Paris Saint-Germain coach Luis Enrique hailed his squad as the best in the world on Tuesday after they reached the Champions League semifinals with a 5-4 aggregate win over Aston Villa.
The French side, who have never won Europe’s elite club competition, will face either Arsenal or Real Madrid in their second semifinal in two years.
Under the Spaniard, PSG has replaced its “galacticos” like Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappé with talented up-and-coming players and the change in policy appears to be paying off.
The Qatar-owned club, which has already clinched the Ligue 1 title, reached the last eight for the third time in five years — albeit after losing 3-2 to Aston Villa in the second leg of the quarterfinals on Tuesday.
And would have drawn level 5-5 or even won it over the two matches had goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma not pulled off a remarkable series of second-half saves.
“I think I have the best squad in the world, not only the goalkeeper. When you are in a club like PSG, you have a lot of quality players,” Luis Enrique told Amazon Prime TV. “I think in the whole two matches, we deserved to win.
“I am very happy because I can offer our supporters another qualification to the semifinal.”
Achraf Hakimi was one of the early scorers for PSG on Tuesday — along with fellow full-back Nuno Mendes — and the Morocco international said “we are on the way to becoming a big team” having already eliminated Premier League champion-elect Liverpool in the knockout stage.
“I think we are really confident right now,” Hakimi said. “We are again in the semifinals and we want to show PSG is a big team, a big club and we want to fight for all the titles we can.”
The PSG boss praised Villa’s quality and intensity, which saw them come back on Tuesday from 2-0 down — putting them 5-1 behind on aggregate — to score three times.
“We started the game in a great way, scoring two amazing goals, trying to take advantage of the spaces,” the former Barcelona coach said. “We cannot forget, this is the Champions League and you have to accept that the opposite team has a lot of quality. Aston Villa played with a lot of intensity in the second half.
“They didn’t have anything to lose because they lost the first match and were losing at halftime in the first half [of the second leg].”
Information from The Associated Press and Reuters was used in this story.
