PARIS — France’s wealthiest household, the Arnaults of high-end empire LVMH, revealed the prepared purchase of second-division soccer club Paris FC on Thursday and aspirations to develop it in the leading flight.
It’s a significant shakeup for soccer in France, putting huge wealth behind a possible opposition in the French capital to the dominant Ligue 1 group of current years, Qatar-funded Paris Saint-Germain.
A declaration from the Arnault household’s holding business, Agache, stated it will endupbeing the club’s bulk investor. Energy beverage giant Red Bull will come aboard with a minority stake.
The declaration didn’t offer a financial figure for the offer, which stays topic to finishing legal and other documentation. But the billionaire household’s business plans to offer the club “with the essential resources” and desires “to completely develop the guys’s and ladies’s groups amongst the elite of French football and within the hearts of the Parisians.”
More broadly, the takeover of the club with a unique blue-and-white Eiffel Tower logodesign might assistance the French capital construct on the sporting momentum of the Paris Olympics and put an end to its location as something of an oddball in the European soccer landscape.
Despite being a powerhouse of style, financing, high-end and homeentertainment, Paris tracks London, Madrid and other cities by having simply one top-flight soccer group: The hegemonic PSG.
The previous club of superstar Kylian Mbappé is a 12-time champ of Ligue 1, with 10 of those titles in France’s top league coming after gas-rich Qatar started injecting its wealth into the club it acquired in 2011.
London, by contrast, has 7 Premier League clubs this season. Madrid and its residentialareas have 5 clubs in La Liga. Rome has 2, sharing Stadio Olimpico.
The scenario is even more curious offered the Paris area’s long and shown record