Paris has everything: impressive architecture and argument The best food and fashion in the world. But the French capital lacks an essential element of a modern metropolis: it has no football rivalry.
Despite the fixed expense of Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), owned by Qatar, in recent years, who gathered a team with superstars Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe, and the club that reaches the standing forests of the League of the Champions this season, the values of the city, the footstest, the photsbinals, the finals of the final The photos of the photos.
However, the Paris region is likely that the most popular football talent factory in the world.
Twenty -nine players from the Gran Paris area went to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, including 11 members of the France team that reached the final, with others that represent people such as Portugal, Cameroon, Tunisia, Senegal and Morocco.
But Paris, the largest urban area of the European Union with a population of more than 12 million, has only had a club in the Superior Division of France, PSG, since the Paris races were relegated 35 years ago.
London has seven clubs in the Premier League, while Madrid, Milan, Rome, Barcelona and Athens have multiple first level teams.
That can be about to change thanks to one of the richest families in the world.
Bernard Arnault has spent most of the last five years in the appointment with Elon Musk for the richest person title on the planet, according to Forbes magazine.
The fall in the luxury products business has recently seen it slide to simply the richest man in Europe, with an estimated fortune of around $ 190 billion.
The founder of LVMH, the conglomerate of luxury products that owns fashion brands such as Dior, Louis Vuitton and the producer of Champagne Moet & Chandon have money and marketing muscle to the mountains.
The Arnault project
Last November, his family tok a majority participation in a small club called Paris FC, with his eldest son Antoine, a football fan and former PSG season ticket holders, saying that they become a force to take into account.
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The family has been linked to the former manager of Liverpool, Jurgen Klopp, in an attempt to take Paris FC of the second level to the superior division of France and any life, is expected, to the Champions League.
“It is an ambitious project but not a reluctant,” Arnault insisted, with the club’s logo, with the Eiffel Tower, on the wall behind him.
There is only one problem.
The average assists in Charlety Stade’s house had been around 3000 until Paris FC Been giving free tickets. That is far from the 47,000 amounted crowds in the PSG.
And Charlety, an athletic sand, “is a stadium where you can’t create an atmosphere,” said Klopp, who is now the world football head of Red Bull.
“It has been a long time since I saw a game from so far away,” he said after watching his first game there.
But Arnaults have plans. Next season, the club will move to Stade Jean-Bouin, on the other side of the road from PSG’s house, the Parc Des Princes, in the 16th district of luxury.
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PSG backyard
While literally settling in the PSG backyard may seem provocative, Antoine Arnault, 47, is usually soft about positioning.
“You’ll never hear me anything negative about the PSG,” he said.
Instead, he said, they want to take advantage of the rich seam of young football talents in the Paris region.
“We want to build a team where we have five, six, seven or even eight players who have passed through the Youth Academy,” said Antoine Arnault, whose brothers and older sister, Delphine, are also involved.
Currently, France can present almost a complete team of Parisian players, including Captain MBAPPE and the Premier League stars, Ibrahima Konate, who was in Paris FC as a young man, and William Saliba.
Like Thierry Henry, Paul Pogba and others before them, they developed their skills in the streets and launches of the city and their most sandy suburbs, called “Banlieues”.
“The Paris region repeats Perfe’s convergence between a real hay football environment and access to excellent facilities and training,” said Tom Williams, author or “Vom Vom: the modern story of French football.”
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Hothouse suburbs
It has almost 330,000 registered players, more than the number of rugby players throughout the country, with more than 5,000 technical staff plus 27,000 volunteers.
Read more: Why is rugby in France seeing a boom in popularity?
Its training structure has developed an exceptional football level at the youth level, said Paris’s president Jamel Sandjak.
“It’s very strong in terms of quality,” he told AFP.
The multicultural composition of the banlieues, with large populations of first, second and third general immigrants of the former colonies of France in North and West Africa, is key for why football thrives there, Sandjak said.
The PSG team currently presents a matter of Parisian talent, but last year the Talismán Mbappe lost, from the Bandy Banlieue, to Real Madrid.
Recently they pointed out the intention to concentrate more on making local players, but Paris FC hopes to overcome their neighbors.
“It is so much our dream to become the best youth academy in France someday as being a French champion and playing in Europe,” said Club President Pierre Ferracci, who will remain until 2027 under the agreement with the Arnaults and Red Bull.
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“The dream is perhaps one day to resemble the Masia,” said the Legendary Academy of Barcelona, which produced Messi, Pep Guardiola and many more players.
The financial power of the Arnault family is such that they could repeat what the Qatar did in the PSG, but insist that it will not be the approach.
“We don’t tend to throw our money out the window,” said Antoine Arnault.
