Paris Saint-Germain forced to sell players worth €60m

Big spending Paris Saint-Germain must sell €60m worth of players by the end of this month to satisfy so-called ‘financial fair play rules’, with failure to do so leading to potential sanctions including being kicked out of European competition.

Uefa, European football’s governing body, last year launched a formal investigation into PSG after it paid a record €222m to acquire Brazilian forward Neymar from Spain’s FC Barcelona. French striker Mbappé was also signed on loan from domestic rivals AS Monaco — with a potential transfer fee of €200m. 

Uefa on Wednesday announced it has “closed” its investigation into the club’s finances, but added it is yet to make conclusions about the results from the 2018 financial year, a period that includes the Neymar and Mbappé transfers. 

A person close to the organisation said that the club has been informed that it must make €60m of player sales by the end of June to satisfy FFP requirements, designed to force clubs to break even. 

Uefa said: “The financial impact of transfer activities as from the 2017 summer — up to and including the upcoming transfer window — and compliance with the break-even requirement for the 2018 financial year will remain under close scrutiny and will be thoroughly looked at in the coming weeks.”

PSG did not immediately respond for requests for comment.

Uefa also investigated sponsorship contracts struck by PSG, which was bought in 2012 by Qatar Sports Investments, a state-funded group founded by Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar.

There had been concern that the sponsorship money had come from “related parties” — entities with financial or other close links to the club’s owners.

Two independent groups, Nielsen and Octagon, were hired to determine the “fair value” of sponsorships, and whether they were in line with normal market prices. 

The Financial Times reported in April that Octagon’s assessment had suggested that the sponsorship contracts had been “overstated”.

Even so, Uefa’s investigators have found that PSG still satisfied FFP regulations between 2015 and 2017, as the club had not more than €30m in losses a year.

It said that even after “significant fair value adjustments of several club sponsorship contracts — on the basis of evaluations performed by independent third-party assessors — the break-even result of [PSG] remains within acceptable deviation for the financial years ending in 2015, 2016 and 2017.”