As Neymar Heads for Saudi Arabia, Paris Saint-Germain’s Superteam Project Collap
The Paris Saint-Germain experiment of recent seasons was supposed to be a plan so lavish and so ambitious that it would bend all of European soccer to PSG’s will. By the summer of 2021, the club had acquired the most expensive player in the world, the brightest young talent in the world and one of the greatest players of all time. That trio of Neymar, Kylian Mbappé, and Lionel Messi had cost more than half a billion dollars to assemble.
But PSG’s owner, an arm of the sovereign-wealth fund of Qatar, calculated that it would all be worth it once the team started winning Champions League titles and breaking records. Instead, PSG succeeded only in breaking PSG. Now, two years later, the club’s era of the Trois Fantastiquesis over.
Messi has already rushed out the door as soon as he could and is now installed at Inter Miami. Now Neymar is expected to be unveiled as an $87 million signing by Saudi club Al Hilal on Wednesday, according to multiple reports. Only Mbappé is set to remain in the French capital for another season, despite Paris’s best efforts to sell him in yet another turbulent transfer window.
The relationship between Mbappé and the club appeared broken once he refused to sign a contract extension beyond next year, while insisting that he would play for PSG this season. The possibility that the club would punish Mbappé with 10 months on the bench suddenly seemed very real—at least until this week when the situation thawed and new manager Luis Enrique brought him back into the fold. Enrique over the weekend refused to comment on Neymar’s impending departure or the conversations he had with the 31-year-old Brazilian playmaker that he once coached at Barcelona.
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