MOSCOW — Edinson Cavani of Uruguay and Kylian Mbappé of France lit up the opening day of the World Cup’s knockout phase on Saturday, scoring two goals apiece to send their countries to the quarterfinals. On Monday, their Paris Saint-Germain teammate Neymar can join them there with Brazil.
But the exploits of Neymar, Mbappé and Cavani — a front line put together at great expense by P.S.G. — come at a time of great scrutiny for their club and for UEFA, European soccer’s governing body. P.S.G. had been under investigation by UEFA for months amid concerns that the club’s lavish spending on players could not be covered by its income — a violation of UEFA’s strict cost-control regulations known broadly as its Financial Fair Play rules.
Just before the World Cup began, however, UEFA’s investigators effectively cleared P.S.G. of rules violations, though with a caveat: they would continue to scrutinize the club’s most recent financial year.
That is an important hedge; the most recent year is the one in which P.S.G. broke soccer’s transfer fee record by signing Neymar from Barcelona for 222 million euros (about $260 million), and then committed to pay the second-highest fee for Mbappé, the French teenager who helped his country complete its 4-3 elimination of Argentina on Saturday.
Yet in clearing P.S.G., at least for now, UEFA may have given new ammunition to those who have criticized its commitment to the rules, which were introduced to stop spiraling debts among many clubs and to prevent an arms race among superrich club owners. One such critic, Javier Tebas, the Spanish league president, declared financial fair play “dead.”
“It has no value,” Tebas said.
In Italy, the decision to clear P.S.G. was contrasted with the treatment of A.C. Milan, the Italian club that received a one-season ban from European competition after a similar investigation. Critics were quick to note that P.S.G., which has won five of the past six French titles, including the most recent one, shares its owner with BeIN Sports, the Qatari-backed sports network that is UEFA’s biggest television-rights buyer.
Given the backlash, as well as tensions within the investigations group itself — some members did not agree with clearing P.S.G. — the chairman of the body overseeing the financial fair play rules is considering reviewing the decision, according to people familiar with the board’s plans.
UEFA declined to comment.
At the heart of the P.S.G. case is a set of sponsorship agreements valued by the club at more than $200 million a season with companies and organizations linked to Qatar. UEFA’s investigators found P.S.G. was receiving far more for the deals than it would for similar ones on the open market.
One such agreement, a nine-figure deal with the Qatar Tourism Authority — by far the club’s biggest sponsor — was reduced by well over half in UEFA’s most recent accounting of the club’s balance sheet. That calculation has been a source of frustration for P.S.G., which agreed to be punished for violations of financial fair play rules in 2014 in a settlement that increased the valuation for the Q.T.A. deal.
P.S.G. declined to comment on the more recent, lower calculation.
But the club also has been frustrated with what it perceives to be late notice of what it was required to do to become compliant with UEFA’s financial rules. P.S.G. received UEFA’s valuations of its sponsorships on June 13, meaning it had only 17 days to raise sufficient funds through player sales before the end of its 2018 financial year. In total, the team sold about 140 million euros’ worth of players before the end of the year’s financial cycle.
The investigation into P.S.G. is the longest and most complex since UEFA established its financial control regulations almost 10 years ago. But a resolution of the case may go a long way toward determining how much confidence clubs have in the process.
While Neymar was signed permanently last year in a transfer that more than doubled the world transfer record, Mbappé joined in a curious arrangement from Monaco that allowed P.S.G. to sign him on loan before committing to a permanent transfer worth 180 million euros (about $210 million) this year. That allowed the team to keep the expenditure for Mbappé’s transfer fee, though not his salary, off the club’s books for one season.
Eight people sit on UEFA’s investigatory chamber, though only one, its chairman, the former Belgium prime minister Yves Leterme, gets to have a final say. At a meeting just before the start of the World Cup, the group was divided on P.S.G., with a majority of its members at one point advocating that the club should be referred to its sanctioning body, the adjudicatory chamber.
That did not happen. On June 13, a day before the World Cup opener, UEFA said the panel had found P.S.G.’s transfers “were in line” with regulations.
Reviewing that decision has some precedent. As recently as last week, the chairman of the adjudicatory chamber, José Narciso da Cunha Rodrigues, announced his group would review a recently agreed settlement between the chief investigator and Turkey’s Galatasary, a club that has now twice breached the cost control regulations. The Turkish team agreed to pay a fine of 6 million euros.
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