‘The planets aligned’
The arrival of the family to Paris FC did not happen completely by design, experts say. Antoine Arnault was informed that Ferracci was looking to sell shares.
“Then the planets aligned themselves unlikely,” said a source with knowledge of the acquisition to the AFP. Red Bull united strength with Arnaults by acquiring 11 percent.
The Giant of Austrian energy drinks is an important player in football with players such as Red Bull Salzburg, New York Red Bulls and RB Leipzig in Germany.
Ferracci, 72, is confident that the Arnaults brand and Red Bull football is a winning formula.
“Red Bull can bring us a lot from the sports side. The family can bring a lot in terms of managing the brand,” he said.
Williams also believes they can achieve it.
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“Paris, the city might not seem like an authentic football place, but Parisian suburbs are full of children who are in football,” he said.
“With the right support son and a reflective marketing, particularly with respect to how the PSG tremors differentiate, a second great Parisian club could be a great success.”
Past warning
But the PSG is at this time as a contenders of the Royal Champions League, having secured its 13th French title in two time.
The rich men have already tried and have failed to break their dominance of the French capital.
In the 1980s, the conglomerate of businessman Jean-Luc Lagarardere Mata Tok on a single French champion racing club, moving them from the suburbs to the princes Parcics. But they could not establish themselves in the highest category.
Lagarder “had great ambitions, but I wanted too much, too soon,” said Williams.
“Speaking to the club brought glamor and short -term success, but it was unsustainable and coupled by a failure to attract a base of loyal admirers, at the same time, led to the disappearance of the club.”
In fact, some doubt whether there is enough football passion in Paris to support a second top -level soccer club.
Unlike other parts of Europe, French cities tend not to have more than a higher team.
Patrick Mignon, sociologist and former employee of the National Sports Institute, Experience and Performance of France, said: “Football clubs tended to be more provincial. In Paris, people had different habits.”
The PSG was created in the early 1970s to fill the football vacuum, its red and blue kit created by fashion designer Daniel Hechter, one of the first president of the club.
And both clubs share the same origins. Paris FC was formed in 1969, fusing quickly with a team from the Saint-Germain suburb to form PSG.
But they separated in 1972, with the Paris FC relegated in 1974. Only one season has passed in the highest category since then, and it was only in the last decade that they became regular customers in Ligue 2.
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Even if they are promoted to Ligue 1 this season, which seems increasingly likely, Paris FC is very in the shadow of PSG, with many of its fans disenchanted to former PSG supporters.
Maxnce Glevarec, 33, spokesman for his group of supporters of Ultras Lutetia, said they hope that Paris FC does not follow the PSG in “Buy Trophies.”
“Most people do not want the club to come out and firm great stars. We want this to bring young players” that come from Paris, he said.
Red Romantics Red
But there is another side of the Paris football identity just across the peripheral, the Ring Road that separates Paris from its suburbs.
Read more: Why is Paris Péripherrique more than a ring path?
Red Star in Saint Oueen, home of the famous famous market where the super fictional thought Ursene Lupin is based in the Netflix homonymous series, has a left and hipster loyal that remains in the same mold as St Pauli in Germany.
The club won the France Cup five times between 1921 and 1942, but these days it struggles to remain in Ligue 2 while dreaming with a return to the upper division, which the last time it appeared half a century ago.
Red Star represses the department of Sena-Saint-Denis, called “93” for its postal code, and known for its large immigrant population, poverty and football.
“I think the future of football is in the suburbs, in 93,” said the supreme Paris Football Sandjak.
“That’s where the heart of football is. We are the number one region, but the number one department within region number one is 93.”
The great hero of Red Star is Rino Della Negra, a legendary striker and son of immigrants who became a communist French resistance fighter, Door War II, before being executed by the Germans in 1944.
But late, their Paris FC rivals have tasks to make fun of them for the growing number of “fools” – French snake for Bourgeois Bohemian – from within Paris that are now found on the terraces.
“We are the artist, workers, young people club … and that is the good thing about that. We are a multicultural club,” said the general manager of Red Star, Pauline Gamerre.
“This is one of the greatest clubs in France. We have won things, there is an identity, a feeling of belonging.”
But despite all their romantic and egalitarian rhetoric, Red Star fans have no voice in how their club runs and many are deeply unhappy with their owners.
An acquisition of the US Private Investment Group.
“We can all be quite idealistic, but there is also an economic reality,” Gamerre admitted when asked about the opposition of fans to the owners.
Gamerre believes that Red Star can become “a solid Ligue 1 club”, establishing a derby to savor with PSG football aristocrats.
But for now there are no saviors in sight.
Paris FC, however, has the Arnaults and Red Bull, and the promotion in their sight. Only time will say if their rich sponsors will give them wings.
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