On Tuesday night in Salzburg, Paris Saint-Germain beat Aston Villa 2-1 and lifted the UEFA Super Cup. It extended a pattern that has become hard to ignore: three straight finals against English clubs, three wins — Tottenham in the 2025 Super Cup, Arsenal in this year's Champions League final, now Villa. Behind it sit two straight Champions League titles, and across those two campaigns PSG went through six knockout ties against Premier League sides without losing one.
So how dominant is this team, really? We put their two European campaigns through the same read we give every match — goals against chance quality — and the answer is stranger than the trophies suggest. The two titles were won by two different teams.
The first title stayed level. The second came in bursts.
In 2024-25, PSG averaged 2.13 xG for and 1.10 against per game — they created twice what they allowed — and scored almost exactly what those chances were worth (+0.10 a game). Eight matches over the line, nine under. The 5-0 final against Inter wasn't an explosion; it was what that profile looks like when it lands.
The defence looked nothing like it. The chance-quality edge fell by a third (from +1.03 to +0.65 per game) — and the goals went up, 45 against 38. Look at the strip: the count of over- and under-performances is almost identical to the year before. The difference is four towers — 7-2 at Leverkusen, 5-3 against Spurs, 5-2 against Chelsea, 5-4 against Bayern — nights when PSG scored three or four goals more than their chances were worth. The title defence didn't run hot every night. It detonated in the biggest ones.
Held to fewer chances. Scored anyway.
Now the part a Premier League audience should sit with. Across fifteen matches in two campaigns, English clubs squeezed PSG harder than anyone else: 1.71 xG per game against them, 2.32 against everyone else — a chance-quality edge of +0.37 against England, +1.21 against the rest of Europe.
And the response changed with the year. In 2024-25, PSG beat English opposition the orthodox way — on chances — and actually finished slightly below what they created against them. In 2025-26 the pattern inverted: +1.05 goals a game above chance quality against English clubs. Held to less, they scored more.
The Chelsea tie is the extreme case in our data: eight goals across two legs from roughly two goals' worth of chances. And the final is the exception that proves the shape — for once PSG dominated the chances, 1.72 to 0.51, didn't convert them, and won anyway, on penalties.
Level at home. Over in Europe.
The sharpest contrast isn't between seasons — it's within one. In 2025-26, the same squad scored +0.06 a game above its chances in Ligue 1 and +0.67 in the Champions League. Domestically they banked exactly what they created; in Europe they kept finding more.
Across football, gaps like that tend not to last — we measured 1,237 ten-game stretches across 15 leagues, and finishing above chance quality carried almost no persistence from one stretch to the next. Which is precisely what makes this pattern worth writing down: PSG sustained one across a full European campaign, on the nights with the most at stake. Whether that's the strongest eleven saving itself for Europe, elite finishers beating a player-blind model, or variance wearing a crown — the data records it either way. We read what happened. We don't predict what happens next.
Related reading
- The problem at Spurs was never the striker — a creation collapse, player by player.
- What is xG? — the 24-second explainer behind every number here.
Data
- Champions League: 34 matches with xG, 2024-25 and 2025-26. Ligue 1: 102 matches, 2023-26.
- Persistence figures: our study of 1,237 consecutive ten-game stretches across 15 leagues.
