Warren Zaïre-Emery is the ultimate professional; a player dedicated to being the best he can possibly be; a young man determined to maximise his talent. Take the story about the foam roller.
“It was a massage roller that they gave me when I was in the under-13s team,” Zaïre-Emery explains to Telegraph Sport in his first newspaper interview. “I kept it for two or three years. It’s a roller you use almost every day for recovery and to relax the muscles and so on.”
When his team-mates at Paris Saint-Germain handed back the ones they had been given they were a little scuffed and worn. Zaïre-Emery’s was simply unusable. “There were lots of bits that had torn off,” he says. “That shows that I’d used it properly!”
He had indeed. The midfielder’s commitment quickly became legendary at PSG – team-mates nicknamed him ‘the Robot’ – even though he is still just 18. It shows his work ethic.
Already Zaïre-Emery has become the club’s youngest ever player and assist-maker having trained with the first team aged 15. At 17 years, eight months and 11 days he was the youngest to be capped by France in more than a century.
Zaïre-Emery was only 16 when he first played in the Champions League and the sole player younger than him at the European Championship was Spain’s Lamine Yamal. Zaïre-Emery had to delay passing his baccalaureate exams (France’s equivalent to A-Levels) because of the tournament and has since completed them.
“These are records, so there’s always pride, but it goes beyond that,” he explains. “All I want is for the club to succeed and for it to go in the right direction and get as many results as possible, which is our goal.”
But how does all the attention feel?
“Above all, I remain myself,” Zaïre-Emery says. “I try to perform as well as possible without question and always give my all on the pitch, whether it’s for Paris Saint-Germain or for the French team. It’s a source of pride to carry these shirts and to give your all for the club or the French team.”
Little wonder Zaire-Emery is now the PSG poster boy – and he is still little more than a boy – as the French super-club officially opens its stunning new state-of-the-art training ground in Poissy, a western suburb of Paris. The €300 million (£250million) facility is spread over 58 hectares, with 16 football pitches.
It even employs 27 full-time teachers to work with the 140 young players at its academy and is a far cry from the much smaller and cramped training ground, the Camp des Loges, which was PSG’s home and where Zaïre-Emery trained since the age of eight and forged strong friendships with Senny Mayulu and Yoram Zague who have followed him into the first-team squad.
“I did everything at the Camp des Loges,” he says. “So, leaving was quite strange… but [here] is impressive – the modernity, the state-of-the-art buildings, the machines. It shows that Paris Saint-Germain wants to move into another dimension and enter a new era.”
PSG are certainly heading into another dimension. And it is a new era. Under head coach Luis Enrique the shift has been dramatic towards younger, ideally French players. “We don’t want flashy bling-bling anymore, it’s the end of the glitter,” president Nasser Al-Khelaifi famously said in an interview with Le Parisien in June 2022. The “bling-bling” phrase is one that landed.
Since then the galácticos have gone: Sergio Ramos, Marco Verratti – the player Zaïre-Emery wants to emulate – Mauro Icardi, Neymar, Angel Di María, Lionel Messi and, finally, in the summer Kylian Mbappé. Now it is about Bradley Barcola, 22, Joao Neves, 20, Gabriel Moscardo, 19 and, certainly, Zaïre-Emery.
To make this work it had to be aligned with the new training ground. Paris – along with London and Sao Paulo – produces the most footballers and yet, until recently, most fell through the net. There were 11 Parisians in the French squad for the last World Cup but, at that time, only Mbappé played for PSG.
That is changing. In the squad for the last Nations League fixtures there were four including Zaïre-Emery who was born in Montreuil to the east of Paris and started playing football on the pitches of Aubervilliers, a nondescript suburb south-east of the Stade de France.
“We have the right conditions, the team, and the coach, we’re a collective and an exceptional team,” Zaïre-Emery says passionately of PSG. “Paris Saint-Germain is a global club, so it’s clear when you have premises like this, buildings as modern as this and a team like Paris Saint-Germain, a coach who encourages young players to play, a philosophy of play, and a club that relies on young people, that shows that young players can come here and that we’ll give them a chance.
“The coach and the club are staking a lot on new players. I think the average age at the club is not very high. That’s what we want: to have players and have them for the long-term and help them progress as well as possible and have a team that’s young and knows how to play together and that gives its all for each other.”
There are bumps in the road and, most obviously, in this season’s Champions League campaign where PSG currently sit in a lowly 25th place – out of 36 – in the new, one-group enlarged format.
They have won just one of their four games so far – including a convincing away defeat by Arsenal – and before the huge away clash at Bayern Munich on Tuesday are not even in the play-off places. Their chances of going through might go down to the wire and failure to progress would be embarrassing.
But Zaïre-Emery has longer-term aims. It helps not just that he comes from a footballing family – his father Franck played as a striker in the French second division for Red Star in Paris – but that he is a PSG fan. Zaïre-Emery revels in being called a ‘Titi’, the description of a player who has come through the ranks to appear for the club he loves.
“A ‘Titi’ is a player who has trained at PSG, who has done everything for Paris Saint-Germain,” he says. “And with the career I’ve had from the association to the pros, it shows that I’m a ‘Titi’ and I’ll give everything for this club and for this shirt, these colours and the supporters who are always behind us, pushing us at every match, whether it’s home or away.”
Such is Zaïre-Emery’s importance, and his value has rocketed, that PSG were quick to tie him down to a new long-term contract at the end of last season. His deal now runs until 2029 and when he signed Zaïre-Emery said he wanted to stay as long as possible.
“It’s the club where I’ve always played and where I’ll always give my all,” he says. “I’ve been through every stage and frankly, it’s a pride and a pleasure to play for this club, so I hope to continue to do so for many years to come.
“You know me, I don’t think I’m the best at showing off, at setting myself up as an example. But through my actions and what I do, I think I can be an example.”
