PSG ready to take the final step towards achieving global goal
Champions League success a must to reach owners’ targets French club want to be in world’s top three sports brands
The first words in the preface to
Paris Saint Germain: Backstage – a huge coffee-table style tome chronicling the first few years of the Qatari ownership – come from the club’s captain, Thiago Silva. “We aim to be the greatest club in Europe,” the defender writes. “The huge target set by the club is to win the Champions League.”
If PSG beat Bayern Munich in tomorrow’s Champions League final that target will have been met in what will also, probably, be Silva’s last game for the club he joined in 2012 from AC Milan along with Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The 35-yearold Brazilian is out of contract.
Back then, PSG would have expected to have been in a Champions League final before now or – as executives at the club put it – to have survived the “cut” of reaching the last four. Contrary to popular opinion, no club – and that includes Manchester City – demand their manager win the Champions League, but what those who have ambitions to be the biggest and most successful do ask for is to be in contention to the end. That means consistently being in the last four.
This season, PSG have gone beyond the quarter-finals for the first time and coming from behind to defeat Atalanta, with two late goals, appears to have lifted a psychological weight from a group of highly-paid players who previously stood accused of being a bunch of under-performing and over-indulged individuals epitomised by the world’s most expensive acquisition: Neymar. “Advancing to the latter stages of the Champions League is necessary in order to give credibility to our project,” coach Thomas Tuchel says.
However, winning the Champions League has become an obsession at PSG – perhaps more so than at any other club. “This chapter of our story isn’t finished until we win the Champions League,” says sporting director Leonardo in a recently
published case study – Paris Saintgermain: Building One of the
World’s Top Sports Brands – by the Harvard Business School. “We can pretend that winning the Champions League is not a goal that occupies our thoughts, but it is. We have to concentrate on results on the field – this is the time.” If this is the time then it is a key moment for PSG, who have an overall aim that goes far beyond being European champions and one that president Nasser Al-khelaifi articulates in an interview with Harvard Professor Anita Elberse as part of the study.
“Winning the Champions League
No club have pursued opportunities in the way they have in retail, culture and fashion
is certainly a goal we set ourselves,” Al-khelaifi says. “And we want to become one of the world’s top three sports brands. I deliberately say ‘sports’ and not ‘soccer’ – we have big ambitions.”
In a previous interview with The
Daily Telegraph, PSG’S deputy chief executive, Jean-claude Blanc, went one step further and declared that the club’s aim was “to be the biggest sports franchise in the world”. That means not just overtaking Barcelona, Real Madrid, Manchester United and Bayern – the five football clubs ahead of them in terms of revenue – but outstripping the likes of American football giants the Dallas Cowboys and baseball’s New York Yankees.
One of PSG’S slogans is Revons
Plus Grand and no one is dreaming bigger or, possibly, have the potential to become a dominant force in the way that they do. Kylian Mbappe – their other major star – has hit back at jibes over the strength of Ligue 1 by mocking the “Farmers League” criticism, but Qatari Sports Investment did not buy PSG nine years ago to only dominate domestically. There have been 23 trophies since, including seven league titles, but the Champions League is the one that matters. It is the one that brings the greatest credibility, kudos and vindication.
QSI’S investment was hugely strategic. Concerns are understandably raised over effectively a stateowned club being in the biggest showpiece in club football – last year’s final drew an audience of 400million across 200 countries – with human rights and sportswashing also under scrutiny. But QSI’S purchase for €70 million (£62.8 million) came with the clear business plan of turning PSG into a sports franchise worth €3billion, which is partly why Paris was chosen.
It is a remarkable anomaly that a city with 12 million residents has just one professional football club (London has 13), and one who have only been in existence for 50 years and have never won the European Cup. PSG is Paris. It is partly why the club are referred to, more and more, as simply Paris and why the logo was redesigned to accentuate the city name more than the words ‘Saint-germain’, while no club in world football have ambitiously and imaginatively pursued commercial opportunities the way they have in retail, culture and fashion.
PSG’S deal with Nike is one of the three biggest in the world and they sell more than a million shirts a season – with more than half outside France. Twenty per cent of the fans who flock to the 48,000-capacity Parc des Princes come from abroad, while shops were opened in Los Angeles and Tokyo. The club want “PSG” to stand for Paris in the way “NY” (and the New York Yankees logo) is synonymous with New York. “We are not trying to be Real Madrid or FC Barcelona – as a young club, we don’t yet have the trophies and history they do – but we are ambitious, we have many of the world’s best players, and we can rely on having Paris in our DNA,” says PSG’S chief partnerships officer, Marc Armstrong, in the Harvard study. “That is what makes us different, and what makes us appealing to global brands.”
Tomorrow, all that matters is on the pitch. Earlier this year, Alkhelaifi set the target of winning the Champions League within five seasons and PSG are one game away from doing that – something they believe they would have achieved by now with their financial might but for Uefa’s financial fair play constraints. Whether it leads to an era of dominance is unlikely – such things tend not to exist in modern football – but it will undoubtedly strengthen and elevate PSG further, which will be a huge concern to the traditional European superpowers they aim to overtake.