Paris Saint-Germain have been ruthlessly mocked by fans after they were branded as ‘Spursy’ following their almighty Champions League collapse at the hands of Real Madrid.
It’s a tag PSG boss Mauricio Pochettino knows all too well from his five trophyless years at Tottenham and, quite embarrassingly, it’s now followed him all the way to the French capital.
The Ligue 1 giants appeared to be cruising into the Champions League quarter-finals at half-time when they held a 1-0 lead, 2-0 on aggregate, courtesy of Real Madrid target Kylian Mbappe.
But a second-half implosion from the Parisians, which saw Karim Benzema net a 17-minute hat-trick, ended their expensively assembled squad’s hopes in Europe for another season.
It means PSG’s long wait to finally win their first Champions League trophy goes on but the manner of their defeat has been compared to a Spurs side that have always been accused of ‘bottling it’ at the biggest moments.
And football fans haven’t held back when it come to brutally mocking Pochettino and his men, who were heavily tipped to go far in the competition given the squad they’ve assembled.
One fan took to Twitter to mock the Ligue 1 side after the result, saying: ‘So the ‘S’ in ‘PSG’ stands for Spursy…’
Another responded to the tweet, saying: ‘Just look at who manages them’, pointing out Pochettino’s prior links with Tottenham.
One fan also compared PSG to the north London club, asking: ‘PSG = A rich man’s Tottenham. What’s the French for spursy?’
The Spurs theme continued, with another adding: ‘You can take the man out of Spurs but not Spurs out of the man Ladies and Gentlemen I present to you: PSG – also known as Paris Spursy Germain’.
A Manchester United fan – a club Pochettino has been linked with taking over in the summer – insisted that the result confirmed the Argentine is a ‘bottle job coach’ and should not take over from Ralf Rangnick at the end of the season.
They said: ‘Mauricio Pochettino confirming what a bottle job coach he is … psg so spursy tonight. Real top football managers would have at HT taken off Messi /neymar to put another defensive minded player on to see the game out completely… Not OUR NEW MANAGER. Will fit right in at OT’
And it wasn’t just the fans who slammed PSG’s display at the Bernabeu.
Liverpool icons Jamie Carragher and Steve McManaman launched scathing attacks on the Parisian side after giving up their two-goal aggregate lead in a flash.
‘We expected PSG to unravel, it just wasn’t in this game because they were so far on top at half-time,’ McManaman told BT Sport.
‘PSG do what PSG have always done, when they come under pressure, they absolutely melt away.
‘There was no organisation, no leadership, yet from Real Madrid it was just an incredible, excellent, fantastic night, and another historic evening for this team in white.’
Meanwhile, Carragher said when talking about Benzema’s hat-trick: ‘This is absolutely embarrassing, 11 seconds. If Real Madrid were playing against an Under-15 team or a kids team, this shouldn’t happen.
‘This is absolutely disgraceful, it really is. Players at this level, where they’ve just got to dig in and fight.
‘They really have, obviously really difficult position where they’ve just conceded two goals but to do that straight from a kick-off is absolutely embarrassing.’
A disappointed Pochettino, who will see his future come under the microscope having failed to deliver the owners’ primary objective, believed his side ‘exposed’ themselves with lapses of concentration.
‘We didn’t manage our emotions well,’ the PSG boss said.
‘We left ourselves exposed. We leave with great pain and disappointment because we didn’t score the goals to reflect our superiority over the two games.’