Carlos Soler was Paris Saint-Germain’s final recruit of the summer transfer window, arriving in the capital from Valencia on deadline day to sign a five-year deal at the Parc des Princes.
Soler, 25, made his debut for Christophe Galtier’s side as a late substitute in Tuesday’s 2-1 win over Juventus as Paris began their latest bid for UEFA Champions League glory, replacing Lionel Messi six minutes from time. A Ligue 1 Uber Eats debut could follow this weekend against Stade Brestois 29.
Here are five things to know about the nine-times capped Spanish international midfielder:
1) Came to the game for a Game Boy
As a kid, Soler was not keen to join a team despite his talent with a ball catching the eye of his family. And so his grandad came up with a way to convince him to play football properly. “When I was five I was already really into video games and he said to me that if I signed up he would give me a Game Boy as a present,” Soler said in an interview with the Royal Spanish Football Federation after his first call-up to the national team last year. “It was almost because of that that I got involved because I didn’t like playing with other kids, so this call-up is partly my grandad’s too.”
That was how Soler’s journey to playing for Valencia at the Mestalla began.
2) Star for his hometown club
Soler was first picked up by Valencia CF in 2005, when he was just eight years old. He worked his way up through the youth system, starting out as a prolific striker who would score more than 100 goals in his first year. Among his first teammates at Valencia was Pedro Chirivella, who would eventually move to Liverpool but is now in Ligue 1 with FC Nantes.
The young Soler was gradually encouraged to play deeper and deeper and by the time he was a teenager he had been turned into a number eight by Rubén Mora, his coach in the juvenile category who likened him to Rubén Baraja, who won two league titles with Valencia and helped them get to the 2001 Champions League final.
“We changed his position because there was an injury to one of our players and we saw that Carlos was good at getting into the area, running in from the second line, and shooting. Out of 40 passes he attempted, 39 would be good. He understood the game and we saw him as a ‘Rubén Baraja’ in central midfield. It worked out well,” Mora told Valencia’s official website in 2020.
Soler, who would later play under Baraja higher up the age groups, was a ballboy at Mestalla as a kid before working his way up to captain Los Che. He made his La Liga debut for Valencia as a 19-year-old in a 3-2 defeat to Real Sociedad in December 2016. He scored his first goal a few weeks later, in a 2-0 win at Villarreal in January 2017, not long after turning 20. He went on to feature in two Champions League campaigns, helping them come out of a group featuring LOSC Lille to reach the last 16 in 2019/20. Soler scored 11 La Liga goals in each of the last two campaigns, but the crowning moment of a Valencia career covering over 200 top-team games came when he played in the team that beat Barcelona 2-1 in Seville to win the 2019 Copa del Rey final. Kévin Gameiro was among their scorers that night. Soler nearly won the Cup again, but Valencia lost to Real Betis on penalties in last season’s final.
3) Penalty hat-trick
Penalties at Paris Saint-Germain might sometimes see Kylian Mbappé and Neymar Jr fighting over the ball, but maybe now they should be leaving spot-kick duties to Soler. Sixteen of his 36 goals in a Valencia shirt came from the penalty spot, including his last one, which sealed a 1-0 victory over Girona on the opening day of this season. More significantly, Soler also scored a hat-trick of penalties in a 4-1 hammering of Real Madrid in November 2020.
Nobody had ever scored three spot-kicks against Real Madrid in a single competitive game in their history.
4) Reunited with Fabián Ruiz and Juan Bernat
Soler’s arrival came just a few days after PSG signed his compatriot Fabián Ruiz from Napoli. They played together in the Spain team that won the Under-21 European Championship in 2019, with Fabián scoring the opener in the 2-1 victory over Germany in the final in Udine, Italy. Soler was also on the books at Valencia at the same time as left-back Juan Bernat, although the latter left the Mestalla for Bayern Munich in 2014, two years before Soler would make his first-team debut
5) World Cup hopes
A member of the Spain squad that won the silver medal at the Tokyo Olympics, Soler returned from the Games and promptly won his first senior cap for La Roja, scoring in a 2-1 World Cup qualifying defeat away in Sweden in September 2021. He scored again in a 4-0 home win over Georgia a few days later, and also netted in a 2-0 win over the Czech Republic in a UEFA Nations League match in June, playing alongside another of his new PSG colleagues in Pablo Sarabia. Soler has tended to play in a midfield three under Luis Enrique and is a clear candidate to go to the World Cup in Qatar at the end of this year.
