How Michael Jordan helped make brand Paris Saint-Germain cool

As part of his “Man of the Woods” tour in 2018, the American singer Justin Timberlake stepped out for a concert in the Paris’s Bercy Arena wearing an exclusive Jordan Brand jacket.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about that. Timberlake had already collaborated with Jordan Brand that year on a limited edition Air Jordan III trainer, which he debuted at half-time during the Super Bowl.

Yet there was something on the back of this jacket that caused a stir — a large mock-up of the Paris Saint-Germain badge, spliced with Jordan Brand’s famous Jumpman logo.

Transfer rumours are normally the main source of gossip around major football clubs. But here, at a Justin Timberlake concert, the French club PSG were creating a different kind of buzz. A month later, when rapper Travis Scott appeared at the Cabaret Vert festival in northern France wearing a PSG x Jordan basketball jersey, speculation of some kind of agreement ramped up further.

This was a football club courting a whole new audience.

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PSG have not been afraid of chasing a brand identity beyond the confines of football.

Their flagship club shop, on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, nestles in among marquee outlets for Rolex, Dior and Louis Vuitton. They have a bricks-and-mortar presence now in New York and London. Their store on Oxford Street opened in September, joining 10 others dotted around the globe.

“This is not some big marketing expense to open stores and run a loss because it’s cool for the brand,” insists Marc Armstrong, the club’s chief revenue officer, speaking to The Athletic at PSG’s offices in Boulogne-Billancourt, west of Paris. “It’s commercial.

“We are one of the few brands out there with enough demand globally for our products to be opening these stores.”

While PSG’s pursuit of European glory has underwhelmed on the field, their off-field commercial footprint has grown significantly. In 2011, when the club were taken over by the Qatari investment vehicle Qatar Sports Investments (QSI), PSG averaged around 50,000 shirt sales per year. Now, their shirts are everywhere. The club say they have sold more than a million yearly since 2019.

According to the latest available Deloitte Money League rankings, published for the season 2021-22, PSG ranked No 1 for commercial revenue in world football. The club say they generated a record €800million (£693m; $879m) last year.

Their global reach has ballooned. On social media, follower numbers have risen from 500,000 in 2011 to more than 200million across a variety of platforms, ranging from TikTok and Twitch to Weibo and WeChat. This month, American private equity firm Arctos Partners was suitably convinced by their expansion potential to acquire a 12.5 per cent stake in the club, a deal that effectively valued PSG at €4.25billion.

That number raised eyebrows, but what is clear is that PSG are no longer just a football club. Nor do they just want to be seen as a football club.

They are a brand, with eyes set on replicating the likes of the New York Yankees.

“The vision of the chairman (Nasser Al-Khelaifi) in 2011 was clear — to make the greatest sports franchise in the sports industry,” Fabien Allegre, chief brand officer at PSG, tells The Athletic. “PSG is unique. It belongs to Paris. We believe football is part of culture, not apart from, and so creating a bridge between music, art, fashion and sport was a key element of our strategy.”

Over the past five years, PSG’s growth has accelerated acutely, fuelled by a series of partnerships with brands such as Dior, GOAT (a global sneaker and apparel platform) and BAPE (A Bathing Ape, a Japanese fashion brand), as well as the recruitment of star players Kylian Mbappe, Neymar and Lionel Messi, who themselves brought a whole new set of eyeballs.

But there is one brand partnership that stands out. One that has made PSG a marketing case study at Harvard Business School. It is the partnership that generated a buzz like no other, and triggered speculation on a par with the signing of a multi-million-pound star player.

Their exclusive agreement with Jordan Brand, at Nike, which tied the club intimately with the legacy of a basketball icon, Michael Jordan.

“It’s the one thing that gets talked about the most, everywhere we go in the world,” says Armstrong. “It was the one agreement that has maybe elevated us to another level.”

PSG and Jordan Brand initially announced a three-year partnership in 2018, but that was subsequently extended. They celebrated their fifth year of collaboration in September by unveiling a third collection: a new third kit with an elephant print design inspired by the Air Jordan III, first unveiled in 1988.

It is the latest of their collaborations that have seen Jordan Brand’s famous Jumpman logo transposed onto a whole range of PSG-branded apparel, from home shirts to diamond pattern shorts — inspired by Jordan’s Chicago Bulls — as well as jackets, tracksuits and, of course, trainers.

