PSG President Nasser Al Khelaifi
If Paris Saint-Germain beat Bayern Munich in today’s Champions League final in Lisbon, the pictures will probably be of Neymar’s tears of joy or wild scenes of celebration in the French capital, but basking in the glory of it all will be the Amir of Qatar.
The club’s first appearance in the final of Europe’s elite club competition comes in the month it celebrates its 50th birthday, yet the starting point for all this was June 30, 2011.
That was when Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) bought PSG, with its President Nasser Al Khelaifi promising to make the club “a great team and a strong brand on the international scene”.
PSG recently won their seventh French title in eight seasons and their fourth domestic treble in six years.
Now, after half a dozen seasons of underwhelming performances on the continental stage, they are through to the biggest and most prestigious club game of all.
“Since we arrived here, the Champions League has been our dream, and we are close to fulfilling our dream now,” Khelaifi said after the team beat RB Leipzig in the semi-final.
PSG were big before QSI -- under the ownership of French pay TV giant Canal Plus in the 1990s, with stars like George Weah, they won the league in 1994 and reached the Champions League semi-finals a year later.
They lifted their only European trophy to date, the Cup Winners’ Cup, in 1996.
But by 2011 this was a club in dire straits.
They had just finished fourth in Ligue 1 but a year earlier came 13th.
Crowds at the Parc des Princes were down with the club having stopped selling tickets to members of two rival supporters’ groups because of hooliganism problems.
Under Khelaifi, a revered figure in Qatar, PSG are effectively a different club.
It took them just two years to shoot up to fifth place in Deloitte’s Football Money League. Their revenue in 2012/13 was just under €400m ($471m), having quadrupled in the short time under QSI.
Only Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern and Manchester United sat before them.
That season PSG returned to the Champions League after eight years away and won their first Ligue 1 title of the Qatar era.
They made the marquee signing of David Beckham. Huge commercial deals were signed with the Qatar Tourism Authority and Qatari mobile provider Ooredoo.
Deloitte’s most recent figures put them fifth again with revenue of €635.9m.
PSG committed the two biggest transfer fees in history, signing Neymar from Barcelona for €222m and Kylian Mbappe from Monaco for €180m, in 2017.
The club has spent, in total, an estimated €1.3bn on transfer fees alone in these nine years.
On the streets in Doha, there is still more focus on the English Premier League than on PSG, although interest is growing.
The PSG store in Doha’s Villaggio mall was this week emblazoned with a poster proclaiming “WE ARE PARIS -- LISBOA 2020” covering half the shopfront.
It is not just Paris -- Qatar Airways has a sleeve sponsorship deal with Bayern and took to Twitter labelling the final as the #Qlassico.
