6 - Plutocrats, Paranoia, Platoche: Qatar Sports Investment in Paris

Summary

Place du Trocadéro, Paris, 13 May 2013

Paris Saint-Germain football club have won their first league title in nineteen years. To celebrate, the club have arranged for the players to be publicly presented with the trophy – the rather hideousHexagonal – at place du Trocadéro in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. In the early afternoon a platform is carefully erected so that the photos of the presentation will be framed by Paris's most famous landmark, which doubles as the club's emblem. Flags are distributed to bemused tourists and the few PSG supporters already gathering there. Later on, a larger crowd of mostly young men begins to grow, and local shops and businesses decide it is best to close early for the evening. By the time the victorious players have arrived on their open-top bus, thousands have gathered, several of whom have set off smoke bombs and fireworks, whilst others try to force their way through the barriers to the area cordoned off for the presentation, where they are repelled by security guards and police. The atmosphere has turned sour, and a group – reported the following day to be former custodians of the Auteuil stand at PSG’s home ground of the Parc des Princes, who feel victimised by the new security measures introduced by the club that have resulted in them being excluded from the stadium – rush into the area reserved for the press, which is quickly vacated by most of the journalists. The actual presentation of the trophy is obscured by the smoke and fireworks and only theHexagonal can be made out clearly as it is passed rapidly from player to player. The players themselves are quickly bundled back onto their bus, and their planned boat trip on the Seine, from which they had planned to salute the supporters gathered along the bridges, is cancelled. The entire ceremony has lasted less than ten minutes, but the battle between the few hundred young men armed with bottles pillaged from skips and police deploying stun grenades and tear gas will go on longer. The police would later announce that over thirty people were injured and forty-seven taken in for questioning.L’Équipe the following day writes of the press area being ‘invaded’ and the PSG team being ‘evacuated’: ‘celebration gave way to violence’ as ‘Paris was overwhelmed’.