PARIS — The French soccer powerhouse Paris St.-Germain acknowledged Thursday that for the past five years some of its scouts had used racial profiling in the recruitment of young players, hours after a news media report that it was part of an effort to limit the number of black players signed by the club.

The charges of discrimination were outlined in a report by Mediapart, which is part of a European investigative journalism collective that has used a trove of hacked documents to produce a series of articles on the internal workings of several top European soccer clubs. On Thursday, Mediapart published scouting reports it said were used by P.S.G. recruiters from 2013 until earlier this year to evaluate young players; along with evaluating a player’s physical and technical skills, scouts were asked to check a box noting each player’s “origin.”

The club, which has been transformed into a global force by its Qatari owners in the past decade, claimed senior officials had no knowledge of the racial profiling program. P.S.G. blamed the form, and the system, on an ex-employee responsible for leading a team that recruited players from outside of the Paris region.

P.S.G. said it began an internal investigation into the profiling last month — “as soon as it was informed” about the tracking of players’ ethnicities — even as it acknowledged the form had been in use for years.