PSG reunite Messi and Neymar
The prospect of seeing Lionel Messi team up again with Neymar will have many football fans around the world salivating.
A team, PSG, that missed out on the Ligue 1 title last season but who in the last two campaigns reached a Champions League final and semi-final, now appear well set to land a first European Cup.
The model is the Barcelona team of 2014/15 which won the treble with Messi scoring 58 goals and Neymar 39. The third man, then, was Luis Suarez who added 25 goals.
Now the third man is Mbappe. It is over to Pochettino, Messi's compatriot, to accommodate them all, and Angel di Maria, and find the right balance to make a team of champions as well as a modern-footballing version of the Harlem Globetrotters
Not all of fans will rejoice. Many will struggle to come to terms with Messi leaving Barcelona. Others would have preferred to see him go to a club where he really could have a transformative impact, like Diego Maradona at Napoli.
But modern football is now dominated by a narrow elite financed by mega-rich owners, state wealth in the case of Qatar-backed Paris Saint-Germain and Abu Dhabi's Manchester City.
Add in Roman Abramovich's Champions League winners Chelsea and even the likes of Barcelona and Real Madrid can't keep up. It is another bitter blow for Barca, who in 2017 were powerless to stop Neymar going to Paris for a world record 222 million euros ($264m), setting off the chain of events that led to Messi heading the same way.
Barca ruined themselves in the transfer market trying to replace Neymar to the extent they could not keep their greatest ever player due to La Liga's financial fair play rules.
PSG are not immune from the financial difficulties caused by the pandemic, but they are better placed to survive the economic downturn. PSG lost 124.9 million euros before tax in the 2019/20 season which was curtailed by the pandemic. Last season's figures are likely to be far worse, reportedly around 230 million euros, with PSG almost entirely deprived of gate receipts as games were played behind closed doors while French TV revenue went off a cliff after the collapse of a record deal with Mediapro.
Yet they have splashed out in the transfer market, spending 60 million euros ($71 million) on Inter Milan right-back Achraf Hakimi and signing several big-name players who were out of contract in Sergio Ramos, Georginio Wijnaldum and Gianluigi Donnarumma. Wijnaldum was snatched from under the noses of...Barcelona.
PSG can do it because their Qatari owners are there to cover the losses and because, for now at least, French league rules do not stop clubs having a wages to income ratio of almost 100 percent, as it was in 2019/20.
Source: www.thedailystar.net
