The PSG paradox: Football’s most beautiful team are also the sport’s most successful state project – The Athletic
The Athletic has live coverage of PSG vs. Arsenal in the 2026 UEFA Champions League Final.
Paris Saint-Germain are not just the best team in Europe and possibly the world right now, but they are also surely the best to watch.
Their full-backs could be wingers in most other teams. Observing their midfield do a rondo in the warm-up would probably be more entertaining than many whole games elsewhere. Ousmane Dembele has been transformed from a talented but unreliable and injury-prone winger into a Ballon d’Or-winning striker.
Desire Doue is a thrilling mixture of pace, skill and nous. Bradley Barcola would start for most other teams in the Champions League but can’t get a game here. And then there’s Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, part bull, part 100m sprinter and part ballet dancer, combining to make probably the most viscerally thrilling player in the sport.
Some of their performances in this season’s Champions League made you conclude that this is football as it was meant to be played: fast, attacking, tons of goals, with structure but also just enough vulnerability to ensure they are not a complete machine.
In most circumstances, all of that would add up to a pretty likeable team.
And then you remember what club they represent.
Qatar Sports Investments bought PSG in 2011, the deal concluded just under a year after the tiny Gulf state of Qatar was named host nation for the 2022 World Cup. The semantics behind criticisms of their motivations may vary: sportswashing, soft power, geopolitical influence, an elaborate state marketing exercise. Whatever term you use, it all adds up to essentially the same thing: Qatar bought a famous but hitherto underachieving European football club, in a desirable location, in order to further the interests of Qatar.
From a football perspective, it has worked spectacularly. PSG have won 12 of the past 14 French titles and last season’s Champions League, and they are favourites to retain the latter trophy when they face Arsenal in the 2025-26 final on Saturday.
From a business perspective, too: QSI paid around €70million (£61m, $82m) to acquire the club 15 years ago, but the investment group Arctos’s purchase of 12.5 per cent of PSG in 2023 valued the whole thing at around €4.25bn.
It has been a bit of a journey.
The slightly reductive version of their timeline is that for the first decade or so of the Qatari era, they were a brand with a football team loosely attached. And that is only slightly reductive: in early 2024, I interviewed Nasser Al-Khelaifi, chairman of QSI and PSG, for my book Who Owns Football?, and when I asked about his main priority when he arrived in 2011, his immediate response was: “I wanted to build a brand.” More football-adjacent goals followed, but the order of his priorities was striking.
And it was obvious in pretty much everything they did. They signed famous players rather than necessarily ones who would form a coherent team; they tried to make themselves as ‘of Paris’ as possible, redesigning their club logo to accentuate the city and minimise the ‘Saint-Germain’ part of their name; they entered into a partnership not just with Nike, but its Jordan imprint; celebrities were invited to matches at the Parc des Princes, and they showed up — Leonardo Di Caprio, Beyonce, Jay-Z. Lenny Kravitz became weirdly ubiquitous.
When we spoke, Al-Khelaifi was extremely enthused about opening a PSG superstore on central London’s Oxford Street, pointing out it was something not even the biggest clubs in the Premier League had managed. “That was one of our main objectives,” he said. “If I had told you before that we want to open a store in London, you would have said, ‘No, that’s totally crazy and impossible’. We have them in Japan, Korea, the U.S. — this is also part of our strategy.”
Admittedly, this was before they had won the Champions League, and we spoke in that period of time when PSG were desperate to win the biggest prize but were trying to play that desperation down, to give the impression they were not actually that bothered about it. If you speak to Al-Khelaifi now, he might give you a different highlight, rather than the expansion of their retail empire.
Nasser Al-Khelaifi is lifted into the air by PSG players after the Champions League final in 2025 (Thibaud Moritz/AFP via Getty Images)
Their transfer policy was very much part of the brand-building, too.
That essentially went through three phases: first, the wave of slightly-past-their-best-but-still-effective stars, including Zlatan Ibrahimovic and David Beckham, then the galacticos of Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi. Finally, a few years ago, they pivoted to actually building a good team, recruiting Dembele, Doue, Barcola, Kvaratskhelia and others.
Al-Khelaifi said the ultimate goal was to have a team of the club’s own youth academy graduates, or at least one full of Frenchmen, which they have not quite nailed yet: only two of the starting XI in last year’s Champions League final were French, neither of whom were homegrown, although two former PSG academy kids did come off the bench. What they have done is construct a thrilling, young side who play the sort of football that justifies your ticket price, or TV subscription.
It has taken a while, but that side of the project has been incredibly successful. The question of whether it has worked from a national-reputation point of view is more up for debate.
More people are aware of Qatar now than they were in 2011, partly thanks to PSG and that World Cup four years ago, but that awareness has been double-edged: the more people know about this nation roughly the size of Connecticut or Yorkshire, with its population of about 3.2million, the more people know about its dark side.
More people know about the kafala system, which exploited the migrant workers who built the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup; this was technically abolished in 2017, but workers’ rights issues there remain. More people know about arbitrary arrests and imprisonments. More people know about the limited rights afforded to women and LGBTQI people, about restrictions on freedom of expression.
But how successful this PR drive has been is almost moot: the point is this is a football club that now exists as a geopolitical tool.
Even if your morals are not excessively challenged by Qatar’s actions, the idea of a state owning a football club is one that we should be suspicious of, at the very least.
Maybe it’s naive, or excessively idealistic to think that football clubs in 2026 are spotless institutions whose only purpose is to maintain the purity of the game. Most big clubs are morally compromised in some way, not least their Champions League final opponents Arsenal, who have sported Visit Rwanda sponsorship patches on their shirtsleeves since 2018 and whose manager, Mikel Arteta, sympathised with what Thomas Partey “had been through” after the Ghana midfielder was charged with rape (Partey’s lawyer has previously said the player “denies all charges against him”).
PSG, and indeed any clubs with links to states, are on a different level. After all, this is a team who managed to make semi-final opponents Bayern Munich — winners of six European Cups, 13 of the past 14 Bundesliga titles, about 10 times richer than their closest domestic rivals in Germany and regular plunderers of those teams’ best talent — look like plucky, underfunded underdogs.
All of which it’s very easy to forget if you just watch Luis Enrique’s team: if you look at Vitinha and Joao Neves and Fabian Ruiz pinging the ball between themselves, or Doue zipping past someone while seemingly not touching the ground, like a maglev train, or Kvaratskhelia leaving a Kvaratskhelia-shaped hole in the middle of whatever poor defender tries to stop him. The beauty of PSG’s football stands in sharp contrast to the club’s ownership.
PSG captain Marquinhos with the Champions League trophy last May (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
This is not a new dilemma for football fans.
You will probably have made your mind up either way whether you’re bothered enough about Saudi Arabia to live with Newcastle United, or Abu Dhabi to think of Manchester City fondly, or Chelsea under Roman Abramovich.
But PSG are the most successful state project in football. That is worth remembering as they dazzle you on the pitch.
