Among the praise showered on the astonishing first leg of Paris Saint-Germain’s Champions League semi-final against Bayern Munich, it was pointed out that it is much easier to play with that sort of intensity in Europe when you can take it easy at home.
These are teams who are so domestically dominant, in Ligue 1 and the Bundesliga, that they can arrange their whole seasons around Europe. Players can be rested, rotated, managed; long-term plans can be made. Your best talent can be kept fresh for the games that really matter.
And there is no player who has benefitted more from this situation than Marquinhos.
The PSG captain has started just nine Ligue 1 games this season. He has played a grand total of 90 domestic minutes since the middle of February. This isn’t due to injury. Barring a few weeks in September and October, he has been broadly fit for the whole campaign.
Rather, it is because he has become a European specialist. He has started 14 of PSG’s 16 Champions League games so far, and all of their last 13.
This is extreme load management, Luis Enrique taking full advantage of PSG’s privilege by essentially using their Ligue 1 fixtures as tune-ups for his skipper; not much more than run outs to keep things ticking over, to stop the Brazilian from developing bench sores or rust on his joints.
The domestic games he has played have been very selective: only twice this season has he started the Ligue 1 game immediately before a Champions League fixture. Before the first leg, the French newspaper L’Equipe ran a piece about his unusual situation with the headline ‘L’intermittent du spectacle’ — the freelance performer.
Marquinhos helped guide Warren Zaire-Emery, as a makeshift right-back, through the game in Munich (Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)
It is not because Marquinhos is particularly ancient. This is a young PSG team so, at 31, he is a senior citizen by comparison, but he’s not completely past it. It is a recognition that their football is so intense and that, after last year’s campaign culminated in a Club World Cup final appearance in mid-July, freshness is key as the season reaches its business end.
There are risks that come with so lightly racing such a key player. This is tap dancing on the fine line that sits between rest and a loss of match fitness, rhythm, sharpness.
In the first leg against Bayern, it looked like the plan may have backfired. Marquinhos was arguably at fault for two goals, standing too far off Michael Olise and allowing him to shoot from the edge of the box, and then turned into a pretzel by Luis Diaz for the strike that made the second leg interesting.
But those fears were dispelled by his terrific performance in the second leg, which saw PSG through to their second successive Champions League final.
In some ways it is slightly unfair to single out Marquinhos for keeping Bayern at bay because his defensive partner Willian Pacho was also superb and PSG defended as a team brilliantly, smothering the German attack for the most part and limiting Harry Kane to what was ultimately a consolation strike.
And yet, it also feels appropriate, in the afterglow of a success like this, to praise Marquinhos because he frequently does not get too much of it. It feels absurd to call the captain of Brazil and the reigning European champions “underrated”, but he has had a slightly odd career, in terms of his status at least.
Marquinhos helped contain the threat of Harry Kane until stoppage time at the end (Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)
He arrived from Roma in 2013, skinny and fresh-faced. Back then, he did not really look like a central defender, or at least not one that would strike fear into the hearts of the world’s strikers. For years he was the junior partner to Thiago Silva, either his sidekick or shuffled into midfield, but his quiet authority has grown since his older compatriot left for Chelsea in 2020.
It also felt like, for a long time, Marquinhos was associated with an underwhelming PSG project; the club so desperate to win the Champions League for so long, but a team who fell short time and again. He was perceived as summing up PSG as a whole: good, but not quite good enough.
But over the years he has matured into one of the best defenders in the world. He has lived through various different phases of the Qatari era in Paris, watching Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Angel Di Maria, Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi come and go.
Those superstars, for the most part jammed together with little thought given to team construction, have all now departed, replaced by arguably just as talented but — crucially — more cohesive youngsters.
Marquinhos is at the heart of PSG’s recent success (Alex Grimm/Getty Images)
And all the while Marquinhos stayed; a still point in a turning world, and the perfect man to lead and mentor this youthful side. Earlier this season he overwhelmingly won a vote among the players to remain as captain, while Pacho described him as “like a father to me”.
“He’s the captain and the leader of the locker room,” Luis Enrique told the media earlier this season. “That’s important. The day he’s not in the team, I don’t know who will speak up and motivate the players. He’s a true leader and I’m happy to have him.”
Carlo Ancelotti agrees, praising his “experience, intelligence, character” shortly after handing Marquinhos his 100th Brazil cap this year. His appearance against Bayern was his 121st in the Champions League, the most of any Brazilian in the competition, edging past Roberto Carlos.
And now he leads his team into a second consecutive Champions League final.
PSG have three Ligue 1 games scheduled between now and that date with Arsenal in Budapest. You can bet that Marquinhos will not be seen in any of them, but he will be ready for the match that really counts.
