Will the history of PSG continue to be written at the Parc des Princes? The answer to this question is emerging right now. Qatari leaders want to own their stadium. The Parc des Princes file being at an impasse, they have just applied for the acquisition of the Stade de France.
This is currently only one of the three avenues considered by the club, but faced with the inflexibility of Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, and faced with the opportunity represented by the acquisition of the largest stadium in France, the leaders are changing gear. The American firm Legends was mandated to prospect and study in depth this file with multiple ramifications. Recently, he commissioned a market study with the club’s supporters. A long questionnaire was sent to subscribers and VIP customers to find out their degree of attachment to the Parc des Princes and to what extent they would agree to change sites if the general level of services increased.
Four options
This questionnaire is accompanied by a map showing the four options considered by the leaders. First option: buy the Parc des Princes to renovate and enlarge it. At PSG, we repeat that this is the priority file while recognizing that the inflexibility of Anne Hidalgo will leave them no other choice but to turn the page. Second option: move to the Stade de France. This has many advantages but the cost could reach one billion, between the purchase (600 million euros) and the renovation (more than 300 million).
At that price, it would probably be easier to build a new, brand new stadium. These are options 3 and 4 considered by the questionnaire which targets, without precision, a site in the west of Paris, five kilometers from the Parc des Princes. This corresponds to the Saint-Cloud racecourse where PSG imagines a huge stadium partly buried.
The mayor of Saint-Cloud never approached
Contacts have been established with France Galop, owner of the site, open to the idea of building a large stadium there but who refuses to give up his land. The mayor of Saint-Cloud, meanwhile, told Le Parisien that he had never been approached.
The last hypothesis concerns a stadium more than ten kilometers from the Park. Attractive from a financial point of view, it will nevertheless be necessary to solve the problem of the routing of the supporters, certain zones being very badly served by public transport.
In short, no solution wins the vote and the opinion of the supporters can count when deciding. Once the Legends firm has delivered its conclusions, Nasser Al-Khelaïfi will present them in Doha. The stakes are high and given the sums at stake, it is the emir who will have the last word. But the Qataris being deeply upset by the attitude of Anne Hidalgo, a move from the Parc des Princes is no longer fiction.