, I needed to eat humble pie and give him a decent score. It’s always personal, never objective.
The Grind of Reviewing: Analyzing the Mess
I started the review process by focusing intensely on the defensive midfield. That’s where this game felt like it was going to crumble for PSG. Watching the 1.5x speed replay, the first thing that jumped out at me was how flimsy Vitinha looked under pressure. I literally rewound the tape three times just on one specific sequence near the 30-minute mark where he got totally bypassed. My initial rating for him was harsh, like a 5.5, but then I realized he did manage to string together some important passes later when the game opened up. See, that’s the reality of rating players—you go in with a gut feeling, and then you have to force yourself to find the counter-evidence.
The process is messy. It’s me screaming “Are you kidding me?!” at the screen, waking up the dog, because I watched Gianluigi Donnarumma make a save that looked spectacular on the first viewing, but on the replay, it was clearly tipped right to him. I grade keepers harshly because I used to play goal myself back in the day, and I know half the “world-class saves” are just good positioning. This entire review took me almost two hours longer than it should have because I kept getting distracted by poor defensive discipline in the middle third.
The Player Breakdown: Assigning the Scores
When I finally sat down to draft the actual scores, I had a pile of scribbled notes and coffee stains on my notebook. Here are the tough calls, the ones that took the most time to justify:
- Hakimi: Yeah, he scored, but his rating can’t just be about the goal. He was a defensive hodgepodge for stretches. I ended up pulling his score down from an 8.0 to a 7.5. People will complain, but they didn’t watch him miss those crucial tracking runs like I did at 2 AM.
- Mbappé: Everyone expected a 9.0 performance. He was fine. He got the job done. He bagged the goal. But was he truly transcendent? Nah. It felt like a minimum effort performance. I stuck him with a 7.0, maybe a 7.2. You pay him to deliver more fireworks.
- The Bench: This is where the real value is. The subs—they came in, solidified the defense, and let PSG see the game out. I gave guys like Pereira and Soler slightly inflated scores just for achieving stability, which was the hardest job in that frantic second half. They get a 6.8 and a 6.5 respectively, solid workers.
It’s the synthesis that’s the hard part—taking those micro-moments and translating them into a simple number. It’s an imperfect art, practiced under imperfect conditions.
Why I Even Bother With This Crap: The Real Context
I’m not a paid journalist. I’m just some guy posting his observations. So why the deep dive? Why the obsessive need to rate every player when I could just go to bed?
This whole practice, this need to document and share detailed analysis of something as trivial as a mid-season football match, stems from a really dark time. It reminds me of 2020. I was laid off, just totally blindsided. I had zero income, bills piling up, and honestly, felt like a failure.
I tried everything to make a quick buck online. I stumbled into writing blog content for a ghost platform—anything from gardening tips to, you guessed it, immediate match reactions. They paid peanuts, maybe $15 per article, but I needed it to put food on the table. I remember having to crank out four match reviews in one weekend, reviewing games I hadn’t even watched live, just based on stats and highlight packages. I was synthesizing analysis, pulling facts out of thin air, just to hit the word count and get that tiny payment.
That pressure, that desperate need to create content, is what stuck with me. Even though I have a stable job now and I don’t need that $15 anymore, the habit of the meticulous post-match review remains. It’s like a muscle memory of survival. I started this blog just to keep practicing that skill, keep proving I could dissect the game better than the “experts.”
So, when I watch these games, and especially when I go back and re-watch them for the ratings, I’m not just reviewing football. I’m reviewing that version of myself who had to fight tooth and nail just to afford electricity. That’s why these ratings are so detailed and so opinionated. It’s not just a hobby; it’s a record of practice, hard-earned.