For the last five years, going to the Parc des Princes has been a pleasant Paris night out. You stroll past the chic apartment buildings of the 16th arrondissement and take your seat in the heated stadium. Then you enjoy possibly the best French club team since Saint-Etienne in the 1970s.
Usually, Paris Saint-Germain wins; they've been French champions four seasons out of the past five. But every spring, the team ritually crashes out of the Champions League in the quarterfinals,Cheap soccer jerseys, usually to Barcelona. The crash seldom provokes much anger, because Paris isn't a passionate soccer city. Instead, most spectators simply transfer their interest to one of many other sources of entertainment.
In short, the Qatari state's project of turning the appalling pre-2012 PSG team into world-beaters had hit a wall. That's why PSG needs Neymar. He's not "the best player in the world," as the club's Qatari chairman Nasser Al-Khelaifi called him on Friday, but he is a superstar of the caliber that Parisians expect.
To keep the locals excited, the club has to win the Champions League. The "transfer of the century" (at least until the next one comes along) puts PSG in the position where a bit of luck would get the club over the finish line.
Paying €222 million for Neymar has been widely dismissed as crazy. That's wrong. PSG's shrewd executives have been planning this transfer for years, always knowing it would cost a fortune. They enquired after Neymar when he was still playing in Brazil. Later, the club sniffed around Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. After realizing both quests were hopeless, it returned to Neymar.
Last summer,PSG Jerseys, Al-Khelaifi flew to meet him and his father in Ibiza and promised the moon. Neymar's agent, Wagner Ribeiro, later said that PSG offered to make him the world's best-paid player and to fly him to Brazil's games in a private jet. But Neymar ended up signing a new, improved contract at Barcelona, leaving the Parisians feeling used.
Neymar and his father care a lot about money. When I asked the player about his childhood in an interview in 2014, he replied: "Tough. We didn't have much money but I never went hungry, my dad always provided. There's a story I told my mom: that when I became rich, I'd buy a cookie factory so I could eat cookies whenever I wanted."
Like most Brazilian players,Neymar Jersey, he has to provide not only for himself and his extended family but also for old friends and acquaintances, as well as for his Neymar Jr. Institute, which helps poor young people in his old neighborhood in Santos. There's no need to feel sorry for him, but his reported net salary of €30m a year -- the highest in soccer -- won't all be spent on Ferraris.
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