Real Madrid sold Nico Paz for a reported €60m this summer, and on Thursday night the Nico Paz Real Madrid question was asked again in the loudest possible way.
The Argentine set up two goals as Como thrashed RB Leipzig 4-1 on the club’s Champions League debut.
Afterwards, he was asked whether he had any regrets. He did not hesitate.
The Nico Paz Real Madrid verdict: “I made the right call”
“It was for nights like this that I wanted to stay,” Paz said, speaking to Sky Italia and quoted by Marca.
“I knew this was where I would grow the most, and I am very satisfied with my decision. I made the right call.”
He was just as glowing about the occasion itself. “It has been a historic night, we played an incredible game, we really wanted this match and we are very happy,” he added.
It is difficult to argue with him on the evidence of the ninety minutes he played at the Giuseppe Sinigaglia. Cesc Fabregas’s side were relentless, Leipzig had no answer, and the man in the middle of it all was the Tenerife-born playmaker who came through Real Madrid’s academy.
A €60m goodbye, made permanent
Paz is no longer a Real Madrid player in any sense. Per Marca, Como paid €60m to make the move fully permanent this summer, taking full ownership of a footballer Los Blancos developed themselves. That fee sits inside the wider story of what the club’s academy has become: a production line that now brings in serious money rather than simply feeding the first team.
Madrid have leaned on that model heavily over the past two windows, with academy sales past the €200m mark reshaping how the balance sheet works at Valdebebas. Paz is the single biggest name in that column, and the most quotable.
Not that the link is entirely severed in the record books. As Marca notes, Paz had already played Champions League football in a white shirt, scoring against Napoli in only his second appearance in the competition — a goal that, for a while, looked like the start of something at the Bernabeu rather than the end of it.
What it means for Los Blancos
Nights like Thursday will always sting a little. Any Madridista watching a former academy graduate carve open a Bundesliga side with two assists is entitled to a moment of wondering.
The counter-argument is the one Paz himself made. He wanted minutes, and he wanted them week in, week out. He would not have had them in a squad containing Kylian Mbappe, Vinicius Junior, Jude Bellingham and Arda Guler, all competing for the same territory, and Jose Mourinho’s rotation this season has already shown how tight that competition is. Paz chose growth over prestige, and he is currently being proved right on a European stage.
There is also a version of this that suits everybody. Madrid banked a very large fee for a player who was not going to start, the academy’s reputation rises every time he does something like this, and Paz gets the career he wanted rather than the one he was handed.
Los Blancos, meanwhile, have their own European business to attend to after a scratchy 2-1 win over Inter Milan on Tuesday. If the mood around the Bernabeu is a touch grumpy at the moment, a former academy boy beaming into a camera in Lombardy will not have helped. But it is hard to begrudge him it. Nico Paz backed himself, and on Thursday night the bet paid out in full.
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