IAN HERBERT: Paris Saint-Germain are putting shirt sales over soul or substance. They may be selling their wares on Oxford Street, but one thing they cannot buy is football’s soul

Pink is a big deal for Paris Saint-Germain, explains an employee at the club store the team has just opened on London’s Oxford Street.

According to her, this color was on trend this year. There was Barbie, and before that there was Valentino’s popular pink fashion line. So the club’s designers came up with a salmon pink hue for PSG’s “training kit” – high-end fashion that you wouldn’t want to get dirty, but which is obviously on trend.

“The kids love it,” says the assistant. “Generation Z is crazy about this product, and women want this product because it is more fashion-oriented.”

If someone were to ask you which overseas team was the first to open a club shop in the UK, you might hazard a guess at Barcelona or Real Madrid – clubs based on a football legend born of legendary European glory.

This is actually a PSG store in London that opened last month. A place where shoppers in Arsenal tops regularly wander in, “just looking around because they like the fashion,” as the assistant puts it. “They buy more for the brand than for the club.”

And that, in a nutshell, is PSG. Fashion statement. Aesthetics. Beautiful clothes with a beautiful PSG motto “ici c’est Paris”.

A motto that was actually coined by someone else – a Belgian shopkeeper who sold Parisian perfume in the late 1960s – although this is a minor inconvenience in the context of Qatar’s desire to promote PSG as “Paris” and turn the club’s name into a lifestyle brand . This is all an optical illusion.

On the playing field, the environment promises to be an important one for the club. Defeat to Dortmund in the Champions League and Newcastle United’s win at home to AC Milan would lead to relegation. Not to mention the geopolitical humiliation of the Qataris, whose jealous Saudi neighbors are desperate to steal the football kit that made the brand famous in Doha.

Victory or defeat in the north-west of Germany, another autumn of struggle on the European stage confirmed the fact that, if you take away the money from the Gulf countries, PSG remains the weakest club among the leading European cities for a very long time. Munich, London, Milan, Manchester, Madrid, Liverpool – all these are football temples. Not Paris.

Those who love football will say that for PSG style is more important than substance and soul, although the suppliers of their fine products and those who buy them argue that trophies do not matter. They point to numbers. According to Deloitte’s Football Money League, PSG – or PSG according to you – has one of the highest revenues in European football at £562 million in 2021/22.

The Oxford Street store is replete with brands looking to cut costs: Jordan, Balmain, Stussy. For the uninitiated, this is the height of fashion, not League Two central midfielders.

A collaboration with Michael Jordan’s brand, PSG X Jordan, produces PSG’s newest fourth kit, whose predecessors included another hallucinating pink PSG kit released a few years ago. Rarely worn on the football field. They buy it often.

The three-way collaboration with iconic Miami street artist and street art paint brand has seen the delivery of tins of PSG graffiti paint, retailing at £120 for three.

“You could do some graffiti with them,” the assistant says. “Or you can just keep them as a collectible.” There have been quite a few sold, although the £190 designer PSG sun lounger remains unchanged.

There’s also a selfie booth where you can snap yourself among the players – an email data collection device for marketers. The photo I took did not have the impact on my grandson that I had imagined. He supports Manchester United, PSG, Real Madrid and Argentina. At least he did that last Sunday.

PSG’s owners also believed that football was as simple as putting Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe and Neymar together and watching them create a European colossus. The team reached just one Champions League final and one semi-final.

When the Qataris sold a minority stake in the club to US investment group Arctos Partners last week in a deal valuing the club at more than €4 billion, PR propaganda heralded it as a means of taking the club to the “next level”. But the Qataris were quick to point out that the Americans “will not have any control” over gaming affairs.

They don’t seem to see any problems with their football. “You don’t have to win the Champions League to be a successful football club,” their chief revenue officer Mark Armstrong told the BBC last month. This observation could dishearten anyone who would like to enjoy moments of outstanding beauty on a football field above clothes of aesthetic value on a coat rack.

However, this is where 12 years of Qatari ownership have led the club, and they can’t even lay claim to being the most dynamic sellers of pink. Messi, angry and depressed when he left Paris this summer, has returned to life at Inter Miami wearing a pink jersey – electric pink, Pantone 1895C to be precise – that radiates his pleasure there. The design – simple in design and hardly ingenious – has become the most popular sporting goods item on the planet.

Broadcasters block Everton fans

Everton players have spoken out following this extraordinary points deduction, but broadcasters appear to be doing everything they can to make sure the fans are not heard.

Sky went to the extreme extreme of sending its reporter Sunny Rudravaihala to broadcast from across the Mersey in the Wirral ahead of the match against Newcastle United.

It was also hard not to notice the striking absence of footage of the end of Gwladys Street, where protest signs were flying, during Amazon Prime’s broadcast of Everton’s victory that night.

Everyone will deny that the broadcasters are acting at the behest of the Premier League, but it certainly appears that way.

Lunch with Jilly Cooper

When I met writer Jilly Cooper for lunch last year, I had the idea to shed some light on the world of football she was exploring at the time in her novel Tackling! It turned out that she gave the best advice.

– That sounds a little gloomy. Write something fun,” Jilly suggested when I told her about a book I thought I might write. Instead I wrote a book about my home town and team, Wrexham. It was fun.

We met again on Saturday after Gilly invited me to watch Wrexham play Forest Green Rovers, her local team, who she was a keen supporter of and had taken along a hospitality box for the day.

I was in the last half hour of a three hour trip when the match was canceled due to the pitch being flooded. I know of several delays. A frosty night in Rochdale’s Spotland lives long in the memory. None of them turned out to be as wonderful as Saturday’s.

The lunch went ahead anyway, in the company of Gilly, her family and a few journalists she had met, and without the minor inconvenience of the start of the match, it was still going on at 16:00 when the club wanted to close the box.

Jilly wanted to talk about my book, even though her book has deservedly taken off. Having interviewed George Best and Rodney Marsh, the latter of whom had flown in from the US for Gilly’s appearance in This Is Your Life, she knew a lot about the game. While working on Tackle! She talked to many journalists.

Topics we discussed on Saturday included Forest Green, where David Horsman is the new manager, much to Gilley’s delight, and Jack Grealish. “I really like him, but when he celebrates with his teammates, he’s always looking for the camera.” She sees football as fun and it’s a blessing. This product is extremely scarce.