Chelsea vs PSG: Zlatan Ibrahimovic says Ligue 1 side will hunt the Champions League till they win it

The Sweden striker sees his team's Champions League opponents as trailblazers for big-money clubs

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Zlatan Ibrahimovic spoke with enthusiastic admiration about Chelsea last night, not just as opponents but as trailblazers. The west London club had shown how to turn a benefactor’s lavish spending into a Champions League trophy, after nine years of trying and huge investment.

Paris Saint-Germain are just five years into their own big-money project. They have reached the Champions League quarter-final three times but have never got any further. Their domestic dominance has rendered Ligue 1 largely irrelevant. PSG need to win in Europe for their spending to mean much.

Ibrahimovic is the figurehead of that spending, the best player PSG have bought and certainly the most important. The Swedish striker has just three months left on his contract, and his future beyond that is unclear, but he spoke with a real sense of ownership and pride about what the club has done since he joined in 2012.

“The team, the club I’m playing in now, is a project that began three and a half years ago,” he said, tellingly from when he joined PSG rather than the takeover in 2011. “The club was born the day the Qataris took over.”

Since then PSG have made obvious progress but they want to go further. Chelsea reached the Champions League semi-finals very soon after Roman Abramovich’s takeover in 2003, but it took them almost a decade before they won the biggest trophy in club football.

“Look at Chelsea,” Ibrahimovic said. “They had the same thing 10 years ago and when did they win the Champions League? Four years ago.”

Laurent Blanc, the PSG coach, made a similar comparison. “It is by looking at other clubs you can assess the progress you are making,” he said. “This is a very young project, but we can sense the difference in how we are considered. Other clubs know that PSG will be able to win the Champions League one day. It’s going to take time.”

Blanc said that the next step for his team, into the semi-finals or beyond, was the hardest but most important part of their journey. “There’s a distance still to be covered,” he said. “It’s not a long distance, but a very tough part of the road to cover. One day PSG will get there.”

Ibrahimovic and Blanc are very different characters, and Zlatan’s assessment of PSG’s progress was rather more direct. “What we have done is amazing,” he said. “We have made such a good team in such a short time. Why haven’t we advanced? This comes with experience. You don’t do these miracles in 24 hours. With time, these things will come.”

Ibrahimovic is convinced of the PSG owners’ ambitions, and promised that they would continue to spend until they reached their target. “With time they can achieve anything here,” he said. “There are no limits. They will hunt this Champions League until they get it, and they will not stop, with me or without me.”

Neither Ibrahimovic nor PSG have ever won the Champions League, which is why their pursuit of this trophy is so important. “I wanted to be part of this, and to take on this challenge,” he said. “I want to do things that will be written in history books.”

Whether or not Ibrahimovic stays in Paris to make more history remains to be seen. He is well paid at PSG but there is far more money on offer in China. There will also be interest from the Premier League next season. Ibrahimovic, though, gave no warning that he is ready to start winding down.

“It is not the end for me, I am only warming up,” the 34-year-old joked. “Age is something that you cannot fear, it is just a number, and the difference is how you feel. When I was young and talking about the Champions League, it was almost an obsession. Then I started to mature and got to know myself, which is difficult, but I realised that if I win it, it doesn’t make me a better or worse player. I am what I am.”