The Numbers: Where Do Most Foreign PSG Players Come From? | OneFootball

Where do the majority of players of Paris Saint-Germain come from? If you guessed “France”, you are right, Captain Obvious – it’s a French club, after all, that usually recruits locally. But, here is another interesting question: where do most PSG internationals come from? To find the answer to this question, I’ve done some digging and uncovered that in its recent history, PSG had more than 300 French players in its ranks. One interesting fact is that despite football being one of the most played and beloved sports in Ireland, no one from the Emerald Isle has ever suited up for the French giants. Here are some more interesting numbers regarding PSG and their international players:

Africa

Over its history, Paris Saint0Germain has signed many African players – most of them from Senegal (9), like midfielder Oumar Sène with 200 apps between 1985 and 1992 or Idrissa Gueye, recently signed from Everton FC, and Cameroon (9), like Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting, who joined the club last year or Modeste M’bami who, during his three seasons with the team, contributed a great deal to the club’s success in Ligue 1. Also, the team’s squad was completed by Ivorian (8), Algerian (7), and Congolese (6) players quite a few times over its history. Most of them are countries where French is the official language (except Algeria, where Arabic and Berber are the official languages but French is used predominantly in the administration, business and education sectors).

This seems more than just a statistical correlation considering that the club has also signed players from other Francophonic countries like Mali, Morocco, Tunisia, Benin, and Guinea, while the number of players coming from African countries with English as the official language (like Ghana and Nigeria) was relatively low.

The Americas

South America is an inexhaustible source when looking for talented footballers and PSG certainly has an affinity for them. Over the years, it has “imported” around 50 players from there, most of them from Brazil (30+) and Argentina (16). From Uruguay, PSG signed four players over the years: Carlos Bueno, Cristian Rodríguez, Diego Lugano, and Edinson Cavani. Also, they signed a player from Haiti (Jean-Eudes Maurice), one from Martinique (Thierry Tinmar), one from Panama (Julio Dely Valdés) and one from the United States: Timothy Weah, born in New York, who made his debut at PSG in 2017 and transferred to Lille OSC just two seasons (and one loan spell) later.

Europe (outside France)

As you might expect, the largest number of international players at PSG come from Europe (outside France), from a most diverse list of countries. Among them, the country with the most players at the Parisian team is Portugal (11), Italy (9), and Spain (8), with four players from Germany (Draxler, Trapp, Kehrer, and Wörns), Bosnia (Sušić, Pantelić, Halilhodžić, and Ibišević), Serbia (Ljuboja, Kežman, Biševac, Pantelić) plus two (Vujović, and Lukić) from Yugoslavia, one (Šurjak) from Croatia, and one (Bošković) from Montenegro. Three of them came from England (including the legendary David Beckham), three of them came from the Netherlands, two from Poland, two from Russia, two from Turkey, and one from Sweden – another football legend, Zlatan Ibrahimović.

To answer the question in the title: with more than 30 players signed by PSG over the years, most foreign nationals playing at Parc des Princes came from Brazil.

Now you know.

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