If Paris Saint-Germain beats Bayern Munich in the Champions League final in Lisbon, the photographs will be tears of Neymar’s joy or wild party scenes in the French capital, but enjoying the glory of everything will be the emir of Qatar.
The club’s first appearance at the last European elite club festival came the month when it celebrated its 50th anniversary, but was the starting point for all this 30 June 2011.
It was at this time that Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) bought the PSG, along with its president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, promising to make the club “a wonderful team and a strong logo on the foreign scene.”
Picture: AFP
There is no doubt that QSI has been successful, even if Qatar criticizes the motivations of the small gas-rich country that protrudes from the Arabian desert.
PSG recently earned its seventh Ligue 1 name in 8 seasons and their fourth national treble in six years.
Now, after part of a dozen seasons of disappointing performances on the continental stage, they have reached the biggest and most prestigious club game of all.
Picture: Reuters
“Since we got here, the Champions League has been our dream and we are about to do so,” he told Khelaifi after the team beat RB Leipzig in the semi-finals.
Wonderful PSG before QSI: Under the ownership of French pay-TV giant Canal Plus in the 1990s, with stars like George Weah, they won the league in 1994 and reached the champions semi-finals of the Champions League a year later. They won their only European trophy to date, the European Cup Winners’ Cup, in 1996.
However, in 2011, this club is in a desperate situation.
They had just finished fourth in Ligue 1, but a year earlier they were 13th. Crowds at the Parc des Princes declined when the club stopped promoting tickets to members of two rival amateur teams due to vandalism issues.
Under Khelaifi, PSG is another club.
It took them only two years to succeed in fifth place in deloitte’s Football Money League. Its sales in 2012-13 were just under 400 million euros (471 million U.S. dollars), having quadrupled in a short period of time under QSI. In front of them only Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern and Manchester United sat.
This season, PSG returned to the Champions League after an eight-year absence and earned its first name in Ligue 1 of the Qatar era. They made the signature of David Beckham’s marquee. Large industrial agreements have been signed with the Qatar Tourism Authority and Qatari cell phone provider Ooredoo.
The latest figures from Deloitte place it in fifth place with a turnover of 635.9 million euros.
The PSG has incurred the two highest movement fees in history, signing Neymar from Barcelona for 222 million euros and Kylian Mbappé of Monaco for one million euros in 2017.
The club has spent a total of around 1.3 billion euros on moving fees during those nine years.
In terms of football, it’s about succeeding on the pitch, but QSI passes and Qatar’s participation motivations go much further.
QSI’s rudimentary online page speaks of a vision “to be identified worldwide as the leading company in sports, recreation and entertainment investments in Qatar and abroad.”
The PSG election, founded in one of Europe’s largest and most glamorous cities, is a way for Qatar to expand its logo following its success at the 2022 World Cup.
“It’s about the brand, the attachment to the prestigious tournaments on the one hand, and the glamorous and successful clubs on the other,” said Nicholas McGeehan, director of Fair Square Projects, who is a prominent researcher and advocate. migrant staff in the Gulf.
For McGeehan, the good luck of the PSG will be definitively reflected in Qatar and Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
“In terms of the prestige of the emir, it has a huge political advantage. Their political capital will soar among the Qataris,” he said.