IAN HERBERT: Paris Saint-Germain are putting shirt sales over soul or substance. The purveyors of their beautiful products contend that trophies don’t matter… And that’s why they are serial European flops
- Paris Saint-Germain are the first overseas side to open a club store in the UK
- The Parisians take on Dortmund in the Champions League on Wednesday night
- On a packed train, how DO you ask a celebrity to move from a seat you have reserved? It’s All Kicking Off
Pink matters a great deal to Paris Saint Germain, explains an assistant in the club shop which the team have just opened on London’s Oxford Street.
The colour has been trending this year, she relates. There was Barbie and before that a hit pink Valentino fashion range. So the club’s design people came up with a salmon pink hue for a PSG ‘training kit’ range – high end fashion apparel which you certainly wouldn’t want to get mud on but which is apparently trending.
‘The kids love it,’ the assistant says. ‘Gen Z are going crazy for it and the women want that product because it’s more fashion-focussed.’
If someone asked you which overseas side was the first to open a club store in the UK, you would maybe hazard a guess at Barcelona or Real Madrid – clubs built on football legend borne of legendary European glories.
It’s actually this PSG London store – which opened last month. A place where customers in Arsenal tops will regularly wander in, ‘just looking around because they like the fashion,’ as the assistant puts it. ‘They’re buying for the brand more than the club.’
PSG’s newly opened Oxford Street store is surrounded by some of the biggest retailers in the world
The Parisians are the first overseas side to establish a club shop in the UK, with it being situated just opposite Oxford Circus Station
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And there, in a nutshell, is PSG. A fashion statement. An aesthetic. Beautiful clothes with the beautiful PSG motto ‘ici c’est Paris.’
A motto which was actually thought up by somebody else – a Belgian shopkeeper who sold Parisian perfume in the late 1960s – though that’s a minor inconvenience amid Qatar’s quest to market PSG as ‘Paris’ and recast the club’s name as a lifestyle brand. It’s all a trick of the eye.
On the field of play, Wednesday is set to be a big one for the club. Defeat at Dortmund in the Champions League, and a Newcastle United win at home to Milan, would bring elimination. Not to mention geo-political humiliation for the Qataris, whose envious Saudi neighbours are desperate to steal the football clothes which have burnished the brand in Doha.
Win or lose in north-west Germany, another autumn of struggle on the European stage has borne out the fact that, when you take away the Gulf money, PSG remain the weakest club of the top European cities by a very long way. Munich, London, Milan, Manchester, Madrid, Liverpool are all football temples. Not Paris.
Those of a football disposition would say PSG are style over substance and soul, though the purveyors of their beautiful products, and those who buy them, contend that trophies don’t matter. They point to the numbers. PSG – or ‘Paris’, according to your persuasion – has one of the highest revenues in European football at £562million in 2021/22, according to Deloitte’s Football Money League.
The Oxford Street store dazzles with the names of the brands wanting a cut: Jordan, Balmain, Stussy. For the benefit of the uninitiated, these are the height of fashion, not League Two centre halves.
The tie-up with Michael Jordan’s brand – PSG X Jordan – produces the latest of the PSG fourth kits, predecessors of which have included another PSG ‘hallucinating’ pink of a few years ago. Rarely worn on a football field. Frequently bought.
A three-way collaboration with a cult Miami street artist and a street art paint brand delivers tins of PSG graffiti paint retailing at £120 for three.
A view from inside the PSG store shows the blue and red home strip on display
But it seems the Parisians are putting shirt sales over success on the field, and while they are making a major fashion statement, results in Europe are lacking
‘You might do graffiti art with them’, says the assistant. ‘Or you might just keep them as a collectors’ item.’ They’ve sold a fair few, though the £190 PSG designer deck chair hasn’t shifted.
There’s also a selfie booth to capture yourself among players – an email data capture device for the marketeers. The image I take doesn’t impress my grandson quite as much I’d imagined. He supports Manchester United, PSG, Real Madrid and Argentina. Or at least he did last Sunday.
PSG’s owners believed that football was this easy, too – a simple matter of bringing together Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe and Neymar and watching them create a European colossus. The team have reached just one Champions League final and a solitary semi.
When the Qataris last week sold a minority stake in the club to US investment group Arctos Partners – a deal valuing the club at more than €4bn – the PR propaganda proclaimed it as a means of taking the club to ‘the next level.’ But the Qataris were quick to point out that the Americans will have ‘no control’ over on-field matters.
They don’t seem to see that there’s any problem with their football. ‘You don’t have to win the Champions League to be a successful football club,’ their chief revenue officer Marc Armstrong told the BBC last month. It was an observation to depress any who would take moments of outstanding beauty on a football field over garments of aesthetic value on a clothes rail.
That’s where 12 years of Qatari ownership has brought the club, though, and they cannot even claim to be the most dynamic retailers of pink. Messi, disgruntled and downcast when he left Paris this summer, has been restored to life at Inter Miami in a pink jersey – electric pink, Pantone 1895C to be precise – which radiates his pleasure there. The design – basic in design and hardly brand genius – has become the hottest piece of sports merchandise on the planet.
Wednesday will be a big day for PSG, who take on Dortmund at the Signal Iduna Park
Defeat at Dortmund in the Champions League, and a Newcastle United win at home to Milan, would bring elimination from the tournament
Broadcasters block out Everton fans
Everton’s players have been doing the talking since that extraordinary points deduction but the broadcasters seem to be going to great lengths to ensure that fans aren’t heard.
Sky went to the bizarre extreme of sending its reporter Sanny Rudravajhala to broadcast from the other side of the Mersey, in Wirral, before the match against Newcastle United.
It was also hard to miss the striking lack of shots of the Gwladys Street end, where the protest banners fly, during Amazon Prime’s broadcast of Everton’s win that night.
Everyone will deny that broadcasters are acting on a Premier League request but it certainly looks that way.
Lunch with Jilly Cooper
When I met the writer Jilly Cooper for lunch last year, the idea was that I might shed some light on the world of football, which she was researching at the time, for her novel, Tackle! Turned out she provided the best advice.
‘That sounds a bit gloomy. Write something fun,’ Jilly offered, when I told her of the book I was thinking I might write. I wrote a book about my hometown and team, Wrexham, instead. It was fun.
We met again on Saturday, after Jilly had invited me to watch Wrexham play Forest Green Rovers, her local team, where she has been an ardent supporter and had taken a hospitality box for the day.
Television broadcasters have been trying to block out Everton fans’ protests during matches
Mail Sport’s Ian Herbert met up with journalist and author Jilly Cooper for lunch this weekend
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I was in the last half-hour of the three-hour drive down when the match was called off because of a waterlogged pitch. I’ve known a few postponements. A frozen night at Rochdale’s Spotland lives long in the mind. None have turned to be so fine as Saturday’s.
Lunch went ahead anyway, in the company of Jilly, her family and a few journalists she has come to know, and without the minor inconvenience of kick-off, it was still going on at 4pm when the club wanted to close the box.
Jilly wanted to talk about my book, though hers is the one which has justifiably soared. Having interviewed George Best and Rodney Marsh, the latter of whom flew in from the US for the occasion when Jilly was on This is Your Life, she knew plenty about the game. She spoke to many journalists during her work on Tackle!
Topics we covered on Saturday included Forest Green – where the new manager is David Horseman, much to Jilly’s mirth – and Jack Grealish. ‘I like him a great deal but when he celebrates with his team-mates he’s always looking for the camera.’ She sees fun in football, which is a blessing. That commodity is in painfully short supply.
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