It was at midnight on Tuesday, when the August 31st deadline for the summer football transfer window closed, that the long-running saga of the possible departure of Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) star forward Kylian Mbappé ended with him staying at the club, despite the increasing bids to sign him by Real Madrid, widely reported as ending with an eye-watering offer of 180 million euros – and which Spanish media reports suggested was even as high as between 200-220 million euros.
Despite the player’s apparent interest in joining the Spanish club, PSG remained inflexible, and for the 2021-2022 football season it will field a prodigious forward trio made up of the Brazilian Neymar, 29, the Argentinian super-star Lionel Messi, 34, and Frenchman Mbappé, 22.
To understand the significance of what French sports daily L’Équipe called the “non-transfer of the century”, one must take measure of the eventual lack of revenue for PSG. Mbappé will reach the end of his current contract with the club in June 2022, which means he can then join whichever club he chooses, with no transfer indemnities payable to PSG, and when he will no doubt also be paid a handsome bonus.
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By so far refusing to sign an extension to his contract, Mbappé placed his employers with the choice of either accepting his immediate transfer to Real Madrid, in which case they would cash in on (at least) 180 million euros, or see him leave next June as a free agent and with no payment due to them. With the likelihood of him signing a prolongation now looking very slim, PSG has chosen to keep its principal asset on the field for one more season.
“If PSG had reasoned purely from the point of view of its financial interests, it would obviously have sold Kylian Mbappé this summer,” commented Christophe Lepetit, a researcher with France’s Limoges university-based centre for the law and economics of sport (Centre de droit et d’économie du sport), the CDES. “Even if it [PSG] can count on its owner, it is not spared by the [Covid-19] health crisis and it is relinquishing a very attractive operation.”
So it is that, 14 months before they host the 2022 football world cup, the Qatari owners of PSG have put aside the issue of money; the gas- and oil-rich Arab Peninsular state had no wish to allow its French star to leave the flagship of its football-based diplomacy, which would have reduced both the showcase casting of its galácticos forwards and its chances of crowning its strategy with a PSG victory in this season’s European Champions League.
PSG’s acquisition of players during the summer was largely an opportunist operation, mostly involving those on a free transfer (as was notably the case with Messi), with outlay limited to the 60 million euros paid to Inter Milan for the Moroccan-Spanish right-back Achraf Hakimi. With its team spectacularly reinforced, the wage bill is considerable, beginning with the estimated annual 41 million euros paid net to Lionel Messi.
While its recruitments have been headline-making, notably those of Neymar in 2017 and now Messi, the club is unenthusiastic to sell players. With the departure of Dutch left-back Mitchel Bakker to Bayer Leverkusen this summer for 7 million euros, PSG has not been able to honour its pledge to the French body that monitors the accounts of professional football clubs, the DNCG, of balancing its books by bringing in 180 million euros in outgoing transfers this summer.
The normally scrupulous DNCG, which studies in minute detail the accounts of financially far more modest clubs, and which does not hold back on imposing bans on player recruitment if this does not match income, has not moved regarding PSG. “Its objective is the financial perennity of clubs,” said economist Bastien Drut, the author of a book published in France about the economy of the football transfer market, Mercato, l’économie du football au XXIe siècle. “As long as their shareholder makes up for the losses, it doesn’t have the vocation of penalising them.” In short, the DNCG does not want to rock the boat in an already heaving sea.
By placing a ceiling on the money ploughed into a club by its shareholders, the Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules introduced by European football’s governing body UEFA requires clubs to generate income equal to their spending. But the FFP charter has been considerably weakened by legal challenges. “It has been eased, and one even asks if it exists anymore,” said economist Jean-François Brocard of the CDES in an interview published last month in French daily Le Monde. “Covid-19 has given a further blow to the capacity and the will to regulate clubs,” he added.
Those who have fared best during the Covid crisis, and above all those which have shareholders with the deepest pockets (sovereign funds, investment funds and wealthy individuals) have understood the interest for them now to make massive investments.
Resultingly, the top European clubs have seen a change in their pecking order; Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea and PSG flexed their financial muscle during the summer transfer market, while Juventus, Inter Milan and FC Barcelona appear fragilized by both the effects of the crisis on their incomes, and their mediocre management.
PSG’s immunity to sanctions is also because of its stance in refusing to take part in the now abandoned European Super League, the project for a private and closed competition proposed in April by a dozen large clubs, and which was met with fierce opposition from UEFA. Meanwhile in France, PSG’s dominant position has placed all of the country’s football sector under its sway.
The influential clout of PSG’s Qatari president Nasser Al-Khelaïfi is illustrated in the long list of roles he occupies: he is chairman of the Doha-based beIN media group (which co-broadcasts matches from France’s top-flight Ligue 1, as well as those of the Champions League, the UEFA European Football Championship and the World Cup), a member of the UEFA executive committee, and chairman of the European Club Association. He is also a minister without portfolio in the Qatari government and a member of the organisation committee for the 2022 World Cup.
The fiasco of the Super League illustrated the impasse of deregulated football, played between the wealthiest clubs, destroying the precious notion of merit and the uncertainty of match results, and economically unbearable. But despite its collapse, and the popular revolt it prompted among the sport’s fans, the well-intentioned talk of a new, balanced and regulated football era already appears to have evaporated.
On Thursday this week, Spanish press reports insisted that Real Madrid is determined that next summer it will recruit – along with Kylian Mbappé – Borussia Dortmund’s 21-year-old Norwegian striker Erling Haaland, nearly as sought after as the Frenchman. A few months ago, Real Madrid’s unrepentent president Florentino Pérez insisted: “It is impossible to complete transfers like those of Mbappé and Haaland, not only for Madrid, without the Super League.”
UEFA envisages replacing the Financial Fair Play scheme with new regulations, including a cap on salaries and a “luxury tax” to penalise those who break the rules. CDES researcher Christophe Lepetit is doubtful as to the effectiveness of such measures. “The major clubs will find the means to increase their incomes,” he said. “If not, they’ll [simply] pay the tax if they break the salary ceiling.”
Many economists specialising in the sports business concur that in order to do away with the unequal situation among clubs, strong and global regulatory measures must be introduced, with the support of both football governing bodies and public authorities. “Without a Europe-wide management of professional sport, no national regulations can be adopted without creating a distortion of competition,” observed Lepetit.
But, while PSG, dodging the constraints in place, offers itself an even more star-studded team, the perspective of a truly regulated and even system appears far off, and public fascination for dream-team line ups like the trio of Neymar, Mbappé and Messi carries the day.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse