LIGUE 1
Who are Paris FC? The club that seeks to “wipe PSG off the map”
Red Bull will begin its project at Paris F.C with the Arnault family, from next month. The goal is to gain promotion and compete with PSG.
On January 1st, at midnight, Red Bull will begin its first moves in the French capital in an attempt to make Paris FC one of the most ambitious teams in French football. The company, together with the Arnault family, through its holding company, is gigantic, since the first objective is to get the team directly promoted to Ligue 1.
Paris FC battling in Ligue 2 for the past right years
Founded in 1969, PFC last played in the French top flight in 1979. At it’s lowest point, the team dropped to the fourth tier but in recent years, the club has found some stability. Paris FC have competed in Ligue 2 since 2017 and the team is currently second, two points behind leaders Lorient after 16 games.
Red Bull’s plan is for the team to establish itself in the top division of French football to forge a rivalry with its older brother, Paris Saint-Germain.
The Paris second team has not played in Ligue 1 for more than 40 years and to do so it has entrusted a partnership formed by the Arnault family, one of the richest in the world, and Red Bull. The energy drinks company will be in charge of shaping the sporting project, holding 10.2% of the club’s shares, while the Arnaults, with more than 50%, will design the commercial strategies, using their extensive experience, as well as providing the financial capital to improve both the squad and the facilities.
There are few certainties and many questions raised by Red Bull’s first transfer market in the French capital. A priori, as Antoine Arnault stated, the club will not do anything crazy and will maintain the strong core that has led it to be one of the most important teams in the French second division.
According to reports in France, Paris FC will have 10 million euros available for its first transfer window, the winter one, in which the objective is to reinforce the team with three players to ensure promotion to Ligue 1.
The team already has great talents, such as the ex-Marseille player Maxime Lopez, ex-Sevilla player Kolodziejczak, as well as Kebbal and Krasso, footballers far above the level required by the silver category of French football.
Neither Red Bull nor the Arnault family want to turn Paris FC into PSG 2.0, but rather a project with an identity and that uses the best young players in the region, Île-de-France, which exports the most to the five major leagues along with São Paulo, to forge a competitive team that can establish itself in Ligue 1.
In France, it was rumored that the club would have 200 million euros available with the aim of looking at European competitions in the short term, a possibility that, although it has been publicly rejected by the majority shareholder, Antoine Arnault, cannot be ruled out from the summer, as long as the PFC certifies its promotion to Ligue 1 in May.
PFC will eventually overtake PSG
According to a Qatari member of PSG, LÈquipe reports that there is a lack of confidence in what Paris FC can do in the future. “In Qatar, we see the arrival of a competitor with enormous resources that has the name of Paris and the Eiffel Tower on its logo. It is no longer the same situation as before with Paris FC, even if they had moved up to Ligue 1 earlier. It will take time, but Paris will eventually eclipse PSG, wipe it off the map.”
One of the first additions that the Red Bull-Arnault partnership has made is to name Mario Gomez, the emblematic striker of the German national team, as one of the visible faces of the project. Behind the scenes, because there is still no official announcement, the former Stuttgart and Bayern striker will be one of the key men in the early years of Paris FC, in which he will have to apply the knowledge of Red Bull, but without taking away the identity of the capital club, since, unlike other teams, such as Salzburg and Leipzig, what the Arnaults have not wanted at any time is for the second team of Paris to become a case of multi-ownership and, in addition, lose its idiosyncrasy, which could have led to a crisis with the fans, many of them revolted after the acquisition of PSG by Qatar was formalized in 2011.
Klopp and Paris FC
Paris will become increasingly familiar to Jürgen Klopp, who will attend the match between Paris FC and Amiens on January 11. Appointed director of football for the Red Bull conglomerate, the former Liverpool manager will closely follow all the progress of a project that has France excited, since a Parisian derby has not been played in Ligue 1 for almost 40 years and it was with the failed project of Racing Matra, the first rich club in Paris, that it faced Paris Saint-Germain before suffering a historic crisis that sent it spiraling (it has currently recovered its name, Racing Club de France, and is in National 3, the French fifth division).
Red Bull wants Paris FC to be one of the pioneering projects in French football and its first objective will be not to fail in the next winter transfer window. The Parisian team will have a cash injection that it will use to reinforce the squad and hopefully return to Ligue 1, before taking out the chequebook to reinforce many strategic points and settle definitively in a category that it has not known since the late 70s.
By chance, when the club split from the merger with PSG, the current giant of French football began its journey in the third division and PFC in the first, before Paris Saint-Germain settled in Ligue 1 and its little brother was relegated and suffered a major crisis. In the French capital they hope to see a derby that can forge a rivalry that barely existed in an ephemeral way in the decade of the 70s.