Brazil forward Neymar has told Paris Saint-Germain he wants to leave the club this summer.
PSG will look at offers between £50 million and £80 million for Neymar, who is the most expensive player in the world.
Neymar would love to go back to Barcelona, but the team’s financial problems make it hard to see how they could pay for him.
Even though Neymar has denied it, PSG’s management has heard that he wants to leave. He still has three years left on his £25 million-a-year deal. It is still not clear if he is jumping or being pushed.
At age 31, he is not thought to be a key player for new head coach Luis Enrique as he builds a new team. PSG has been willing to sell him because they want to put together a younger, more hungry team.
This summer, clubs in Saudi Arabia, Brazil, the United States, and Europe are all likely to try to sign the player. In January, there were talks with Chelsea.
Paris has had a rough summer, with Lionel Messi leaving and Kylian Mbappe getting into a big fight.
When Sky Sports News asked the club about it, they didn’t say anything, but it’s thought that the Brazil superstar, who is under contract until 2025, hasn’t told the club’s executives of his plans to leave yet.
The club is sure that they will either have to sell France striker Mbappe this summer or lose him for free next summer when his contract is up.
Messi left earlier this summer to join Inter Miami, and if Neymar and Mbappe leave PSG as well, it will be the end of an era.
The club is trying to get rid of what their president, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, has called their “bling bling” image from the past. Instead of bringing in top-tier superstars, they are trying to make more players on their own.
Neymar was a great example of the old way of doing things. In 2017, PSG broke the world transfer record to buy him from Barcelona for €222m (about £200m).
Since joining PSG, he has won France’s Ligue 1 championship five times, but he hasn’t been able to add to the one Champions League title he won with Barcelona in 2015.
Mbappe, on the other hand, has been taken out of PSG’s main training group because of the dispute over his contract.
Sources at PSG are sure that he has already agreed to sign with Real Madrid when his contract is up and get a €160 million signing-on fee as a free agent.
PSG is said to have even offered Mbappe a new contract with a “guaranteed sale” clause that says he can leave for a fee next summer. However, sources say that Mbappe’s agents have turned down this and all other offers.
Al Hilal made a world record offer of £259 million for Mbappe last month, so PSG gave them permission to talk to him. But it was said that Mbappe and his representatives didn’t even want to meet with a group from the club when they came to Paris.
Chelsea and Barcelona are also trying to make player-plus-cash deals to get Mbappe, who won the World Cup with France in 2018 and was a star at last year’s finals in Qatar.
Photo by EPA/KIMIMASA MAYAMA
