Le Shock Sportif

Paris Setting Standard for Football Farce

By Matthew Tempest in Paris

With only five weeks left in the season, Paris may soon become the only major European capital without a top flight soccer team. The natives are getting restless.

It was a match that encapsulated the entire season for the proud Paris football club Paris Saint Germain. With just three minutes left in a hard-fought game against the visitors from Nancy last weekend, Paris' only top flight team was up 2-1. But then, their season of league failure caught up with them. Nancy scored two quick goals and Paris Saint Germain was suddenly a giant step closer to dropping out of France's top football league -- which would leave Paris as the only major European capital without a team in its own top domestic league.

"It is dreadful," said Paris Saint Germain player Jerome Alonso after the match. "We took a blow to the head."

There have been fleeting bright spots this year for the players from Paris. PSG won the League Cup tournament earlier this year and is still playing in the French Cup tournament of club teams. But relegation would be an embarrassing blow to a team that had a run of success in the 1990s. It would also be mortifying to the proud French capital.

Indeed, newspapers from Le Monde to the more downmarket Le Parisien have bemoaned the team's dismal fate, with the latter urging Parisiens to "be silent … and pray" for salvation on the pitch. But even as Paris is not known for being mad about soccer, the relegation of PSG would add deep insult to recent injuries. The city is only slowly recovering from the trauma of losing the 2012 Olympics (having started as near certain favorites) to London. And its signature sporting event, the Tour de France -- which finishes with a dramatic sprint down the Champs-Elysee -- is becoming ever-more mired in doping controversies. For many, a football-free Paris would be yet another indication that the city's hold on world-class status is endangered.

"We are too good to go down, but it looks like it's going to happen," says Fabrice Binet, a 27-year-old PSG fan from northern Paris. "It's not the fans' fault, they turn up each week. It's the lazy cowards of players and the manager."

REPRINTS

Find out how you can reprint this SPIEGEL ONLINE article.

A look around Europe confirms the image of Paris' impending football anemia. London has five teams in the country's top league, the Premiership: Arsenal, Chelsea, West Ham, Tottenham and Fulham. Rome has Lazio and Roma in Serie A. Spain's Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid are both safely ensconced in the Primera Liga. Even Berlin -- which, partly due to its isolation during the Cold War, only supports one team -- has boring old Hertha Berlin. Despite a blip in 2003-4, the team has been secure in the Germany's top league, the Bundesliga, for more than a decade.

Indeed, should PSG sink into the second league, it would put the City of Light on par with some footballing minnows. Liechtenstein's capital Vaduz, for example, plays in the Swiss second league. The team from the Dutch government seat The Hague was likewise relegated last season, but Amsterdam is the country's true capital. Outside of that, you have to go to Abuja in Nigeria or Ottawa in Canada to find capitals without top flight teams.

On the 10th anniversary of France winning the World Cup in Paris, and their subsequent triumph in the 2000 European Cup -- and just two years removed from an impressive second place finish in the 2006 World Cup in Berlin -- it seems almost unthinkable that football in the French capital could have fallen so far, so fast.

Paris Saint Germain actually won the League in 1994, and has lifted the French Cup five times in the past 15 years. But this year, they are marooned just third from the bottom with 35 points -- in a league where the last three teams get dropped to the second league at the end of the year. Of the teams just ahead of them in the standings, only one has a worse goal differential, making it doubly difficult for PSG to cling to the first league. Indeed, it was 19 games into the season before the Parisians even won a home match. A manager change in January failed to produce the hoped-for New Year turnaround.

The result has been a capital city, known the world over for its elegance, with a decidedly un-elegant group of disgruntled football fans. And with PSG backed by some of the most unpleasant hooligans in European soccer, the mixture of dismay and predilection toward violence has become combustible.

Hooliganism has been a growing problem in Paris in recent years -- despite there not being another team in Paris where PSG fans to focus their rage. Instead, the team's followers often beat each other up, and have developed one of the worst reputations for fan violence in European football. There are, in fact, around 10,000 self-proclaimed "ultras" -- hardcore violent fans -- one of whom was implicated in a 2002 assassination attempt on President Jacques Chirac.

Among the ultras are two rival gangs -- the Boulougne Boys made up of largely racist whites, and the Tigris Mystic, comprising more of Paris' immigrant community.

But ironically, the PSG stadium (the Parc des Princes, the country's national stadium until the Stade de France was built to host the 1998 World Cup) is in one of the capital's swankiest neighborhoods, located just on the fringe of the plush 16th arrondissement in the west just next to the Bois de Boulougne.

And the 30,000-seat stadium has seen plenty of action this season -- most of it, however, has not taken place on the field. Before Christmas, fans went "on strike," arriving en masse 15 minutes late for the start of game in protest at their team's poor performance. A December match against fellow relegation candidates Toulouse kicked off five hours earlier than scheduled out of fear of drunken fan violence. Nevertheless, PSG fans set fire to their own seating, so dismayed were they by their team's loss.

One PSG player was even put under police protection after he tossed a note back into the crowd from fans outlining their grievances -- hardly a wise move considering the club's "ultras." Last season was even worse with a fan being shot dead by police -- in an apparent accident -- during rioting outside the stadium after a visit by Israeli team Hapeol Tel Aviv.

Even as the team last week managed, against all odds, to win the League Cup at the new national stadium, the Stade de France, the fans were hardly on their best behavior -- and managed to embarrass French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was in the crowd with his son Louis.

Fans unfurled a 25-meter-long banner proclaiming "Welcome to the Pedophiles, Welfare-Scroungers and Inbreds." It was, of course, not a reference to Sarkozy but to the opposing team Lens from France's economically depressed north.

Sarkozy immediately ordered his security team to remove the banner, but the damage was done. More may be on the way.