Guest of After Football on RMCLeonardo looked back on the 11 years spent by Marco Verratti at PSG, a player he brought in himself in 2012. The former sporting director recalled the importance of the Italian midfielder in the first years of the Qatari project, a period “where everything was contested”. According to him, Verratti marked the history of the club, but also suffered more criticism. Leonardo recognized that his former protégé sometimes played at the level of the best midfielders in Europe and that he could have had an even more brilliant trajectory.
For the Brazilian, the tipping point might have been an earlier departure to another big club. “Maybe a guy like Verratti, after five years at Paris Saint-Germain, he had to go to an even bigger team”Leonardo said, while defending the player’s overall record. Leonardo refuses to talk about waste despite a healthy lifestyle that is sometimes discussed: “I think it’s not a waste… He had some personal things going on at times that put him in a difficult situation. » If he does not win the Champions League, the former sporting director believes that Verratti will stay “a huge player” in the history of PSG.