PSG’s relationship with Nike is long-standing. “We’ve been with Nike for 34 years,” says Armstrong. “We’re contracted now until 2032. It will be 43 years by then. Nobody’s been with them longer.” That enabled PSG to become Jordan Brand’s first formal partnership with a football club, having previously ventured into the sport through former PSG forward Neymar, with whom Jordan launched its first complete collection in 2016.

Neither Nike nor PSG was willing to disclose figures associated with the agreement, but there is no question that working with Jordan Brand adds immense value.

In its latest annual report, as detailed by Forbes, Nike reported $6.6billion in annual wholesale revenue for Jordan Brand. The club say that their revenue has increased eightfold since 2012, and that their partnership with Jordan has increased sales outside France. Indeed, they suggest those sales rose by 50 per cent within the first six months of the agreement.

“It’s a significant proportion of the annual sales now and it’s got us to the position where, today, we think we’re the best-selling jersey in the world,” says Armstrong, who joined PSG just after the Jordan agreement was signed. “When you add in the lifestyle ranges and the whole collection, we think we’re out-selling everybody.

“It reaches an audience that, even if you did win every single trophy every single year, you still wouldn’t otherwise reach because it’s a non-football audience. A lot of what we do reaches the people who wear the Jordan kit because it just looks amazing and it’s cool. They know the two brands are cool and have heard about it.”

PSG saw the tie-up as a natural step on their journey to global brand recognition. They point to a pathway of collaborations that led to this point, such as with Parisian fashion brand Koche — the club became the first football ‘brand’ to appear at a high-end fashion show, in Shenzen, China back in 2017. Two years later, they launched a Jordan kit there.

On the field, PSG have signed culturally significant footballers, such as David Beckham in 2013 and one of the greatest players of all time, Messi, in 2021. Their players have been featured in Vogue magazine. Today, they have their own section on the contemporary online fashion guide and cultural hub, Hypebeast.

Their plan is clear; to cash in on Paris’s status as a capital of culture.

As a strategy, it makes sense. This is a club competing in what is recognised as the fifth-best league in Europe. They do not benefit from the riches generated by television deals such as those enjoyed in the English Premier League. Deloitte, in 2021, ranked PSG only 18th for broadcast revenue. “It stresses the importance of those areas we can control,” says Armstrong. “Growing our stadium revenues, growing our licensing and merchandise revenues, growing our sponsorship revenues.”

They have deliberately played into Paris’ high-end image. They have unashamedly expanded their VIP section at Parc des Princes to nearly 5,000, almost 10 per cent of the stadium’s capacity, and have welcomed an array of celebrities from Kim Kardashian to Pharrell Williams. Jordan himself has visited twice. Stars have worn their attire and the club claim they do not pay them to do so.

“We sent a friends and family pack to all kinds of celebrities around the world,” says Armstrong. “Will Smith received sneakers and unveiled them live on his Instagram channel. It’s organic. We are not paying these people to do this. They want this cool product. Every week you see different celebrities wearing the product.”

PSG have outwardly tried to own Paris and everything that comes with it.

In 2013, they accentuated the word ‘Paris’ in their badge as part of a rebrand. As the only major club in the city, they dominate their territory. “In London, there are six or seven Premier League teams and even Madrid, Milan and Barcelona have more than one,” says Armstrong. “London having one Premier League team and being called London United, with Big Ben in the badge, is everything we are.

“We are Paris and Paris is in the name, the Eiffel Tower is on the badge and there is no other top-flight team in the city. So we own the city in a way other clubs don’t dominate their city. You can combine that with how cool the city is; the city of fashion, art, gastronomy, and all of these great things.”

This is appealing terrain for a brand like Jordan. “Even though it started as basically a basketball brand, they also want to feel exclusive, high fashion,” says Professor Andrea Guerin, director of the Institute for Sport Business at Loughborough University London. “There are so many examples over the years of different celebrities wearing their clothing. In 1996, the band Boyz II Men all wore Air Jordan XIs to the Grammy Awards with their suits. That was a huge moment: ‘Wow, this is a sport brand, but they’re actually fashionable enough for people to wear with tuxedos’.”

“We are first to be able to bridge between Dior as an official outfitter, and then Jordan, which is maybe a mainstream streetwear brand,” says Allegre, who has worked for PSG since 2008. “We cover all the scope.”

