Nico Paz: The €60m Number 10 Real Madrid Sold Twice

In August 2024 Real Madrid sold a twenty-year-old from their own academy to a newly promoted Serie A club for six million euros, and kept a buy-back clause worth nine. Two years later they used it — and immediately sold him back to the same club for sixty million. Nico Paz is now the most expensive player Como have ever owned, a Champions League footballer, and the reason one line in a contract earned Real Madrid fifty-one million euros without the player ever kicking a ball for them again.

One Player, Three Numbers

The mechanics are worth sitting with, because they describe how elite clubs now handle talent they cannot fit into a first team. Madrid did not gamble on Paz developing. They sold him cheaply, retained the right to change their mind for nine million euros, and let somebody else pay his wages and take the risk of him failing.

He did not fail. Paz finished the 2025-26 Serie A season with 12 goals and 6 assists — joint fifth in the division in both columns, at twenty-one — and Como qualified for the Champions League. At that point Madrid exercised the clause, then sold him straight back to Como for sixty million, banking a fifty-one million euro profit on a player they developed, gave up on, and never re-integrated. The new deal carries a fresh buy-back at eighty million.

For the player it worked too, which is the part that gets lost. Paz chose Como. He is a first-choice creator in a Champions League side rather than a squad option in Madrid, and the club just made him the most valuable asset in their history.

There are exactly four attacking midfielders aged 21 or under rated 77 or above in EA FC 26: Nico Paz and Kenan Yıldız at 79, Alejandro Garnacho and Franco Mastantuono at 77. That looks like a small but healthy generation of playmakers.

Then you check where they actually line up. Yıldız is used off the left at Juventus. Garnacho has been a winger at every club that has coached him. Mastantuono has been deployed as a right-sided attacker at Real Madrid. Paz is the one who genuinely occupies the pocket: Cesc Fàbregas plays him as the ten behind the striker in a 4-2-3-1, with licence to drift, and Como's attack is built to feed him there.

So the shortage is sharper than the database suggests. The number ten is not only being produced less — the players still labelled as tens are being moved to the touchline, where their output is easier to measure and a full-back can cover behind them. Paz is close to a controlled experiment in what happens when a club builds for one instead.

The card reads 82 dribbling, 77 passing, 78 pace, and 51 defending. That last number is the honest one: this is not a midfielder who protects anything, and any side that picks him accepts a structural cost for it. Fàbregas pays it because the return is a player who receives with his back to goal in the one zone centre-backs cannot follow him into, and turns.

What separates him from a good Serie A creator is the shooting. Twelve league goals from a number ten is not a creator's return; it is a scorer's, and it came alongside six assists. Very few twenty-one-year-olds in Europe finish a season in the top five of a major league for both. That combination — the volume of a scorer with the position of a playmaker — is why Inter were reported to be preparing something near €58m before Madrid's clause made the situation impossible for anyone else.

He is also, quietly, an Argentina international in a generation that keeps producing this profile and keeps exporting it. We covered that production line in our Argentina list, and in the young midfielders the game still underrates.

Scout Gamer Read — EA FC 26: 79 (DRI 82, PAS 77, SHO 71) — the shooting number is the one that looks wrong after a twelve-goal season. Real-level: top five in Serie A for both goals and assists, at twenty-one, in a Champions League side. Tier: Elite Now.

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