The Birth of PSG & the History of Paris' Strange Relationship With Football
In the build-up to Paris Saint-Germain's Champions League semi-final against RB Leipzig, much focus has been dedicated to the synthetic, rootless origins of Die Roten Bullen, a sporting 'project' born out of board meetings and strategic investment, but one whose lasting identity is slowly being forged on the pitch through the seductive footballing philosophy of manager Julian Nagelsmann.
If the identity of Leipzig is judged to be a work in progress, you could be forgiven for thinking that PSG's own journey of self-fashioning came to an end in their dramatic quarter-final defeat of Atalanta.
With the spark provided by Parisian-born wunderkind Kylian Mbappé, PSG showed an assurance in the game's dying moments which marked them out as a team taking control of its own identity, a club finally worthy of a city which is arguably producing world-class footballers at a more prolific rate than any other.
Particularly striking on the evening were PSG's white away shirts, with the repeated word 'Paris' stitched into them, a contrast which will no doubt be noticeable when compared to the not-so-subtle red bulls which dominate Leipzig's own white jersey.
And yet, when a little more scrutiny is applied to the strange history of PSG, there are undoubtedly parallels between their own foundation and that of Leipzig's - parallels which speak to the remarkable challenge of stitching the complex image of Paris into the fabric of a football club, and the loose threads which such an enterprise leaves behind.
While many clubs started out as a side for local workers, a team of students, or even just a group of friends looking for a kickabout, Paris Saint-Germain were formed in 1970 by that most romantic of methods - a merger.
The merger in question was a strange marriage between amateur side Stade Saint-Germain and 'virtual' side Paris FC, a team without any substantial assets like a manager or a stadium which had been in part recommended by the French Football Federation. Their mission? To restore elite-level football to Paris.
Clubs from London can collectively boast of 21 top-flight titles, while teams from Madrid have amassed 44 between them. Yet before Qatar Sports Investments took over PSG in 2011, only thrice had the winner of France's highest professional division been from Paris.
Just like Leipzig, PSG were therefore not so much an organic creation as born out of protracted negotiations (even the addition 'Saint-Germain' was a vexed question for some Parisians) and the lure of a 'gap in the market'.
But how can this gap, in one of Europe's most advanced cosmopolitan hubs, have opened in the first place, and stayed open until as late as 1970? The answer is a reflection of the unique circumstances of the history of French football, and the far-from-seamless task of stitching together the contradictions of Parisian life.
To a large extent, the history of professional football in Paris is a story of two different clubs, and the bad luck, bad timing and occasional mismanagement which plagued them as they attempted to establish themselves as the dominant clubs in France's capital.
The clubs in question are Red Star FC, located in Paris' northern suburbs and founded by none other than former FIFA president Jules Rimet, and Racing Club de France (after which Argentina's iconic Racing Club de Avellenada is named), a club from the Colombes suburb of Paris.
The development of football in France was hampered by three important factors - its relatively late professionalisation in the 1930s, the dissolution of professional football during the Vichy France of World War Two, and the catastrophic decline in attendances in the 1960s which economically crippled a host of clubs.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Red Star and Racing were amongst the most effected by this stop-start character to the construction of French league football, where if you happened to be in bad shape at the wrong time, dire consequences followed.
In winning four Coupe de France trophies before full professionalisation, Red Star are simply unlucky to have had such a sparkling side during the sport's amateur era, while, having won the 1945 Coupe de France, the challenges of the post-war transition, alongside some graden variety corruption, held them up.
Racing Club, meanwhile, won their first league title in 1936, but the outbreak of World War Two and accompanying regionalisation of football would stop them from making further inroads, while, having finished second in back-to-back seasons in 1961 and 1962, their progress towards the promised land of another title was halted by French domestic football's nadir in that same period.
But it wasn't a simple lack of serendipity alone that stopped Parisian clubs from gaining a foothold, but the fact of Paris itself, and how its fragmented, multicultural working-class population was at odds with the sociological roots of the game in France.
As Geoff Hare puts it in Football in France: A Cultural History, '[g]eographical mobility' of the capital which 'diluted any special Parisian identity' clashed with how the cultivation of football in France originally arose through a strong, unified sense of the local, circulating 'around small town clubs supported by a homogeneous working-class community and sponsored by its dominant family firm and the local authority.'
It was therefore significant that, as Hare points out, PSG was developed outside of the traditional formative institutions of French football, in a city which until 1977 did not even have an executive mayor, instead, like Leipzig, using the power of commercial acumen to transcend the traditional means of building up a football club.
Here, it feels appropriate to return to another feature of the kit worn by Mbappé and co. against Atalanta, the red Nike logo which denotes PSG's hugely succesful association with Nike's Air Jordan brand.
Neatly and pleasingly sown on the opposite side to the Paris Saint-Germain badge, without a single piece of fabric out of place, it symbolises the knotting together of the disparate elements of Parisian life into a single, slick operation. But as Paris FC (who split from PSG in a vain gesture of defiance in 1973) linger in Ligue 2, Red Star tough it out in the Championnat National, and Racing Club try to avoid falling into obscurity altogether, it serves as a reminder that for all the success that a newly-unified Les Parisiens may bring to the capital, there will always be a stitch out of place.