There is more to the appeal of Paris than the glitz and glamour. There is a strong basketball culture here, too, defined by the Quai 54 streetball world championship — a basketball tournament held annually and supported by Jordan Brand since 2006.

The Jordan Brand has other links to the French capital, including its “Jordan Brand Wings” design programme, which aims to assist future designers. “These examples buttress a longstanding, organic relationship between brand and city,” a spokesperson for Jordan Brand tells The Athletic. “That connection has been retained through the decades and continues now with PSG.”

PSG themselves are popular with an aspirational audience Nike is keen to attract. “Nike has a clear strategy to win with the sub-cultures within Paris,” says Richard Adelsberg, chief executive of global sports and esports marketing and creative agency Ear to the Ground. “There’s a huge hip-hop scene, and the NBA, basketball and hip-hop have built from the ground up together. They have had a close trajectory.”

Like Jordan the basketball player, Jordan’s brand has transcended the confines of his sport. His clothing lines have appeared on TV shows and his trainers were worn by the leading hip-hop artists of the time. In the 1990s, rappers such as Notorious BIG, Ice Cube and Jay Z would reference Jordan’s trainers in songs.

PSG today are now enjoying a similar cultural crossover. Take the track Thiago Silva by Dave and AJ Tracey, which went viral after Glastonbury in 2016 when a festival-goer was brought on stage to rap the song with Dave while wearing a PSG shirt with Silva’s name on the back.

“It is essentially a four-minute long advert for PSG,” says Simon Chadwick, professor of sport and geopolitical economy at SKEMA Business School in Paris. “There is now this whole bunch of rap artists who release tracks or publish videos in which Paris Saint-Germain, Nike and Jordan are centre stage. On the one hand, it is very Generation Z, very much about convergence, fashion, lifestyle, music. About coolness. About being a 21st-century urban youth.

“But, at the same time, the brand has become aspirational. A lot of these tracks are about earning money, driving fast cars and so on.”

The result has also given Jordan Brand a foothold in soccer, the world’s most popular sport, and access to a cultural audience that fits its brand identity. Michael Jordan had stressed it was “a natural fit” at the launch of the partnership. That has rung true.

The image of two players sat on footballs, Mbappe with Warren Zaire-Emery — the 17-year-old midfielder who, like Mbappe, grew up in the Parisian suburbs — epitomises the way PSG can cultivate their image through Jordan. The photograph is a mirror of Jordan’s iconic commercial with Spike Lee in 1988, to launch the Air Jordan III. It was a key moment in the fusion of sportswear and hip-hop culture.

Is Mbappe the club’s own Jordan? “We love having great players like Kylian here,” says Armstrong. “Just like Neymar, Zlatan (Ibrahimovic), (Edinson) Cavani, Thiago Silva. But the club is bigger than any player.”

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For PSG, this has all been transformational.

“Jordan is a powerhouse brand, it transcends basketball, and changes how consumers think of PSG,” says Professor Guerin. “Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time, arguably. His brand represents this greatness. Partnering with PSG helps to give them that same kind of impression in consumers’ minds.”

PSG have managed to enlarge their appeal beyond football and reach a younger audience, a target area many clubs find difficult to access. Entering these cultural spaces and becoming “cool” is not easy, certainly when it comes to claiming authenticity. Jordan Brand has helped in taking that step. “There are strategies involved, but Jordan make it feel like it’s not a big marketing strategy,” adds Professor Guerin. “What young people want to see is something that doesn’t feel like they’re being marketed to.

“In academia, it’s called ‘self-presentation theory’ — goal-directed conscious or unconscious attempts to influence the perception of others. Backstage performances are seen as more authentic. That’s where someone’s showing more personal aspects of their lives or they’re talking to their friends. As opposed to front stage, which is much more crafted and constructed. People really want to see backstage performances.”

It is not just PSG and Jordan Brand that benefit.

To talk of PSG is also to talk of Qatar. The club’s majority owner, QSI, derives its wealth from the Qatari state. PSG have multiple sponsorship agreements with Qatar-owned or linked companies. “PSG have riden the urban wave,” says Professor Chadwick. “In conjunction with that is Qatar seeking to project soft power. It’s arguable that, through Qatar’s ownership of Paris Saint-Germain, Qatar has, among some target audiences, become cool.

