PSG Reportedly Won’t Try To Sign FC Barcelona Players Anymore

A new arrival at Paris Saint-Germain has effectively seen a “non-aggression pact” come into place which means the Qatari-backed giants won’t try to sign FC Barcelona players for the foreseeable future according to SPORT.

In many ways, Barca have never recovered from losing Neymar to the Ligue 1 champions in 2017.

The Brazilian was starting to hit his peak at Camp Nou after joining from Santos four years earlier.

He was a pivotal part of a treble triumph under Luis Enrique in 2015, scoring the goal that effectively killed Juventus off in the Champions League final in Berlin.

A key cog in the ‘MSN’ trident completed by Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez, Neymar looked set to become a club legend until PSG shocked the football world a couple of summers later and activated his €222 million ($241 million) release clause.

Then-president Josep Bartomeu fluffed his lines by attaching such a relatively low fee to Neymar’s contract and then squandering the money on replacements such as Phillipe Coutinho and Antoine Griezmann that failed to live up to the mark.

Ousmane Dembele, bought around the time Neymar departed, has shown promise as of late. But it has taken an expired five-year contract and current head coach Xavi Hernandez’s guidance for him to start to fulfil his potential.

A long story short, Neymar’s exit and the misuse of the cash earned from it steered Barca away from the cusp of generational dominance.

Instead of racking up Champions League titles for fun, Barca haven’t won one again since that fateful evening in the German capital while bitter rivals Real Madrid did a “threepeat” from 2016-2018 before adding further victories in 2019 and 2021.

Away from the pitch, financial mismanagement from Bartomeu and the pandemic plunged Barca into a “technical bankruptcy” they are still recovering from.

The club has since learnt its lesson from the Neymar debacle by imposing PSG-proof €1 billion ($1.08 billion) clauses on the fresh deals of its prodigies including Gavi, Ronald Araujo and Pedri.

Last month, Culemania reported that PSG had already tested cash-strapped Barca’s resolve with a cheeky €100 million ($109 million) bid for Pedri which was rightly knocked back.

According to SPORT, though, the arrival of ex-Barca boss Luis Enrique in the dugout “will calm the waters between both clubs after years of conflict”.

The development leaves the Blaugrana safe in the knowledge that players he previously managed for the Spain national team such as Pedri and Gavi “are in no danger of being seduced”, as Luis Enrique seeks to lay down the foundations of a winning team while looking far away from Catalonia.

Of course predicting what length of time Luis Enrique will stay in Paris, or any coach for that matter, is not far off asking how long a piece of string is.

Yet with both Spanish youngsters, plus Araujo, tied down to long-term contracts, Barca at least know that they will hold on to them until well into their mid-20s.