PSG coach Enrique faces crucial month in fight for Champions League survival

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PSG coach Enrique faces crucial month in fight for Champions League survival

2025-01-03 00:03 Last Updated At：00:11

PARIS (AP) — January could be a crucial month in determining Paris Saint-Germain coach Luis Enrique's future at the club.

While runaway league leader PSG is unbeaten in domestic competition heading into Sunday's Trophée des Champions (the French super cup) against Monaco, it is a far different story in the Champions League.

Three defeats in the new-look group format have left PSG in a perilous position, and the ambitious Qatari-backed club faces the threat of elimination.

With only two games remaining PSG is in a dismal 25th place out of 36 teams, with the bottom 12 all going out.

PSG next faces 2023 champion Manchester City at home on Jan. 22 before traveling to play German club Stuttgart the following week.

Those would already be tough games, but they are made even more difficult given the fact that City and Stuttgart are similarly in danger and need victories. City is one point ahead of PSG with eight points and Stuttgart is level on seven.

Stuttgart's penultimate game is against Slovan Bratislava — which has lost all six matches so far and conceded 21 goals — and so victory there would put it ahead of PSG going into the final round, if Enrique's side fails to beat City.

City is struggling to defend its Premier League title and European success could prove coach Pep Guardiola's salvation, so the PSG game is massive for the club.

Defeat may prove costly for Enrique, who is PSG's eighth manager since Qatari investors QSI bought the club in 2011. In that time, Carlo Ancelotti is the only coach not to be sacked, leaving for Real Madrid in 2013.

The hire-and-fire approach is unlikely to spare Enrique if he suffers the crushing humiliation of being knocked out of the new giant group-stage format of the Champions League — where eight sides qualify directly and 16 reach the knockout phase playoffs.

Modest Lille and tournament newcomers Brest are both in the top eight while 2004 runner-up Monaco is 16th, leaving PSG last among the French clubs.

Whatever PSG achieves in France — with the Ligue 1 and French Cup double a possibility — Enrique will be judged on what happens in Europe's elite competition.

Seko Fofana looks to be the player Rennes needs to move up the league table.

The Ivory Coast midfield left Saudi Arabia's Pro League to sign a long-term contract with the Brittany-based club on Wednesday.

With his driving runs and eye for goal, Fofana helped Lens to a second-place finish in Ligue 1 in the 2022-23 campaign, where he was among the league's best players.

At 29 years old, Fofana is entering his peak years and that sounds like good news for Rennes, which was in 12th place ahead of Friday's trip south to play Nice.

AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

Jimmy Carter's state funeral starts Saturday. Here is what to know

2025-01-04 23:54 Last Updated At：01-05 00:00

ATLANTA (AP) — Six days of funeral observances for former President Jimmy Carter begin Saturday in Georgia, where he died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100.

The first events reflect Carter’s climb up the political ladder, from the tiny town of Plains, Georgia, to decades on the global stage as a humanitarian and advocate for democracy.

Here is what to know about the initial ceremonies and what happens next:

The proceedings, streamed on apnews.com and the Associated Press YouTube channel, began at 10:15 a.m. EST Saturday with the Carter family arriving at Phoebe Sumter Medical Center in Americus.

Former Secret Service agents who protected Carter served as pallbearers, walking alongside the hearse as it exited the campus on its way to Plains.

James Earl Carter Jr. lived more than 80 of his 100 years in and around the town, which still has fewer than 700 people, not much more than when he was born on Oct. 1, 1924. Some other modern presidents — Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — also grew up in rural settings, but Carter stands out for returning and remaining in his birthplace for his long post-presidency.

The motorcade will move through downtown Plains, which spans just a few blocks, passing near the girlhood home of first lady Rosalynn Smith Carter, who died in November 2023 at the age of 96, and near where the couple operated the family peanut warehouses. The route also includes the old train depot that served as Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential campaign headquarters and the gas station once run by Carter's younger brother Billy.

The motorcade will then pass by the Methodist church where the Carters married in 1946, and the home where they lived and died. The former president will be buried there alongside Rosalynn.

The Carters built the one-story house, now surrounded by Secret Service fencing, before his first state Senate campaign in 1962 and lived out their lives there with the exception of four years in the Governor's Mansion and four more in the White House.

The military-run schedule calls for a 10:50 a.m. stop in front of Carter's family farm and boyhood home in Archery, outside Plains, after passing the cemetery where the former president's parents, James Earl Carter Sr. and Lillian Carter, are buried.

The farm now is part of the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park. The National Park Service will ring the old farm bell 39 times to honor the 39th president.

Carter was the first president born in a hospital. But the home had no electricity or running water when he was born, and he worked his father's land during the Great Depression. Still, the Carters had relative privilege and status. Earl employed Black tenant farming families. The elder Carter also owned a store in Plains and was a local civic and political leader. Lillian was a nurse and she delivered Rosalynn. The property still includes a tennis court Earl had built for the family.

It was Earl's death in 1953 that set Jimmy on course toward the Oval Office. The younger Carters had left Plains after he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. But Jimmy abandoned a promising career as a submarine officer and early participant in the Pentagon's nuclear program to take over the family's peanut business after his father's death. Within a decade, he was elected to the Georgia state Senate.

From Archery, the motorcade will head north to Atlanta and will stop at 3 p.m. outside the Georgia Capitol, where he served as a state senator from 1963 to 1967 and governor from 1971 to 1975. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens will lead a moment of silence. While former governors are honored with state-run funerals, presidents — even if they served as governors — are memorialized with national rites run by the federal government.

The motorcade then is scheduled to arrive at the Carter Presidential Center at 3:45 p.m., with a private service at 4 p.m. The campus includes Carter’s presidential library and The Carter Center, established by the former president and first lady in 1982.

From 7 p.m. Saturday through 6 a.m. Monday, Carter will lie in repose for the public to pay respects around the clock.

The ceremony is expected to include some of The Carter Center's global staff of 3,000, whose work concentrating on international diplomacy and mediation, election monitoring and fighting disease in the developing world continues to set a standard for what former presidents can accomplish.

Jimmy Carter, who delivered its annual reports until 2019, won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize in part for this post-presidential work. His grandson Jason Carter now chairs the board.

Carter's remains will travel next to Washington, where he will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda until his funeral at 10 a.m. Thursday at the Washington National Cathedral. All the living presidents have been invited, and Joe Biden, a Carter ally, will deliver a eulogy.

The Carter family then will return to bury its patriarch in Plains after a private hometown funeral at 3:45 p.m. at Maranatha Baptist Church, where Carter, a devout evangelical, taught Sunday School for decades.

Carter will be buried afterward in a private graveside service, in a plot visible from the front porch of his home.