PSG payments to agents experience explosive increase

The figures published by French football’s financial watchdog, the DNCG, over the past week have demonstrated that PSG has never paid as much to various agents and intermediaries as they did last season. Nearly €40m was paid in agency fees.

The DNCG has published the detailed accounts of L1 clubs for the 2021/2022 season, confirming in passing the abysmal losses of the capital club with a net result of a loss of €368M, and PSG paid no less than €39.440m in agent and intermediary fees. By way of comparison and despite a crazy number of transfers, OM only paid €10m in commissions during the same season, the same as AS Monaco and Rennes (€9.2m).

Over the 2021/2022 season, which stretched from July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022, PSG made the following deals in terms of incomings: transfer of Achraf Hakimi (€60m excluding bonuses), loan then transfer of Nuno Mendes for €45m (€7m + €38m), transfer of Vitinha (€41m), free transfer arrivals of Georginio Wijnaldum, Sergio Ramos, Gianluigi Donnarumma and Lionel Messi. Kylian Mbappé’s PSG extension also earned Monaco a €35m bonus. That is €181m in total transfer compensation including this bonus.

About €40m in agency fees for €181m in transfers, the ratio between the two is of a kind rarely seen in football (at around 22%) and this means above all that the free transfer arrivals appear to have cost the capital club a fortune, with the agents and various intermediaries involved being very well paid, regardless of the fact that there was not a transfer fee paid to another club.

The metric for compensation paid to agents and intermediaries has been provided by the DNCG since the 2017/2018 season. During that campaign, PSG had only paid €23.2m in commissions according to the figures provided. That is around 5% of the total spent on transfers over the season, estimated at €400m since Berchiche (€15m) had been recruited a few weeks earlier than Neymar and Kylian Mbappé.

Year after year, agent commissions have only climbed while PSG has nevertheless been rather quieter in terms of their activity on the whole on the transfer market, blocked by the sums committed to sign and retain Neymar and Mbappé. PSG paid €25.8m in commissions in 2018/2019, €26.9m in 2019/2020, €28.45m in 2020/2021 and €39.4m in the most recently completed campaign. For the first time, the club has therefore exceeded the bar of €30m in agent commissions paid, approaching the €40m number, which represents an increase of almost a third.

James Thorpe | GFFN