PSG vs Real Madrid: Titans Florentino Perez and Nasser Al Khelaifi to provide more compelling action off the pitch than on it
Real’s president has respect and admiration for his counterpart with dealings together shaping the future of European football
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Florentino Perez is renowned as one of the bluntest and most headstrong figures in football, but those who know the Real Madrid president couldn’t help noticing a change in his demeanour, in the presence of one specific individual. It is the man he will meet again on Wednesday night, his Paris Saint-Germain counterpart, Nasser Al Khelaifi.
Bernabeu sources insist it is one reason why Madrid never quite went all in on Neymar this summer. Perez wanted to show sufficient respect to Al Khelaifi, to ensure everything was above board, and that the relationship between the two would remain friendly.
It is why, even allowing for the relative ease of a group also containing Club Brugge and Galatasaray, meetings off the pitch at the Parc des Prince on Wednesday could be far more influential to the future of the Champions League than the meeting on it.
Perez and Al Khelaifi will certainly be able to speak with a bit more freedom about what happened with Neymar, but a delicate diplomacy will remain – especially when it comes to Kylian Mbappe.
Part of the reason for this diplomacy is because of one of the biggest acts of war in recent football history.
Perez was almost as stunned as Barcelona when PSG actually went and enacted Neymar’s release clause back in the summer of 2017. It wasn’t just the money involved, at £220m, but the meaning of it.
As someone who had caused a similar shockwave with exactly the same manoeuvre to first become Madrid president by enacting Luis Figo’s release clause back in 2000, Perez fully understood everything behind this display of power. It made a serious impression on him. He was, in short, “intimidated”.
Perez realised what PSG could do to his own club, if they had the will.
So he understood the need to get on the right side of PSG.
“Imagine it,” one Bernabeu source said. “Even Florentino doesn’t want to have a problems with them. He wouldn’t dream of pissing off Al Khelaifi. They could buy up to his construction company!”
So, Perez has actively looked to maintain a friendship. There are regular channels of communication, semi-regular meals, and occasional deals. You only have to look at the mutual favour the clubs agreed this summer, by effectively swapping a former first-choice goalkeeper for a prospective stand-in, as Keylor Navas went to Paris and Alphonse Areola to Madrid. The latter is happier to sit on the bench behind Thibaut Courtois, the former gets the starting football he craved.
Such deals are a far cry from the effective cold war that exists between PSG and Barcelona.
It does however mean that Perez can’t use his usual transfer approach against the French champions, so that they won’t come back with greater force against him. And this is where it gets intriguing, and where a flashpoint may eventually be inevitable.
Like PSG, after all, there are a lot of suggestions that Madrid are now looking beyond Neymar. They are looking to the future, and Kylian Mbappe.
He is already Perez’s next great project, in a line that includes Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo, Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale.
Everyone knows the way these pursuits usually go, with intensive media campaigns and Madrid just abrasively letting it be known – to pretty much the whole world, rather than the selling club – they won’t take no for an answer. This will have to go a different way.
“It’s for that Madrid don’t insist on Mbappe,” one source said. “They just can’t be that direct. It has to be careful. In an ideal world, Mbappe would say he wants to go first.”
That way, Perez’s good relationship with PSG could prove extra advantageous, and potentially make such a transfer all the smoother.
The problem, and potential for complications, is Al Khelaifi’s own vision of an ideal world. It is one in which Mbappe proves himself as the game’s great successor to Ronaldo and Leo Messi, but always in a PSG jersey.
The French champions, after all, see Mbappe in the exact same way Madrid do.
But it isn’t an ideal world which is why some complications are inevitable as the future of the club and the game.
This is where it could get testy.
Some of the French club’s hierarchy have already been suspicious about the exact source of the regular reports from Madrid media that PSG are on the brink of failing Financial Fair Play. There is also the knowledge that such speculation will play on the minds of players like Mbappe as much as anyone one.
It is almost symbolic, in that regard, that Mbappe will play on Wednesday and Neymar won’t.
So much centres around him. You can only imagine the conversations off the pitch if he again proves devastating on it.
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