✍️ Will PSG Sign Another Superstar Player?

Can Paris Saint-Germain resist the temptation of signing another expensive superstar player?

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Kylian Mbappé, the last remaining true superstar in France’s top flight, has left as a free agent to Real Madrid, while the television rights deal that officials had boasted would raise in the region of €1 billion for the league has flopped.

Nearly a year of increasingly desperate negotiations have yielded a domestic deal worth just €500 million per year for the next five seasons. Ligue 1 finds itself with a deal worth exactly half of what was hoped. It is also below the previous €624m per-year deal that France’s top teams previously enjoyed.

For all the bullishness of LFP president Vincent Labrune, French sides find themselves braced for an indefinite period of financial turbulence.

The timing of this could barely be worse. Clubs are struggling to make ends meet in the post-Covid era, and from this season, the LFP will lose 13% of its revenues to CVC Capital Partners, a Luxembourg investment fund that saved teams from going to the wall during the pandemic with an injection of €1.5b. It is a deal that has since been likened by Slate.fr as ‘selling the soul of the game to the devil.’