Dn a club which relies, each off-season, on its financial strength to dream of a new start, the transfer window is more than anywhere else the moment of all hopes, the one when supporters cannot conceive that the coming season will transform them into disappointments. So Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) tried to reinvent itself on the transfer market, once again. Finally the good one?
Started very early with the anticipated signing of defender Milan Skriniar in January, completed by that, in extremis on the 1er September, from striker Randal Kolo Muani, its recruitment campaign will have above all been marked by a non-event. At the end of the “summer soap opera” and an arrangement whose terms are still unknown, Kylian Mbappé remains in Paris.
On the other hand, Lionel Messi and Neymar Jr have gone to other latitudes, completing the failure of their stays in the capital. These departures, with that of Sergio Ramos, confirm the bracketing of star politics which made the club a global brand, but prevented them from getting closer to their highest sporting goals, starting with a Champions League victory.
A more French team
Even the Italian Marco Verratti, emblematic player of the Qatari era since 2012, is pushed towards… the Qatar championship. If this reshuffle has taken on the appearance of a great laundry with the transfers of a few undesirables, the long column of arrivals has not deflated a workforce which includes around forty players. Enough to compose an entire team, bench included, with past recruitment errors.
Eager to transform, the PSG uses its usual weapons. With 350 to 370 million euros in expenses for only 120 to 150 million in sales (according to estimates), he did not skimp. The social plan which would have decimated the administrative staff if Mbappé had left for free next year (according to the club, then in full tussle with his star) is just a bad joke. Just like UEFA Financial Fair Play.
The turn is all the more marked as a strong blue coloration tints this recruitment. Randal Kolo Muani and Ousmane Dembele will support Mbappé in attack, while Lucas Hernandez will flesh out the defense. That is, in the group, five confirmed internationals with Presnel Kimpembe, and now three promising international hopefuls with Bradley Barcola, arrived from Lyon, who joins Nordi Mukiele and Warren Zaire-Emery.
After many empty promises to extract a few nuggets from the Ile-de-France breeding ground, and while many young people from the training center have shone elsewhere, it is a way of making PSG a more French team – if not to see it evolve in the same category as their Ligue 1 counterparts. If we add several profiles of “duty players”, valiant and ready to sacrifice, like the Urugayan Manuel Ugarte, we begin to believe in a real turning point.
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