At the intersection of the A13 and A14 motorways outside Paris, a £250million, 74-hectare state-of-the-art training ground, with 17 pitches, is being raised. Quite literally – Paris St-Germain’s vast new facility is being constructed across three levels with an elevation of 150 feet from bottom to top, to represent the journey from joining the club to making it into the first-team. The latter’s facilities will be at its highest point.
Around 800,000 cubic metres of soil alone have been moved just to shape that configuration. To put it scale in perspective, the training ground is more than twice the size of Manchester City’s, which was generally regarded as the best in the world when it opened, and two-and-a-half times that of Tottenham Hotspur’s.
Meanwhile, PSG are also opening their latest academy in Caerphilly, less than 10 miles north of Cardiff. Wales is the 15th country PSG has moved into with 22,000 children attending their sessions, wearing PSG gear, idolising their players and being coached in the “PSG way”. By Easter, there will be 20 academies in England and Wales alone, across cities from Manchester to Brighton.
And, in the week that PSG face Real Madrid in the second leg of their last-16 Champions League tie, it was announced they have become the first football club to open a store in New York. The shop in Fifth Avenue follows on from one in Los Angeles, three in Japan and one in South Korea.
Of course beating Real (they have a 1-0 advantage from the first leg in Paris) is the absolute priority. PSG’s intense ambition is to finally win the Champions League as they also fight to keep Kylian Mbappe and decide whether Mauricio Pochettino – who they kept out of the clutches of Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur last year – will remain as their head coach.
PSG, backed by the financial might of Qatari Sports Investments, is a club with serious global ambitions; one that believes it will eventually become the biggest sports franchise in the world. Not just bigger than football rivals such as Real or Barcelona but bigger than the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees.
“What we are trying to achieve is to make Paris St-Germain the coolest brand in the world in sport,” Fabien Allegre, the club’s brand director, says. “I think that Paris St-Germain is part of the next generation. Of course we have the (tie-ins with the) Jordan brand, we have Dior, but between that we also have collaborations with young, talented designers and artists and are trying to cover all the interests of the youth whether that’s fashion, music, art. It’s all in one. It’s not just about marketing and merchandising, there is the full ecosystem of the big professional football club, its IP.”
