The star is Luis Enrique - inside the plans to keep PSG at the top

Johan Cruyff, a man Paris St-Germain boss Luis Enrique deeply admires, used to say the hardest thing in football is winning after winning.

This season has been designed by Luis Enrique at PSG with that conundrum in mind.

The back-to-back European champions could become only the second team to win three consecutive Champions Leagues this season. They are also aiming for a third successive league triumph.

They arrive at Etihad Stadium on Wednesday sixth in Ligue 1, with just three wins, two draws and one defeat. Nobody in Paris is panicking, though.

Luis Enrique's side made a similarly slow start last season, but the coach was confident the results would come.

"Do you want to bet against us?" he said recently.

Luis Enrique recently signed a contract until 2030, and so have a number of players central to his plan.

The big danger is that a group who have won everything will believe they can relax without anyone noticing.

Much of what he has done so far is about preventing exactly that.

When the club announced his new contract, they also confirmed new deals for Joao Neves, Fabian Ruiz, Willian Pacho, Lucas Beraldo and Senny Mayulu, sending a clear message to the dressing room that this is still a long-term project.

There has been remarkably little change in the technical staff since Luis Enrique arrived at PSG in 2023.

Assistant Joaquin Valdes has been alongside Luis Enrique since their Barcelona B days, and he is the one who talks to the players on a personal level.

He also helps keep his boss grounded when Luis Enrique's mind drifts too far away, and you can see him in the background in every news conference.

Rafel Pol, who handles strategy and acts as second in command, is another constant presence.

Very little of the way they train on and off the pitch has altered during Luis Enrique's three years at the club.

The players aren't shown a huge amount of videos, but there is a big screen on the training pitch to correct players and two cranes for the coaches to see everything from a height.

The one real change though is in the luxury of depth - a factor that proved key last campaign.

Luis Enrique can now regularly leave out a couple of key players from his squad and the team does not suffer.

Ousmane Dembele was not in the squad for the win against Le Mans on Saturday, and earlier in the season it was Lucas Digne who was left out. Against the bigger opponents, such as Manchester City and Barcelona, the starters arrive rested.

Against Le Mans, he used eight players that would not start the bigger matches, and, with the match level, he brought on four of his 'stars' to ensure the win.

His attack has been renewed after Gonzalo Ramos, Bradley Barcola and Lee Kang-in all departed.

Dani Gil, Paris correspondent for the Spanish radio station COPE, explains: "Barcola could not be given the minutes he wanted, they had won everything and been paid well for it, and the club could do with players who were hungrier.

"Mika Godts and Ferran Torres fit that description. Neither has yet won at club level what the departed players won."

Barcola was not rated by the coaches as someone who could reach the level Dembele sets, yet his flashes of brilliance were enough to convince Liverpool to pay £123m for him.

Summer signing Torres is the more intriguing case. He went through a difficult stretch psychologically, worked on his mental strength and now calls himself 'the Shark'.

He was unhappy at Barcelona when he was not playing regularly, even though last season produced his best numbers.

Now, having netted the winner for Spain in the World Cup final, he has scored seven goals in France. For the first time in his career he feels really wanted.

He also knows what kind of team he has joined. In a Luis Enrique side the star is Luis Enrique, and the forward is content with that.

The way of playing, the standards, the habits, they all belong to the coach, and the players slot in.

It explains why the club could sell famous names without the team losing its identity.

Luis Enrique, who has taken a space that PSG's Qatari owners had never handed to any other coach, has turned a club once seen as a collection of expensive signings into one envied by the rest of the world, by signing wisely but also by drawing value from the academy.

Four homegrown players - Warren Zaire-Emery, Mayulu, Quentin Ndjantou and Ibrahim Mbaye - played in the Champions League last season.

The first-team headquarters sit at the top of a hill, and the academy is at the bottom, so the young players have to climb, literally and metaphorically, if they want to make it.

The campus was officially opened in November 2024 after an investment of 350m euros, and for the first time the professional teams, the men's and women's academies and the school all share one site.

The method is imposed from the top down. The under-23s coach is a former player, but the style comes from Luis Enrique's first team, with constant meetings between them and academy directors.

Yohan Cabaye, director of the training centre, speaks often to director of football Luis Campos and Olivier Gagne, the deputy director of professional football. Campos, Gagne and Luis Enrique attend youth league games whenever they can.

The recent international break showed that way of working. Only four first-team players remained at the club.

Sixteen academy players were away with their national teams too. Luis Enrique spent the three weeks on the training ground with the youngsters as they got the rare chance to impress the coach.

His relationship with the media is distant. When asked what he had done during the three-week break, he said it was of no interest to anyone.

It is his way of marking distance. He keeps friendships with two or three Spanish journalists, who might get an answer to a phone message, but in France he has drawn a firm line.

There is no 'off the record', no coffee with reporters and no one-to-one interviews for anyone. In his first year he answered in Spanish, and now he replies only in very good French.

Yet when football is the subject, he is very interesting.

Before the Le Mans game he opened by saying that, as usual, we worry about the most banal things in football. Then he explained how French perception works.

When PSG win, the rivals are considered inferior, but when they struggle, it is declared a catastrophe. He said the view from the media is always extreme.

And next, the Etihad.

It will be fascinating to see how Luis Enrique handles the subject of former manager Pep Guardiola, who will be present at the game, and the charges brought against City by the Premier League. My sense is that he will stand up for him.

There will obviously be a meeting between them, and that is Luis Enrique's way of saying something, not necessarily about the case itself but about what he thinks of Guardiola's legacy.

They know the questions may arrive in Manchester, but the PSG media team has no plan to prepare a coordinated response. That is how much they trust the manager.

Whatever he is asked, expect the same Luis Enrique: sharp, managing the pressure and comfortable at the top.