PARIS: Paris has everything—stunning architecture and arguably the best food and fashion in the world. But the French capital lacks one essential element of a modern metropolis: it has no football rivalry. Despite Qatar-owned Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) spending vast sums in recent years assembling a team featuring superstars like Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe, and the club reaching this season’s Champions League semi-finals, the city has never truly been a football crucible. Yet the Paris region is probably the world’s hottest football talent factory. Twenty-nine players from the greater Paris area went to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, including 11 members of the France squad which reached the final, with others representing the likes of Portugal, Cameroon, Tunisia, Senegal and Morocco.

But Paris, the biggest urban area in the European Union with a population over 12 million, has had only one club in France’s top division—PSG—since Racing Paris were relegated 35 years ago. London has seven clubs in the Premier League, while Madrid, Milan, Rome, Barcelona and Athens all boast multiple top-tier teams. That may be about to change thanks to one of the wealthiest families in the world. Bernard Arnault has spent most of the last five years jousting with Elon Musk for the title of richest person on the planet, according to Forbes magazine. The dip in the luxury goods business has seen him recently slip to merely the richest man in Europe, with a estimated fortune of around $190 billion. The founder of LVMH, the luxury goods conglomerate that owns fashion brands like Dior, Louis Vuitton and champagne producer Moet & Chandon has the money and the marketing muscle to move mountains.

The Arnault project

Last November his family took a majority stake in a small club called Paris FC, with his eldest son Antoine—a football fan and former PSG season ticket holder—saying they wanted to turn it into a force to be reckoned with. The family have linked up with former Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp in a bid to take Paris FC from second-tier Ligue 2 into France’s top division and eventually, it is hoped, to the Champions League. “It is an ambitious project but not an unrealistic one,” Arnault insisted, with the club’s logo, featuring the Eiffel Tower, on the wall behind him.

There is only one problem. Average attendances at the club’s Stade Charlety home had been hovering around 3,000 until Paris FC began giving away free tickets. That is a long way off the 47,000 sell-out crowds at PSG. And Charlety, an athletics arena, “is a stadium where you cannot create an atmosphere,” said Klopp, who is now Red Bull’s head of global soccer.

“It has been a long time since I watched a game from that far away,” he declared after watching his first match there. But the Arnaults have plans. Next season the club will move to the Stade Jean-Bouin, across the road from PSG’s home, the Parc des Princes, in the upmarket 16th arrondissement. —AFP

PSG’s backyard

While setting themselves up literally in PSG’s backyard might seem provocative, Antoine Arnault, 47, is typically smooth about the positioning. “You will never hear me say anything negative about PSG,” he said. Instead, he said, they want to tap the Paris region’s rich seam of young footballing talent.

“We want to build a team where we will have five, six, seven or even eight players who have come through the youth academy,” said Antoine Arnault, whose brothers and elder sister, Delphine, are also involved. France can currently field almost an entire team of Parisian players, including captain Mbappe and Premier League stars Ibrahima Konate—who was at Paris FC as a youth—and William Saliba.

Like Thierry Henry, Paul Pogba and others before them, they crafted their skills on the streets and pitches of the city and its grittier suburbs, called the “banlieues”. “The Paris region represents the perfect convergence between a real hothouse football environment and access to excellent facilities and coaching,” said Tom Williams, author of “Va Va Voom: The Modern History of French Football”. – AFP