When Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) became Paris Saint-Germain’s majority owner in 2011, the club was Europe’s 48th best, according to the numbers at EloFootball.com. And this was a major improvement — it was 90th a year earlier.
PSG had just finished fourth in Ligue 1, their best placement in more than a decade. They had fallen to Benfica in the UEFA Europa League round of 16, and that was encouraging. At that moment in the summer of 2011, PSG were a VfB Stuttgart (tied with PSG for 48th at EloFootball) or a Werder Bremen (41st) — a club with a proud and intense fan base but no major history of success.
Fourteen years later, PSG are European champions. They won their first UEFA Champions League title — becoming only the second French club to do so — with a jarring 5-0 statement win over Inter Milan in Munich on Saturday. It might have been the best performance ever in a Champions League final, and it gave them as many European titles as Manchester City, among others.
Saturday’s win was the culmination of a more than decade-long story of lavish spending and heartbreak and missteps and all the things that modern soccer exhaustingly forces us to think about at all times (sportswashing, legal fights, nation-states, geopolitics). It also provided us with a chance to look back at the twists and turns that got PSG to this point.
Their rise was very fast, then very slow. How did they fall short in the past? What made this year different?
