Mad transfer market reaches zenith with Neymar deal

– ‘Unsustainable’ –

However, not all of Europe’s giants wish to partake in this spending frenzy.

“I don’t want to buy a player for 150 or 200 million euros, I don’t want to join in such madness. That’s something that we will refuse totally,” Bayern Munich president Uli Hoeness told SID, an AFP subsidiary.

Veteran Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, who has been criticised by supporters in the past for an apparent lack of willingness to spend huge sums on individual players, says the Neymar deal is “beyond calculation and rationality”.

“For me, it is the consequence of the ownerships and that has completely changed the whole landscape of football in the last 15 years,” he said.

But in a landscape where other leagues are collectively struggling to compete with the monstrous sums handed out to teams in England, the move for Neymar can also be seen as a huge boon for French football as a whole.

“Even if the arrival of Neymar raises questions about the real coast, we all congratulate Nasser (Al Khelaifi, the PSG president) and PSG. This is huge for the notoriety of Ligue 1,” tweeted Jean-Michel Aulas, the owner of rivals Lyon and a regular critic of Paris and their Qatari owners in the past.

Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel Levy is another who thinks the current levels of spending are “unsustainable”, and it is therefore no surprise that his club have kept their hands in their pockets this summer.

Yet when clubs have the backing of a state behind them, like PSG, such moves are less about making an investment and more to do with making a statement.

“It is by attracting such top players that clubs will be able to win trophies and gain notoriety but these transfers will not be made profitable by ticket sales or merchandising,” said the French sports economist Jean-François Brocard.