After recruiting heavily this summer, PSG also took care to get rid of many undesirable players. In a controversial move from Spain’s perspective, the club owned by the Qatari sovereign wealth fund QSI found the ideal way out in Qatar. After transferring Marco Verratti and Abdou Diallo to Al-Arabi, Paris reached an agreement with Al-Ahli to sell their German attacking midfielder, Julian Draxler. He officially signed a two-year contract on Sunday, for an estimated fee of 20 million euros – a real bargain considering his performance since his arrival in the capital and his loan to Benfica Lisbon last season.
Naturally, by amassing at least 80 million euros for three players they no longer counted on, PSG has drawn disparaging comments from their biggest critic: the Spanish elite. “PSG, a new accounting trick?” reads the headline of the Catalan newspaper Sport on Sunday, before continuing: “Historically, clubs owned by states have used sponsorship agreements to increase their revenue with prices that are above market rates. […] What we didn’t see coming is that these clubs now use transfers to comply with financial fair play. Several clubs from Qatar, the emirate that controls the Parisian club, have paid 35 million euros for undesirables and 45 million euros for Marco Verratti.”
A few days earlier, the president of La Liga, Javier Tebas, who has made criticizing PSG his battle cry, said something similar: “We can also do what France does, which doesn’t control PSG even though they sell Marco Verratti to Qatar for over 40 million euros, or I don’t know how much. We can do that too, find a satellite country that buys players from us to make huge profits and then buy all the players we want. Is that the system we want? I don’t think so.”
