Are you impressed? Seriously: Does anything that's happened at Paris Saint-Germain over the past 10-plus years impress you? The club, at least, believes you should be.
"After so many games and emotional moments, Paris Saint-Germain have recorded some crazy statistics over the last ten years: 1314 goals scored in 553 official matches, with 399 victories and 258 clean sheets," wrote an anonymous author ("CLUB") for the official PSG site in a summer of 2021 post titled "QSI - 10 years already!"
The post continued: "The Paris Saint-Germain men's team have, since 2011, won 27 trophies: 7 times French league champions (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019 and 2020), 6 Coupes de France (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021), 6 Coupes de la Ligue (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2020), 8 Trophées des champions (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020). Crazy numbers that have led the club from the capital to becoming the French club with the most trophies."
Here's another crazy number: €1.1 billion, or how much PSG have spent on net transfer fees alone since the Qatari takeover, per Transfermarkt.
Only Manchester United have spent more, but we're not really concerned with continental rivals because PSG haven't won anything outside of France. Inside of France, Marseille have been the second most free-spending side since 2011, doling out a relatively minuscule €170 million on net transfer fees...
... and that's just the money spent to pay the players to play for PSG.
According to the estimated wage data from FBref, PSG's current annual wage bill is somewhere around €387 million -- by far the largest in the world and more than seven-times bigger than their closest domestic competitor, Marseille and their €52 million.
If you had a comparatively unlimited financial resources, you -- yes, you -- could have accomplished what QSI have done at PSG since 2011. As we saw against Bayern Munich on Wednesday, all they've really built is a paycheck clearing house for big-name soccer players. This isn't a team. It's just a group of random dudes wearing Jordan-brand jerseys with a massive QATAR AIRWAYS logo on the front.
What is the point of PSG?
At the 1960 Olympics in Rome, France won just two medals: one silver and one bronze. Embarrassed by the results, president Charles De Gaulle devoted significant state resources to improving France's international athletic performance. "Although money and energy were initially devoted to Olympic sports, a nationwide framework of state support, financial subvention and technocratic guidance of elite and grassroots sports was established and would provide the infrastructural and ideological backbone of France's formidable youth training programmes of the 1970s and 1980s," David Goldblatt writes in "The Ball Is Round."
This pivot toward organization, infrastructure and investment in talent ultimately turned France into the global football powerhouse it is today. Every World Cup we see alternate starting XIs of French-born stars that play for other countries and French-eligible players who didn't make the roster. Karim Benzema is the reigning Ballon d'Or winner ... and France has reached the past two World Cup finals without him playing a single minute at either tournament.
As the profile of the national team began to grow, so too did what we now know as Ligue 1.
Given the industrial origins of most of Europe's great clubs, the French soccer boom kicked off without a top-tier club in cosmopolitan Paris. So, a group of local businessmen, led by fashion designer Daniel Hechter, created their own by fusing Paris FC with Stade Sangermanois in the early 1970s. Hechter eventually resigned over a ticketing scandal and was replaced with Francisco Borelli, who created French football's first executive boxes, but also offered cheaper tickets to younger fans.
PSG won a couple of French Cups and its first league title in 1986, but Borelli himself was eventually forced to resign in the early 1990s after his spending plunged the club into massive debt.
In came new owners French television channel Canal Plus, which hoped to create a kind of virtuous revenue cycle by spending on PSG, which would create an entertaining television product, which would create more revenue for Canal Plus, which could then spend more money on PSG, who would then be even more in demand from consumers, and on and on. The club won its second first division title in 1994 and reached the semifinals of the Champions League in 1995. Eventually though, as Goldblatt writes, the club descended "into internal fighting and financial chaos so bad that Canal Plus were forced to disinvest."
So in an accidental way, QSI has maintained the spirit of the club they took over and claim to have transformed. PSG have always been what they are right now: a messy corporate project that would only ever succeed in spite of itself.
What could PSG be?
Here's how QSI itself describes their ambitions and the club they took over.
