50 years of PSG: A look back at the rise of France’s wealthiest club

Paris Saint-German (PSG) began life as the result of a merger between amateur side Stade Saint-Germain (to which the club owes its iconic white colour and the fleur-de-lys logo) and Paris FC, a club that barely existed, without a manager or a stadium to its name. The newborn club was run by businessmen Guy Crescent, Pierre-Étienne Guyot and Henri Patrelle. Their aim? To create an elite club for Paris that would slide straight into Ligue 1.

Faced with opposition from other clubs, that wasn’t quite the case, but it didn’t take long for Paris Saint-Germain FC to claim the Ligue 2 title in only its first season and launch itself into Ligue 1.

Victory was short-lived: the city of Paris threatened to remove its financial support unless the club changed its name to Paris Football Club, permanently stripping it of its Saint-Germain-en-Laye roots.  The former Stade Saint-Germain president and then PSG vice president Henri Patrelle was furious and staunchly refused. 

But Paris’s town hall stood firm, and in May 1972, the club was split in two again. Businessman Guy Crescent left with Paris FC, which retained its position in Ligue 1. Patrelle took Paris Saint-Germain, now having lost all of its star players and been relegated to the third division.

Starting anew with a fresh line-up of young but talented players, PSG accelerated through the third division and narrowly made it to the top spot. In one quick season, PSG was back on top in Ligue 2.

For its first three years Paris Saint-Germain was fan-owned, embracing the Spanish socios style of ownership. That all changed in 1973, when a group of wealthy French businessmen bought up Paris Saint-Germain after its promotion, led by French couturier Daniel Hechter and businessman Francis Borelli.

The Hechter-Borelli years

The period between 1973 and 1991 was when the club began to find its footing – even as it was accruing debt. PSG returned to Ligue 1 in 1974 (while Paris FC dropped down the league tables) and moved into its stadium Parc des Princes. In 1978, Borelli took over the presidency of the club, following Hechter’s life ban from football after being found guilty of financial corruption.

It was in the late ‘70s that Paris Saint-Germain began flirting with politics, and the club’s story and that of a future French president started to intertwine. Jacques Chirac became mayor of Paris in 1977 and saw in football political promise: Jean Tiberi, the Paris mayor who succeeded him, told Le Monde, “Jacques Chirac had realised that the crowd in a football stadium represented a social study of Paris residents – even if just the fact of going to a stadium doesn’t change a vote”.    

Borelli courted Chirac, who promised funding for the club and took advantage of photo opportunities in the Parc des Princes. Meanwhile, Borelli was mismanaging the club, driving it into financial ruin. He was eventually forced to resign.

The ‘Golden Era’

Rescue came in the form of Canal+, a French TV channel that saved the club from bankruptcy in 1991. The city of Paris oiled the wheels of this transition by wiping the club’s 50-million-franc debt, (€1.4 million).

Canal+’s ownership heralded the start of the club’s glitzy reputation. Politicians, actors and other stars went to the Parc des Princes to see and be seen. The ‘90s is also when PSG really began to appear as a heavyweight in French football. In 1994, the team sailed to the top of Ligue 1, and the year after lifted the Coupe de France and the Coupe de la Ligue. The club won the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup in 1996 and reached the UEFA Champions League semi-final once and the UEFA Cup semi-finals twice that decade.

Hooliganism

But there was a shadow on the beautiful game at the turn of the century. British hooliganism had started to permeate French football, and the club’s rivalry with the Marseille team Olympique de Marseille (OM) began to degrade into violence. Canal+ agreed with OM owner Bernard Tapie to fuel the fire of animosity between the clubs in order to get more viewers. Football matches were marked by violence, racism, insults and anti-Semitism. Two Parisian fans, Julien Quemener and Yann Lorence, died in clashes outside matches - in 2006 and 2010, respectively - and French authorities started to ban certain groups of supporters from attending matches.

The club’s star started to wane again and it slipped down the league tables. Debt was accumulating. It seemed inevitable that Canal+ would let the club go. After a period when the club was owned by a pension fund, the next acquisition came from an unlikely source: Qatar.  

The rule of Qatar

In June 2011, the ruler of Qatar bought a 70 percent stake in the club’s shares. Tamin bin Hamad Al Thani became a majority shareholder through the state-owned organisation Qatar Sports Investments (QSI). By 2012, QSI bought up the remaining 30 percent stake, instantly turning PSG into one of the wealthiest clubs in the world.

That money was immediately funneled into turning around the club’s fortunes. PSG has now become synonymous with lavish spending and high-profile signings, taking on Zlatan Ibrahimović and Thiago Silva in 2012 and David Beckham and Edinson Cavani the year after.

In 2017, the Qatari owners opened their wallets once again to transfer Brazilian footballer Neymar from Barcelona in the most expensive transfer ever at €222 million. The same year the club signed the 18-year-old Kylian Mbappé in the most expensive deal for a teenage player ever at a rumoured €145 million.  

That money has turned the club into the 11^th most valuable football team, according to Forbes, and has secured its place at the top of the game, bringing it in 2020, for the first time ever, to the UEFA Champions League final.