As Paris celebrates, PSG fans find a sense of belonging

Hindustan Times

2 days ago

As Paris celebrates, PSG fans find a sense of belonging
The Champions League win means a lot more to the millions of multi-ethnic immigrants who support the club
Sharda Ugra/Left Field
Paris is agog, awash and cannot contain itself from frequent drive-bys in souped up Mercs, beat up hatchbacks and motorcycles, horns and hooters tooting and shouts of 'championes' to anyone who will listen. Or rather make that France is agog following Paris St-Germain's triumph at the Champions League final on Saturday night. PSG are only the second French club to win the CL title following Olympic Marseille in 1993.
Eighteen-year-old friends Tom Gene and Corbinaud Mathis from La Rochelle travelled three plus hours from the south eastern coast and managed to somehow get into the watch party at the Parc des Princes on Saturday night with 48,000 other fans. They paid 80 euros for 40-euro tickets, and after PSG wiped the floor with Inter 5-0 found themselves in tears. Frenchmen have no issues with crying, non? 'For sport' Gene said, 'we are allowed'.
Brothers Lucas and Tomas Duval enjoying beers at a bistro a stone's throw from Parc des Prince are from La Rouen on the Normandy coast and belong to a family of PSG fans – 'we are fans since we've been born 25 years ago, before us our father and our grandfather.' The Parc des Princes is getting ready to welcome the team on Sunday evening and the club's Megastore has a queue that stretches by a modest calculation at least 400m around its facade.
In true French style, it has taken a few hours for the PSG staff to locate the 'MegaStore' standee which is hastily introduced over the queue to complete the TV pics. In another corner of the ground, a fan lit flares on the walkway which runs over the high-speed road leading to and from the centre of Paris. The cars whizzing by responded in a chorus of appreciative, sustained honking.
The Duvals, who watched at a bar because they couldn't get into the watch party called May 31 'the most beautiful day of our lives – we have dreamed of it since we were little – this is the most beautiful cup in the world.' The fans shrug their shoulders on the news of the rioting in Paris after the game. It left two dead, around 200 injured and close to 500 arrested. Traffic was shut down on the roads and metro stations in preparation for the team's victory parade on the Champs Elysees.
'This happens when ultras meet excitable young men,' said my taxi driver Smail Moulel, who played a season in the Algerian league for JK Kabylie as right back ('No.2, Cafu's position'). The Parc des Princes concourse and surroundings are being covered with team slogans, which somehow sound grander in French. Ici c'est Paris, Here is Paris.
Well, not exactly here – as in metaphorically speaking, not in the 16th arrondisement of Boulogne-Billancourt which houses the Parc des Princes as it does Roland Garros. The 16th is quite chi-chi and as writer Simon Kuper, author of Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty First Century explains, 'People who live there (in the 16th arrondisement) don't go to watch – PSG has very much a proletarian kind of fan base.'
The PSG fans are reflective of Kuper's Paris in the 21st century. This is not the Paris inside the Peripherique, the ring road around the centre of the city known to tourists; which Tony Estanguet, head of the Paris Olympic committee referred to as the Snow Globe version of Paris, with its population of two million.
But PSG's Paris is outside the Peripherique. The city of its suburbs with its multi-ethnic, immigrant population totalling around eight million people, non-whites from francophone Africa and elsewhere. Kuper, a Paris resident for more than two decades and now a naturalised French, says 'Paris has expanded like a non-European city in the last two decades and all the growth is in the suburbs. PSG is a club of the suburbs.' He explains that this newly growing population came to France with no sense of belonging for either the suburbs or the heritage of Belle Paris. 'But they find a sense of being and belonging in the club.'
This Paris forms what is referred to as a Greater Paris or a Grand Paris, 'which was never discussed as a concept or an idea until recently.' PSG then is the club of the Grand Paris which in itself makes it in the European context. Most European clubs may have non-white players but PSG's larger fan base too is non-white. Next to the Duvals telling their story, PSG fans arrived for a round of coffee and cigarettes, chatting in a patois of what sounded like French and Arabic.
Many of the young PSG players are children of immigrants – the final goalscorer in Munich, Senny Mayulu, has grown up in a north-eastern suburb of Paris called Le Blanc-Mesnil. There is much pleasure being derived from the fact that PSG's success has been produced by a team of seasoned professionals and local talent, with zero Galactico component. That their champion team is a collective and not an assembly of stellar talent.
Everyone loves teen prodigy Desire Doue, and hardy captain Marquinhos is also equally adored. Hotel receptionist Amin, also high school philosophy teacher and chess player, and a fan of Gukesh and Viswanathan Anand, is savouring the moment, 'Yesterday felt like Independence Day. A second Independence Day.'