"At the start of the 21st century, there were new stars ... but despite the magic of Ronaldinho and the goals of Pedro Pauleta [109 goals], PSG struggled to rescale the heights. Before changing stratosphere in 2011, with the arrival of new owners, Qatar Sports Investments and chairman and CEO Nasser Al-Khelaifi. They established an extremely ambitious project, a project that has one aim: to take Paris Saint-Germain to the summits of the European game, having already transformed Les Rouge et Bleu into the most successful French club in history."
And here's how QSI describes itself: "Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) was founded in 2004 and is a private shareholding Organization with the ambition to invest in profit-bearing sports related projects within Qatar and also internationally, while becoming a globally recognized and leading sports and leisure investment company."
When it comes to PSG, we can chalk off that first part; owning the club in the way QSI has owned PSG is not a profit-bearing sports-related project. Then we get to the second part, the cough-cough sportswashing part: becoming globally recognized as a leader. And QSI wants PSG to do that by reaching "the summits" of the European game. Read: winning the Champions League.
The QSI project hasn't failed in terms of making PSG a global brand. The uniforms look cool, the players are fun and for the first time, I saw a PSG store at a local mall the other day. They also seem to be one of the favorite clubs of the next generation of fans, which is what happens when you have Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe and Neymar on the same team, at the same time.
But in terms of becoming any kind of leader? No chance.
- Laurens: PSG need a clear-out after another UCL failure
- Ogden: The PSG project fails again as Bayern prove their pedigree
Before QSI took over PSG, the club was just another club and perhaps even something of an oddity -- why isn't the team from Paris any better? -- but that was about it. Now, year after year, they're the butt of the joke. Their approach to team building -- star after star after star -- has created another virtuous cycle. Each big-name player makes them less likely to field a cohesive team capable of winning the Champions League, and each big-name acquisition makes their inevitable failure seem even more embarrassing. You have Mbappe, Messi and Neymar ... and you can't even make the quarterfinals?
Well, of course you can't. As the game has tilted more and more toward teams that defend from the front and title the field in their favor, PSG have continued to stack forwards who don't defend at all on top of each other. And despite those decisions then requiring sacrifices from other players on the field, they've also opted for expensive attacking fullbacks and aging big-name center backs who themselves also require sacrifices from other players on the field. Meanwhile, the likes of Manchester City, Bayern Munich, Liverpool and even Real Madrid have all spent a ton of money on building rosters of players that fit a certain style and complement each other.
These teams consistently succeed in Europe because they can rely on both individual and collective brilliance on a given night, while PSG have only ever had the former to fall back on.
The irony, as Alex Stewart of Analytics FC pointed out yesterday, is that QSI could have simply just built an exciting squad of a few superstars combined with local-born talent.
Paris produces more soccer stars than any other city on the planet. From 2002 through 2018, 60 Paris-born players appeared in the World Cup -- 10 more than any other metropolitan area. If we just look at players who were at some point in the PSG academy, you've got RB Leipzig playmaker Christopher Nkunku, Bayern Munich winger Kingsley Coman, Bayer Leverkusen winger Moussa Diaby, Real Madrid defender Ferland Mendy, AC Milan goalkeeper Mike Maignan and Juventus midfielder Adrien Rabiot, among others. Five of them are modern two-way players who would help fill the spaces vacated or created by the club's other stars, while the sixth is a fantastic keeper who replaced PSG's current keeper, Gianluigi Donarumma, at AC Milan, who are now through to the Champions League quarterfinals.
A young, diverse team with a core of local Parisians would not only be better equipped for European success than what PSG currently has, but it would also probably earn the club a little more sympathy for when they fail. Of course, based on Al-Khelaifi's behavior after last year's elimination at Real Madrid, this ownership group doesn't seem too concerned with any of that. No, instead they'll likely just continue to spend without any real plan, while Parisian players continue to flourish everywhere other than in Paris.
Remember who scored the winner in the first leg against Bayern this season or in the final in 2020? Someone should tell PSG.