Worst kept secret in football

PSG are not in a strong negotiating position.

‘So it’s official then’

Guillam Balague…

Winning lots of CL’s and selling players.

They will probably sell Josulu to United for 60m. That's where the has beens go.

Huge signing on fee and huge wages

OP, it seems to have escaped many people just how sensibly Madrid have been run for years now, more so when compared to similar-sized clubs. If you check the following link, you'll see that over the past decade, they don't even break the top-10 in terms of either gross or net transfer spend. In fact, they're not even top-25 in net spending.

https://www.transfermarkt.com/transfers/einnahmenausgaben/statistik/a/ids/a/sa//saison_id/2014/saison_id_bis/2023/land_id/0/nat/0/kontinent_id/0/pos//w_s//intern/0/plus/1

Their overall transfer balance in that time is close to €300M better than Liverpool's, who in turn have fared significantly better in that department than any of the other major PL clubs.

You'll notice too that over that time they've also signed and sold considerably fewer players than their competitors, which suggests they've been significantly more careful when picking their targets. They've also signed a number of experienced players on "free" transfers, a term, "free", which is pretty misleading, since all of these players have received juicy signing-on fees.

Which brings us to the next and undoubtably most important item: wages. Madrid do tend to fork out big time on wages, but there too, they've significantly lightened their wage bill over the past 3 years, in which time they've got most of the previous big earners, such as Bale, Hazard, Benzema or Ramos off the books. The current biggest earners are believed to be Kroos, Modric, and Alaba, with the first two under contract only until the end of the season.

As I mentioned on another thread a few days ago, the club's been operating this season at roughly €250M below its salary cap, which is fixed by La Liga as a proportion of revenues, so they've got plenty of room to pay Mbappé his wages and a signing-on fee spread out over the course of his contract.

You can see all the wage bills of the major clubs in this UEFA report: https://ecfil.uefa.com/2023 Click on the "Wage Costs" tab at the top for more details. You'll probably be pretty satisfied with what you'll find there if you're a Liverpool fan too.


Over these years, they've also carried out a major renovation the stadium, almost an entire rebuild, with the increase in revenues forecast to significantly outstrip the servicing of the loans for its construction. The same graph above also shows the latest figures for gate receipts, but those are from before the Bernabéu became fully operational again this season.

Add to all of the above the tremendous collateral they'd be able to commit to potential lenders, and the fact that they're estimated to be the most valuable club in world football, and it's easy to understand that they'll have no problem whatsoever funding the Mbappé deal with room to spare.

good post IOAG

Cheers. Not that anyone seemed to care though.