Matvey Safonov is not the goalkeeper Paris Saint-Germain planned on. He was signed as cover, he took the jersey anyway, and two summers later he is still the man standing behind the back-to-back champions of Europe. For a club that has spent a decade buying certainty, that is an unusual way to fill the most exposed position on the pitch.
Here is the story of how the Russian got there, and why the debate about him refuses to die down.
Who is Matvey Safonov?
Safonov is a Russian goalkeeper, born in February 1999, who wears the number 39 shirt at Paris Saint-Germain and is listed among Luis Enrique’s three senior goalkeepers for the 2026/27 season alongside Lucas Chevalier (30) and Alessandro Longoni (16).
He is a product of the FC Krasnodar academy and spent the formative years of his career there, graduating through the club’s much-admired youth setup into the first team and holding down the number one shirt for several seasons before Europe came calling. He arrived in the French capital in the summer of 2024. He is a full Russia international, though the suspension of Russian national teams from UEFA and FIFA competition has kept his international career largely on ice throughout his time in Paris — a quirk that has, at least, meant no long-haul internationals eating into his summers.
The full picture of the squad he sits in is in our guide to the PSG first-team squad for 2026/27.
How he ended up as PSG’s number one
This is the part that surprises people. Safonov did not arrive as the solution; he arrived as the insurance policy.
Lucas Chevalier was signed from Lille to be the long-term answer between the posts, a goalkeeper with a Ligue 1 reputation and the profile Paris wanted. It did not take. Safonov, brought in behind him, got his chance, took it, and never gave the shirt back. Our profile of Lucas Chevalier and how his PSG move unravelled covers the other side of that story.
What makes the situation stranger still is that PSG then failed to move it on. Paris tried and failed to sign Zion Suzuki in the summer of 2026 and found no takers for Chevalier, as PSG Talk reported, leaving the goalkeeping department exactly as it was twelve months earlier. Longoni came in on a free transfer and took the 16 shirt, but nobody has pretended a free signing is an upgrade on the man in possession.
So a club that spent heavily on Maghnes Akliouche, Ferran Torres and Mika Godts went into a Champions League defence with the same goalkeeper it had spent a year trying to replace. Our breakdown of the PSG goalkeeping department lays out how thin the competition really is.
What kind of goalkeeper is he?
Safonov is a shot-stopper first. He is big, he is sharp off his line, and at his best he makes the reaction save a defensive line does not deserve. Krasnodar built a good deal of their resilience on it.
What he has never been is a sweeper-keeper in the Luis Enrique mould, and that is the friction at the heart of his Paris career. This is a manager whose sides push the defensive line high and ask the goalkeeper to operate as an extra outfielder, comfortable receiving under pressure and starting attacks with his feet. Safonov’s distribution is functional rather than a weapon. In a team that dominates the ball as completely as this one does — Paris had 21 shots in the first half alone against Slovan Bratislava on Champions League matchday one — the keeper touches the ball rarely, and when he does the margin for error is small.
Why Matvey Safonov divides Paris right now
Because the season has started badly, and the numbers behind him have not helped. PSG are winless in Ligue 1 after three games — 2-2 at Rennes, 2-2 at Lille, then a 2-1 defeat to Monaco — and sit seven points behind the league leaders. Across that run Safonov conceded six of the nine shots on target he faced, per PSG Talk: almost every clean effort that reached him ended up in the net. L’Equipe were unsparing in their marks after the Monaco game.
Small samples cut both ways, and a goalkeeper who faces three shots a match is judged on a handful of moments in a way an outfield player never is. The counter-argument is that PSG’s high line is designed to concentrate risk in exactly that spot, and if the man behind it is not winning the one-v-ones, the whole structure looks fragile. We went through that argument in full in our piece on the PSG goalkeeper question and the winless start.
What happens next
Nothing, until January at the earliest. The transfer window closed on 1 September 2026 and there is no route back into the market before the winter, which means Luis Enrique’s options are Safonov, a Chevalier he could not sell, or Longoni. In practice, that is not much of a choice.
Paris opened their Champions League defence by putting six past Slovan Bratislava at the Parc des Princes, so the alarm is not sounding across the whole squad — only in one corner of it. Safonov has already answered the question of whether he could take a shirt nobody expected to give him. Whether he can keep it through a third European campaign is the one still open.
