Benoît Cauet, former PSG midfielder, gave his analysis in Le Parisien on the progression of Warren Zaïre-Emery (19), the Paris Saint-Germain midfielder. According to him, the young Titi’s resurgence comes from a run of consecutive matches, but also from a new level of demand: moving away from playing “safe” football and returning to a more dominant, impactful style.
Cauet: “When you start playing again, stringing games together helps you enormously.”
“When you start playing again, stringing matches together helps you enormously. He is less in his comfort zone and manages to optimize his qualities to become even better. He will never play like Hakimi, but he has developed other abilities that allow him to attack space.
We’re talking about a very young player who started very early in a very big club, where he is always expected to be perfect. If he was taken out of the team, it’s because something wasn’t right. I feel like he wanted to do things too well, that he settled for playing cleanly when we were expecting something else from him: going into duels, recovering not five but ten balls, making forward runs to project himself.”
Cauet’s analysis touches on something fundamental: Warren Zaïre-Emery never lacked talent — but perhaps he had too much control. By wanting to play everything cleanly, he had somewhat smoothed out his game, almost “restrained” himself, occupying a role too academic for such a powerful midfielder. Returning to PSG’s starting XI offered him a simple truth: playing regularly gives rhythm, but above all, frees instincts.
Where Achraf Hakimi (27) naturally brings the explosiveness of a full-back, Zaïre-Emery has expanded his game in another direction: better reading of space, more assertive forward projection, and a rediscovered defensive intensity.
Cauet insists on this point: the expectation isn’t five balls recovered, but ten. More duels, more runs, more authority. And over the past few weeks, that’s exactly what he’s delivering. A logical rise for a player still learning to handle the enormous expectations of a club like Paris.