“I’m not entirely sure that Qatar in the PSG case, or Abu Dhabi in Manchester City’s case, really understood why they had bought these assets. It was probably for reasons of status and it was probably because these countries are rentier states; because of their over-dependence upon oil and gas revenues, they seek to effectively generate external revenue streams from other investments, to diversify their economies. It also mitigates risk by moving some of their assets offshore as well.

“I’m not suggesting there was no reasoning behind the acquisition. But what people forget now, especially in the context of what Saudi Arabia is doing (with its investments in football), is that you go back to 2008 when Abu Dhabi bought Manchester City and it wasn’t like this. Dubai started hosting their tennis championship around 20 years ago. In many ways, the Gulf nations were engaging in this conspicuous consumption because they saw some attraction, but also they were copying each other. I describe it as isomorphic behaviour.

“It is almost as though what we’re seeing now and what we’ve seen over the last 10 years is the retrofitting of strategy to the acquisitions that they have made. In City’s case, it’s much more about a franchise network. In PSG’s case, it is much more about lifestyle and fashion.”

France also gains from PSG’s growth, too.

“There is renewed emphasis at the top levels of government in France to use its cultural assets to project an image of France,” adds Professor Chadwick. “PSG is a big part of that. The biggest and best embodiment of that is President Emmanuel Macron trying to persuade Mbappe not to go to Real Madrid (in the summer of 2022), with 2024 a key year with the Paris Olympics on the horizon.”

Nike will not be put off by global power games. “They have always had an edge; troublesome, awkward, non-conformist,” says Professor Chadwick. “They read the street better than their rivals. For Nike, PSG is something of a sweet spot.”

This agreement still has room to run. There is alignment on future growth. China, for instance, is seen as the next step for PSG, who are considering opening a store there next year, with Nike similarly viewing the country as a key market. PSG and Jordan Brand recently met in London to discuss future design ideas.

There are no concerns over the departures of star names Neymar and Messi last summer. “Last year’s home kit was the record kit launch, and we’ve beaten that this year,” says Armstrong. “Stadium tour business is up. We’re opening stores, in Miami and Las Vegas. Most recently, London, a third store in Korea, a fourth in Japan. All the metrics are still going in the right direction.”

To keep winning off the field, though, PSG will need to win on it, too.

PSG may have more flexibility to alter their identity to accommodate a lifestyle brand, more so certainly than the traditional big football clubs who have to traverse the tension between what appeals to a younger, international audience and the demands of their traditional fanbase. But there are limits.

In May, PSG’s ultras protested outside the club’s offices in Boulogne-Billancourt. They released a statement declaring their disillusionment about the direction of the club, high ticket prices and “mercenary” star players with little connection to the team. The atmosphere has improved markedly in the period since, but are PSG conscious of accusations they privilege brand over sporting substance?

“Of course, that’s why we do invest,” says Armstrong. “First and foremost, we are a football club. That’s what we care most about. But what we have done as a brand helps to provide the revenue to fund what we want to do on the pitch.”

That wholesale change in approach included the recruitment of 13 new faces as well as a new coach in Luis Enrique — with a long-term remit. It also coincided with the opening of a new €300million training centre. The aim was to pivot to a younger, more French team. Such a pivot is not incongruous with the PSG brand, not least considering the vast array of football talent found in the Paris suburbs.

“We can press reset,” says Allegre. “It was funny because, this summer, a lot of friends wondered if this was not going to be a good year because of Neymar and Messi leaving. ‘You won’t sell jerseys’. But sales are up.”

PSG do need to be successful as a team, though, and not just to appease supporters. For their brand to take on the international recognition of the LA Lakers and the New York Yankees, they need to be winners. Michael Jordan’s greatness was established by his outstanding ability on a basketball court.

“What they’re doing with Jordan Brand is very interesting from a cultural, marketing point of view, but to become a global brand that competes with the big U.S. and European franchises, they’ve got to start winning Champions Leagues as well,” says Adelsberg. “That’s probably the last step.”

In the absence of trophies outside of France, PSG have had to think differently to build their image. But it can only take them so far.

They are well aware of that.

“If we have this success on the pitch, if you get a trophy on the Champions League level,” adds Allegre. “Then all the pillars of the strategy will be there.”

(Top photo: Ibrahim Ezzat/NurPhoto via Getty Images))