PSG and its market's specificities management

The PSG (Paris Saint Germain) is a sport club that owns 2 sports team : the traditional football team and a handball team bought few years ago and renamed PSG Handball. Though, those brands under the name PSG concern 2 different sports, the market and segmentation are or could be different at some points. Not the same market because even if those are both sport teams and providing entertainment and emotions through sport, communities that are targeted are really different from each other and the French and global culture influence the total market (in France and Europe, Football is way more followed that handball, and therefore TV broadcasting and revenues are different).

Moreover, the football club is made of many teams, the professional, youth and women team.

Those teams follow the same main PSG strategy in term of brand managing and strategic guidelines but the professional team is seen as the bottomline and the most important to value. The youth and women team participate in the image the club aims at conveying and the youth, as per se, is aimed at forming the future players that will help the club getting good sport results, attract attention (if a young is very talented, such as the player Rabiot, media will talk about the club) and also generate profitable yields if the players are transferred to another football team.

Therefore, our study will focus on the Professional Football teams market, not only in France but also worldwide.

On this market in France, the potential competitors are only 20 (i.e. the 20 teams playing in the first two divisions that are 100% professional). In Europe and in the world, there are hundreds of football professional teams. However, only a few are real competitors on a global market : roughly 30 brands (between 2 to 7 teams in the 6 main football championships : England, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, plus few teams playing is less worldwide visible championships such as Shaktior Donestk…)

Managing the club is very complex since it deals with assets that are both tangible and intangible. The emotions felt by fans and communities as well as the fans and players’ behaviors are not tangible while Jersey, Scarf, coffee cup and other merchandising object branded PSG are tangible. With merchandising, or ticketing, the brand can control everything, from the products range, to the distribution channel, packaging and pricing. On the other hand a club can buy players that have skills that should allow the team to get good results and therefore convey excitement, happiness but you can’t be sure those players will actually have a good impact on results, neither you can control the fans as well as player’s behavior (even with contracted conditions, they can be broken easily). Therefore, it is very difficult for clubs to manage it.

PSG faced lots of violence, for the past few years, in and off stadium from their ‘pseudo’ fans giving the club a negative image. People and family were becoming afraid of going to watch games at the stadium and watching it in bars surrounding the Parc des Princes since Riots happened both before, during and after the game.

Moreover, the club had to pay many fines and play games with no supporters allowed. Their community (which is a valuable asset for a club as we mentioned) became a burden for the club and measured had to be taken to turn it into a positive asset for them (ban many supporters on coming to the stadium, allocate tickets randomly when choosing a category, dislocation of supporters groups, reinforcement of security, more entertainment for families, and so on…). Plus, this bad image armed the club equity since partners don’t want to be and won’t consider associate their brands to the PSG.

Since Community is a main asset to take care of, it is really difficult to implement such measures since it could cost the loss of an important part of the community and therefore the revenue they generate (tickets and merchandising purchases, audience on TV and therefore an impact on TV rights revenues, sponsor partners)

Sources : PSG webiste, l'Equipe.fr Article ont the PSG handball team, le Figaro article on the PSG Sport strategy