This is terrible for our sport, but man will it be incredible content. If the reported Messi-to-PSG deal goes through, PSG will have won. Won what? Not the Champions League, but the soft-power proxy battle being waged using various superstar soccer players.

When the Qatari sovereign wealth fund purchased PSG at the beginning of the previous decade the goal was, essentially, to launder the country’s awful human-rights reputation ahead of the 2022 World Cup. Er, sorry. The goal was to win the Champions League. That didn’t happen for a while -- didn’t really come close to happening. And it seemed especially far away in 2017, after they blew a 4-0 first-leg lead with a 6-1 second-leg loss away to Barcelona.

How to make sure that doesn’t happen again? Buy the best player you can realistically acquire from Barcelona. In the past, “realistically” would’ve limited that to someone low down on the depth chart -- a fringe starter or perhaps a star who couldn’t quite crack the starting XI anymore. But with a trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund backing your bidding, you lived in a new reality, one where you could buy the most valuable player in the world for a one-time, up-front payment of $244.2 million.

Neymar wasn’t enough, though. No, PSG had also blown Ligue 1 for the first time since 2011, so they had to stop that from happening again, too. They expanded the scope of what was real even further, scooping up 19-year-old Kylian Mbappe from the Ligue 1 champs, Monaco, for $159 million. The Neymar deal more than doubled the previous record-fee paid for a player, while the Mbappe signing became -- and remains -- the second-most expensive deal ever and at the time more than doubled the highest fee paid for a teenager.

While they still haven’t won the Champions League yet, they’re getting close: a final two years ago, the semis last year. Even an essentially unlimited money supply can’t totally solve the randomness of knockout soccer -- or can it?

PSG won the Super League. Yes, there was no Super League, but hear me out. They never supported it; all the clubs that did saw their reputations plummet to some degree. After Juventus’s Andrea Agnelli resigned his position in order to help head up the Super League, PSG chairman Nasser Al-Khelaifi slid into his role at the head of the European Club Association. The ECA describes its mission as such: “to protect and promote European club football. Its aim is to create a new, more democratic governance model that truly reflects the key role of the clubs”.

Given the current state of the world and club football’s existence within it, the biggest club in the world could no longer afford to keep the greatest soccer player of all time despite his tearfully expressed desire to stay. And once we knew Lionel Messi was leaving Barcelona, there was no chance of him going back to his Cleveland or anything like that. No other options were even worth dreaming about; it was either the club owned by Qatar, the one owned by the royal family of Abu Dhabi, or the one controlled by the Russian oligarch who also owns the world’s largest yacht. And pretty quickly, it became clear that it was gonna be PSG, where the money never really seems to matter.

This is not how a healthy sports ecosystem works, although this particular outcome might yet produce something incredible for us to watch. If Messi does ultimately sign with PSG, then perhaps for the first time ever, a soccer team will employ the three best players in the world, at the same time, across the same front line. According to Michael Imburgio’s DAVIES model, which looks at a number of key indicators to estimate how many goals you can expect a player’s on-ball performance add to his team, there were three consistent starters for their clubs last season who created at least 0.55 goals worth of added value per 90 minutes. First: Neymar, at 0.62. Then, Mbappe at 0.6, followed up by Messi, at 0.55. Here’s a comparison of where they added their value:

Messi and Neymar will move the ball up to the box, then Messi and Mbappe will score the goals. Worried about Mbappe’s speed over the top? Sucks for you; then you’ll leave all that space open underneath, where Messi and Neymar have been ripping teams apart for the better part of a decade. Want to stop those, too? Well, good luck; they’re both in the 99th-percentile at their positions in both progressive carries and progressive passes and shot-creating actions and non-penalty expected goals plus expected assists. Maybe you can take away one of them, but well, no one’s really even been able to take away one of them when they’ve been apart, and now they’re both gonna be on the field at the same time. But let’s just say, I don’t know, Pep Guardiola dreams up something crazy that manages to nullify both Messi and Neymar in the Champions League; doing so means you’re devoting fewer resources to preventing Mbappe, the most electrifying player in the world in space, running into space. The most human Messi has looked in recent years came in a handful of Champions League ties where the opponent pressed aggressively because they weren’t worried about any of the Barcelona attackers running in behind. Now, Messi gets to play with the one player most like himself and the most dangerous threat to run in-behind a defense. In possession on the attacking end, this team is going to be absolutely devastating and an absolute joy to watch (once you, of course, get beyond the decades-long degradation of society that allowed it to happen).

It’s the other side of the ball where they might meet their downfall. Last season, Messi pressured the ball 8.92 times per 90 minutes, while Mbappe was even lower at 7.71 -- depending on how you wanna classify their roles, both were in the bottom-1 percentile of pressures at their positions. Neymar looks like Peak Roberto Firmino compared to both of them, but his 15.64 pressures are basically average for his position, 52nd percentile. So, can a team win the Champions League with so little pressure exerted by its front line?

Last season, Chelsea’s front three tended to feature some trio from these four: Mason Mount (21.3 pressures per 90), Christian Pulisic (17.4), Kai Havertz (15.4), and Timo Werner (13.1).  Two years ago, Bayern Munich won the tournament with a front four who all averaged at least 12.6 pressures per 90: Robert Lewandowski was at that mark, while Kingsley Coman hit 17.2, Serge Gnabry came in at 17.8, and Thomas Muller was up at an absurd 22.7. (Although he turns 32 next month, Muller ranks in the 97th percentile for attacking midfielders in pressures over the past calendar year. He’s a freak.) The year prior, Liverpool’s Roberto Firmino was melting faces with 23.6 pressures per 90, while Sadio Mane (19) and Mohamed Salah (16.1) did more than their fair share of ball-hounding, too. And even the Real Madrid side that won the club’s third Champions League in a row pressed way more than the MNM trio combined for last season: Cristiano Ronaldo was down at 8.9 and Gareth Bale came in at a sub-Neymar 14.2 pressures per 90, but Karim Benzema was at 16.7 and Isco (21.5 pressures) actually started the final over Bale.

So, even when you account for the drop off in pressing that’s occurred while soccer has been played in the middle of a global pandemic, no team that’s won the European Cup over the last four years has done so with anything close to the lack of forward-line pressing PSG look set to line up with over the next two seasons. Will that be what does them in? Or will their attack just be so good that it might not matter? Or will all three find enough energy in their legs to make it happen? They’re going to win the league and the group stages of the Champions League should be a cakewalk, too. With this much attacking talent, all they have to do is run for seven games.