Rise and fall of a Paris superclub
The transfer fee was eye-catching, the salary eye-watering and the impact jaw-dropping. It seemed to be the move and the moment that signalled a power shift, a change in soccer’s established order. One of the brightest South American talents of his generation, heralded as the next best player in the world, moving to a rising force in Paris, drawn by money and glamour to a club long on cash and short on patience.
Thirty years later, Neymar would have much the same effect, the Brazilian turned into the most expensive player on the planet by the untrammelled ambition of Paris Saint-Germain. But he was not the first to follow that path.
Six years before Neymar was born, in the summer of 1986, Enzo Francescoli, the Uruguayan forward known as El Principe, blazed the trail when he was snared by another club that believed it could combine the allure of Paris with apparently bottomless wealth to create, almost from scratch, a team of superstars. Before Neymar, before PS G, there was Matra Racing de Paris.
It would be too simple to present the grand project—fuel led by Qatari money—at PS Gas simply a repeat of Racing’s boom and bust in the 1980s. The differences are too pronounced for the parallel to hold.
Racing’s benefactor, the industrialist Jean-Luc Lagardère, saw soccer as away to win personal glory and commercial advantage; PS G’s owners have turned the club into a pawn in a geopolitical game.
Lagardère’s ambitions were strictly domestic. The chairman of the Matra conglomerate— which made everything from magazines to missiles — he dreamed of restoring Racing, one of the oldest clubs in France, to its 1930s heyday, when it was crowned national champion and had a reputation for impossible luxury. The modern P.S.G. is not concerned with Ligue 1. Instead, it gauges its strength on a higher stage. Its season will not be defined by a mere parochial triumph, but by whether it can overcome Real Madrid to earn a place in the quarterfinals of the Champions League.
And the sums and salaries Qatar Sports Investment, PS G’s financial engine, has lavished on the likes of Neymar and Kylian Mbappé over the last seven years dwarf anything Lagardère ever spent: When Francescoli joined, just before the 1986 World Cup, he was paid 700,000 francs a month, given a house in Montmartre and presented with a Peugeot 205. Neymar, presumably, drives something a little more impressive.
But there is an inescapable echo of Racing’s story in the very modern revolution at a club with which it once shared a stadium. If it is not a parallel, then perhaps it serves asap ar able, an example from which PS G might learn. After all, it is not just deploying the same methods Racing used three decades ago; it is under the same pressures, running the same risks. “Patience does not exist in Paris,” said Alain De Martigny, once Lagardère’s coach at Racing. “We are much more in the spotlight than elsewhere in France. It has always been like that. A team in Paris cannot be average.”
A grand experiment
Lagardère’s grand experiment began in 1982. He had already enjoyed considerable success in auto and horse racing when he turned his attentions to soccer, hoping to merge Racing and another Paris club, Paris F.C., to create a rival for the still relatively young PS G His initial plan was rejected; in the end, he had to make do with buying Paris F.C. and simply renaming it Racing, before the formal merger went through a year later.
The new team started life in France’s second division, but Lagardère had no time to waste. He set about building a team capable of winning promotion. “The recruitment was impressive for a secondtier team,” the midfielder Fathi Chebel said. “Our team was first-division quality, and De Martigny was one of the most valued coaches in France.”
Lagardère’s first coup came in 1983, when he managed to persuade Rabah Madjer, an Algerian striker of considerable promise, to join his club, then still in the second division. “He was a spectacular player,” De Martigny said. “His transfer was like Neymar’s to PS G”
Chebel has “splendid memories” of that period, culminating in promotion in 1984; he describes a team where many of the players were friends, all living in the same areas: Colombes, near Racing’s atmospheric old stadium — Lagardère would install the team in PS G’s Par cd es Princes not long after taking charge — and Maisons-Laffitte.
Six of his teammates lived in the same apartment block as him. “Once a week, a player had to organise something and we would all go out together to a restaurant or a concert,” he said. Lagardère encouraged the bonhomie, but also treated his players to lavish dinners. His wife, Chebel said, often brought gifts for the players’ partners.