Xavi Simons is one of the talents of Paris Saint-Germain who feel cheated by the club, headlines Le Parisien Friday evening. The eighteen-year-old midfielder has been returned to the Under-19s, along with Édouard Michut, among others, despite promises of opportunities for playing time in the first. Simons has an expiring contract and will probably not renew it.
Simons and Michut seemed to join the PSG first team last summer and also experienced the preparation for the season. However, the two talents were told in August that they had to return to a youth team. “We should have left last summer,” says the father of one of the two players. “Everyone in Paris knows that the club’s project is illegible, not least because there is no reserve team.”
At the start of the calendar year, Leonardo, PSG’s technical director, still expressed his confidence in the club’s talents. The Brazilian said to France Football Among other things: “Instead of having an international play five games a year, we might as well give a chance to one of our young players who have been trained here.” Simons was still regularly on the bench with the first team in the spring and then also made his official debut, but has never been part of the A-selection once in the current season.
For Simons, his expiring contract seems to be the ideal solution to the problem. The midfielder has recently been linked to Barcelona in Spain, where he already played in the youth between 2010 and 2019. The situation of his peer Michut, also a midfielder, seems more hopeless: he signed a contract in the summer of 2020 that will bind him to PSG until mid-2025.