Qatar’s PSG mission has been accomplished with Champions League win. Now what?

MUNICH, Germany — Paris Saint Germain’s Champions League win means the club, and the city, are now (even more) officially on the football map. Now what?

Saturday night’s 5-0 humiliation of Inter wasn’t just PSG’s initiation into the big time, but it also opens new horizons for just where this club might go. (They’ve spent a lot of money over the past decade and while they have some big individual wins, they were seen as somewhat JV until the big silverware was claimed on Saturday night.)

When Qatari Sports Investments (QSI) bought the club in 2011 and chairman Nasser Al-Khelaifi started spending big, conventional wisdom in the football community was that it was some combination of PR/soft power exercise with a view toward burnishing the gulf nation’s image ahead of the 2022 World Cup. Well, that has come and gone. Then it became about proving that the “project” could work and deliver the game’s biggest prize. That’s done and dusted too.

So where to now? Does QSI double down, or perhaps, with their “mission” accomplished, does it decide to get out altogether?

We’ll get back to that in a minute, but it’s important to understand what QSI has done for Paris, viewed through the football lens.

I don’t mean to offend the City of Lights, here. It’s just that, for a very long time, relative to the game’s traditional football capitals, football really wasn’t that much of a thing there. Yes, Paris is where FIFA was founded and yes, this is where Pele scored that remarkable goal in “Escape to Victory.” But folks, FIFA was formed in 1904 and soon moved to Zurich (no, that’s not a football hub either) while the iconic Pele goal never actually happened because it was a movie plot point.

The fact of the matter is that France has produced just one other European champion, Marseille, and lest we forget, they were found guilty of match-fixing domestically, had titles stripped and were forcibly relegated. As a nation, they won only one other European trophy: PSG won the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1995-96, putting it on a par with … Dinamo Tbilisi, Mechelen and Magdeburg.

France as a whole hasn’t historically punched its weight in club football and within France, the city of Paris hasn’t punched its weight either. True, Paris Saint Germain has won the most domestic titles (13), but before the QSI takeover in 2011, the city as a whole had won just three: two with PSG (1985-86 and 1993-94), and one with Racing Club Paris in 1935-36. The dominant domestic forces were far from the capital: Marseille, Monaco and Lyon to the south, Bordeaux and Nantes to the west.

Oh and this whole thing whereby Paris is some sort of hotbed of football talent, producing an endless stream of gifted players? That’s a relatively recent phenomenon, too. Of the 12 most capped players for the French national team, just one (Thierry Henry) is from the Paris area, and of their 10 highest scorers, just two (Henry and Kylian Mbappé) are from the capital.

What changed? QSI’s acquisition of PSG was obviously a major driver, but not the only one. Sure, they pumped tons of money into the club — breaching Financial Fair Play rules multiple times and being forced into settlement agreements by UEFA’s Club Financial Control Body. But the club also inherited the vast stockpile of gifted youngsters on their doorstep; they’re not responsible for Paris becoming an endless pipeline of young talent, and it took them a while to appreciate just what they had. Before the decision to lean on talented youngsters, many of them locally developed, they went down a cul-de-sac of pricey, ready-made stars (from Zlatan Ibrahimovic to Neymar to Lionel Messi) hoping to assemble a juggernaut of big names that would deliver on the pitch and off.

Things absolutely worked off the pitch, though how much is down to the star factor and how much down to some very smart commercial folks at the club is a matter of debate. PSG’s revenues rocketed to more than €800m ($900m) — and no, not all of them are the result of sponsorship deals with Qatari-owned companies for allegedly inflated amounts that led to three separate UEFA investigations, which is a similar battle for Manchester City with the Premier League — and the club became a legitimate global brand. The number of PSG jerseys worn around the world by folks who wouldn’t know the Parc des Princes from the Park and Ride has grown exponentially and today they are near-ubiquitous, especially among the hip and hip-adjacent.

On the pitch, not so much, and certainly not in terms of bang for buck when you consider the vast amounts shelled out. Over the past five seasons, PSG’s losses amounted to nearly a billion dollars (COVID obviously had an impact too, but that’s a hefty sum) far outstripping every other club, bar Barcelona. But last season they diminished significantly (a manageable €56m or around $63m) and this year, they might even break even.

Part of it comes from reshaping the squad by moving on players with high salaries, part of it is working the transfer market and the magic of amortization (in other words, spreading transfer fees out across the length of a player’s contract to minimize the annual hit on the balance sheet). Beyond that, a lot of it is simply betting on youth because even pricey young signings tend to be cheaper than older ones, simply because they earn less money.

We can debate to what degree the shift away from the Mbappé-Messi-Neymar Era was part of a calculated football-strategy or driven by necessity. Al-Khelaifi called the youth-driven approach part of “the project” before the Champions League Final — the question is whether it became “the project” after the 2022 settlement agreement with UEFA for breaching FFP rules forced them to curb their free-spending ways or face more punishment. What’s not in question is that the books suddenly start to look good too. (Winning the Champions League while no long responsible for Mbappé’s enormous wages helps, as does the fact that the squad is packed with younger players, who don’t yet command huge salaries: the equivalent of winning the Super Bowl with a bunch of guys still on their rookie contracts.)

They established the global brand, they’ve delivered the biggest prize, they move the club closer to sustainability, and they even helped convert Paris into a proper football town. (We know this last point because France’s richest man, luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault, and the Red Bull Group have teamed up to invest in another Parisian club, Paris FC, which was promoted to the top flight this year. Oh, and the two teams play barely a quarter-mile apart.) It took a ton of cash, but that’s not nothing. That’s an achievement.

With all this in mind, might Qatar and QSI decide it’s time to up sticks? They can legitimately argue they turned PSG into a giant who can maintain its status even without them and may even be sustainable, with some smart ownership. Possibly even profitable, if the French league sorts out its TV deals or if the Super League sirens return.

Stay tuned. Al-Khelaifi, no doubt, wants to stick around. Whether the folks in Doha feel the same way — or whether they now want to turn their attention somewhere else — might be a different story.