Barcelona’s former president, Joan Laporta, has revealed that Paris Saint-Germain was prepared to pay a staggering €250 million to lure young sensation Lamine Yamal away from the Catalan giants.
Speaking at a Tuesday event for his latest book, Laporta shared that many outsiders questioned the club’s sanity for walking away from such an astronomical sum of money.
Yamal became the talk of European football after a sensational 2023/2024 breakout season that saw him emerge as one of the most exciting prospects in the game.
At the time, PSG was scouring the market for a high-profile successor to Kylian Mbappe, who had recently departed for Real Madrid on a free transfer.
Had Barcelona agreed to the deal for the then-17-year-old, it would have rewritten history by shattering the €222 million world-record fee PSG famously paid for Neymar back in 2017.
“When PSG offered us €250 million for Lamine Yamal, and we rejected it, he was 17 years old; some people thought we were crazy,” Laporta said.