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Chapter 334: Considerations for a New Home II

They had the best youthful talent in the football world in the person of Kylian Mbappe playing for them and they had the best of the best players in every position.

They also had players like Neymar Junior, Angel Di Maria, Julian Draxler, Mauro Icardi, Marco Verrati, Pablo Sarabia, Ander Herrera, Marquinhos, Presnel Kimpembe, Keylor Navas and many more.

Any of these players would have other clubs drooling at the chance to have them in their ranks and it was clear that their team was one of the best teams in all of Europe, but there was a major flaw this brought.

Jason wasn’t one of the bias people who put down every league in the world but the top four which were the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, and the Bundesliga, but Jason also knew that their title as the top leagues in the world wasn’t a sham.

The French Ligue 1 wasn’t too far off from the top leagues, but it still paled quite a bit in comparison and this had been validated by players who could easily make rounds in the Ligue 1 going to the top leagues and becoming unable to pull off such performances.

Radamel Falcao was one of such players and his outing from the Ligue 1 to the Premier League could not be said to be anything less than disastrous with him only able to net four times for Manchester United in twenty-six appearances in the 2014/15 season.

He was also only able to score one goal for Chelsea after 12 appearances for the club in the 2015/16 season which was way worse than Gonzalo Higuain and Alvaro Morata who were touted as Chelsea’s worst transfers in the striker position.

Anthony Martial was another such player, but he was way better and was able to perform quite well outside the Ligue 1, his physicality was no match for the Premier League and he spent most of his time in Manchester United in the recovery rooms.

There were other examples like Bakayoko who couldn’t hit top performances once they left the Ligue 1 despite constantly pulling off impressive performances in the French League.

The players at Paris Saint Germain however, weren’t like those players.

They were tried and trusted players who had conquered leagues outside France before joining Paris Saint Germain, but this was where the problem began.

With player pedigree like that, and a team that was as impressive as that, the Ligue 1 which wasn’t much of a challenge to the PSG players in the first place became like easy mode which took off their competitive edge, hence, despite qualifying for the Champions League every year, they hadn’t been able to do much in the knockout stages and usually ended up being knocked out as early as the quarter-finals once they came up against any other European giants.

They had managed to make it to the finals in the previous season, but it was quite clear that their luck had a great deal to do with it as they hadn’t faced any major European giant of their level until the finals and were only faced with Borussia Dortmund, Atalanta, and RB Leipzig.

Of those three, only Borussia Dortmund posed a bit of a challenge and Atalanta was a team that couldn’t match up to them in any aspects.

Leipzig was the worst of those three as they hardly had any history with the Champions League or even at the top level at all. They had only surfaced recently and were shaking up the Bundesliga quite a bit due to Borussia Dortmund slacking off in the last few years, leaving Bayern as the only title contenders.

As soon as PSG were faced with Bayern in the finals, they lost.

Of course, there could be other reasons for this, but to Jason, it was clear that there was a major lack of competitiveness in the Ligue 1 which had relegated Paris Saint Germain to the bottom of the list among the main contenders for his signature.

He wanted to become a legend of the game and he would rather prove himself in tougher leagues than go to the Ligue 1 which people called a ‘farmers league’.

‘… Ok, maybe that is a little too biased,’ he thought to himself wryly, but he wasn’t changing his mind.

History was there as a guide for people to learn from and Jason would have to be blind to ignore the examples, especially Neymar Junior who was once touted as one of the greatest and was compared with Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, yet after his transfer to PSG, he slowly disappeared from the conversation.

Neymar went from being compared to Ronaldo and Messi to being compared with players like Sterling and Dybala.

Sterling and Dybala were good players of course, but imagine the disrespect.

Neymar, the prince born in an era of two kings being compared to mere nobles?

Nah… there was just no way Jason could ignore that and attribute it to Neymar’s choices regarding money and his lifestyle.

Not when there was more than Neymar as an example.

Marco Verrati, a player who had burst onto the scene before Kevin de Bruyne and someone who was touted to become one of the next legendary midfielders at the level of Toni Kroos and Luka Modric also degraded to the level where he was being compared to the likes of Jorghino.

Like, what in heaven’s mercy was that disrespect?

Of course, this was due to Marco Verrati’s lifestyle choices as he never stuck to a strict lifestyle of a footballer and was always out partying.

Worst of all, he even began smoking at some point, yet no one called him out at the club because despite letting himself go, his raw talent was enough to still display top-level performances that other players could only dream of having.

Jason knew himself and knew that if he ever let money or pride get to his head and he stopped putting in the effort he was constantly putting in, he would crash faster than a house of cards when a tornado blew past and he would probably never be able to recover.

This was already his second chance and he doubted if he would get a third one so he had to be as cautious as possible of anything that could adversely affect his career even if it seemed like he was being too much or he wasn’t thinking straight.