The pop-up on New York’s Union Square had French chefs in the kitchen, limited-edition artist collaborations on the walls and a France-Senegal World Cup watch-along on a big screen. Richard Heaselgrave, Paris Saint-Germain’s chief revenue officer, gestured around the room during the tournament and said: “there’s no football here.”
That was the idea, according to Fortune’s account of the club’s “Ici, c’est Paris” La Maison tour. PSG is trying to turn a famous motto into a business model. “We sell out,” Heaselgrave said. “These are profitable ventures.”
A motto from Barcelona
The motto is borrowed. In 1968, FC Barcelona president Narcís de Carreras told the club’s members that Barça was “més que un club,” more than a club. It was a declaration of Catalan identity under Franco’s dictatorship, not a marketing line. Fortune posed the open question: can that feeling be engineered from the top down, or does it only grow from below, as it did in Barcelona?
The Yankees cap
When Qatar Sports Investment bought PSG in 2011, said chief brand officer Fabien Allègre, who joined the club in 2008, “there was no PSG jersey in the street of Paris.” Fifteen years later the club has won back-to-back Champions League titles and counts 240 million fans, 90 percent of them outside France.
Allègre said the model he took away from the chairman’s global ambitions was the New York Yankees cap. “Every single person going to New York buying a hat, I mean, 80% of them didn’t know that that was like a baseball team,” he said.
The club redrew its badge in 2013. Out went the cradle of Louis XIV, a nod to Saint-Germain, the suburban town 20 kilometers from Paris where kings once lived. In came a modernized Eiffel Tower and the fleur-de-lis. “Make it bigger than Saint-Germain,” Allègre said. Fans barely objected; he called the change “smooth.”
The pitch is the city itself. Heaselgrave noted that 40 million tourists visited Paris last year with no help from PSG. Dior dresses the players for official appearances, and Jordan Brand, which enters its tenth year with the club next year, produced a kit that echoed the Chicago Bulls, with a diamond on the shorts and no red stripe down the shirt.
PSG Labs
Behind the branding sits PSG Labs, launched a year ago and run by Par Helgosson, a Swedish-born tech veteran who has been with the club for three years. It works as an accelerator, venture fund and capital-raising platform. Helgosson said it starts with “market before product”: it finds needs inside the club, across men’s football, women’s football, handball and judo, and seeds ventures to meet them.
PSG is also the only major football club in the world to hold Bitcoin on its balance sheet. The La Maison tour has stopped in Shanghai, Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York, Doha, London and Paris, and Seoul is next. Labs runs four deal batches a year. “No one runs four batches a year,” Helgosson said of rival clubs. “No one.”
Sources
- More than a club: how Paris Saint-Germain took inspiration from the Barcelona slogan and the New York Yankees cap to create a global business brand | Fortune
- More than a club: how Paris Saint-Germain took inspiration from the Barcelona slogan and the New York Yankees cap to create a global business brand
