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Simon Chadwick: “PSG is about something much more than football, it’s about looking good !”
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Is PSG still a football club? For Simon Chadwick, Professor of Sport and Geopolitical Economy and Researcher at Skema Business School, it is first and foremost a fashion brand. That’s how Qatar hopes to make a return on its investment. To the despair of its oldest supporters, but to the delight of New York’s singing stars.
You said in a recent interview PSG was never intended to be a football club for its Qatari’s owners: what is supposed to be PSG for them?
Investing in an elite professional football nowadays is never going to be a case of philanthropic endeavour or altruism. The likes of QSI (Qatar Sports Investments) invest in clubs such as PSG to achieve a financial return on investment. Put in simple terms, you spend a million to make two million back, otherwise what’s the point?
The challenge then becomes how to do this, which can be addressed in various ways. It is very clear that football alone is insufficient as a driver of revenues, hence its convergence with digital technologies, entertainment, and fashion and lifestyle are becoming important drivers of clubs’ commercial activities. One need only look at how streaming is helping to transform Ryan Reynolds-owned Wrexham or how important Venezia’s fashionable range of Kappa team shirts have become. It is within such parameters that PSG is now being run, though the club has an asset at its disposal that others don’t – Paris itself. [...]
Read the full interview on our SKEMA ThinkForward website
