As a club, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) are imperious by nature. Last night, the French soccer giants sealed their progression to the next round of the UEFA Champions League (UCL) after besting AS Monaco over two legs. In previous years, there may have been questions about PSG’s ceiling in the pan-European competition, but this year, they are the defending champions.
In May 2025, PSG ventured to Munich, Germany, and came away with their first UCL trophy. The win firmly established the club at the top table of Europe’s elite sides after years of near misses. Last week, they travelled to Monaco to ensure they maintain their knockout streak in the competition, running out 3-2 victors before finishing the job last night.
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But that was not the only trip PSG took this month. Earlier in February, the organization traveled to London, UK, for an altogether different purpose. There were no fixtures involved, UCL or otherwise, and no players made the trip. In a sense, PSG, the soccer club, did not travel at all. Rather, the five-day excursion to the heart of the UK capital was an exercise in promoting PSG, the brand.
Ici C’est Paris La Maison reimagined a townhouse near London’s bustling Oxford Street as a hub of cultural activity. While the walls were adorned with PSG branding and matchday posters from that historic UCL run, the activity within the house was decidedly different. The ground floor hosted a full-service yoga studio by PSG partner Stanley 1913 and an AI-powered movement tracker envisioning participants' movements as dance.
The first floor featured a coffee shop leveraging the club’s Visit Rwanda sponsorship to provide its own blend of Rwandan coffee beans, a merchandising store – doubling as a creative customization workshop replete with clothing capsule collections and standard PSG shirts, and the demonstration of a sleep pod from Beyond Wellness (the same pod used by PSG players at their training center).
Activity continued with the second floor staging DJ sets and musical performances from Parisian artists, alongside a display of the club’s 2024-25 trophy haul, a Formula 1 driving simulator, and a photo corner. On the top floor, the house presented curated meals and tasting sessions from various chefs.
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By GlobalDataThe totality of the cross-cultural experience reflects PSG’s new reality and its intention to expand beyond the realm of sport. Positioning ‘PSG the brand’ as a wider commercial entity with broader appeal than just PSG the soccer club. And in the eyes of PSG chief executive Victoriano Melero, the two can be mutually exclusive.
“It’s not about converting [non-soccer fans], it’s about having a broad fan base. The idea is really to make them a Paris Saint-Germain brand addict, meaning that they [may] not be that interested in football, but they're interested in the brand itself.”
Melero joined PSG as general secretary in 2017, before stepping into the chief executive role in an interim capacity in 2023, a role that was made permanent a year later.
In his time at the club, Melero has overseen the development of the Ligue 1 team’s new training center in Poissy, and perhaps most notably the purchase of a minority shareholding in the club by private equity firm Arctos Partners.
He spoke to Sportcal while visiting La Maison, discussing how PSG’s brand diversification is helping to push it to new commercial heights, and insulating it from potential pitfalls that a soccer-only model can spring up.
PSG the brand
Since 2018, PSG has been a partner of Jordan Brand, the fashion-forward Nike subsidiary that has helped transform the club’s visual identity. Jordan's affiliation has helped shift PSG’s image into that of a streetwise label representative of Paris itself and its position as a global fashion hub with a young population. This identity, PSG believes, translates across borders, something the club itself intends to do physically as much as emotionally.
Indeed, the La Maison concept is not a one-off exclusive to London. After its stop at the UK capital, the cultural exhibit will depart on a global tour, with planned visits to Los Angeles and New York (US), Shanghai (China), and Tokyo (Japan).
Melero provides an outline, explaining: “The point is to attract new fans, to convert those fans through product and services, [through] our philosophy, and then to retain them. This, I think, is maybe the most complicated, because we know the versatility of young people. So we've had to show that we are much more than just a football club.”
At the crux of this has been the Jordan Brand affiliation, a first for Jordan in the soccer market and the European market at large. While PSG had previously relied on its core Parisian fanbase to serve as a baseline for annual merchandise sales, Jordan Brand has helped turn the club into a global merchandise mover on a par with any other team in the sport.
In May, this reached its zenith, with PSG setting a new international (non-US) sales record for global e-commerce with merchandising heavyweight Fanatics, the exclusive operator of PSG’s internet sales business.
Peaking in the hour after the club’s UCL victory (between 11 pm and midnight CET), sales exploded 4,200% on the entire previous day (May 30), and in those 12 hours, more merchandise was sold than in the entire three months preceding it, combined.
Buyers from over 70 countries purchased PSG merchandise, with the best-selling item naturally being the commemorative Champions League winners jersey, but the gains did not stop there.
“The launch of the home kits this season saw a [masssive] increase compared to the previous season, thanks to the win in the Champions League,” Melero says, revealing that sales more than doubled on the prior year. The numbers eclipsed even the 2021-22 home jersey release, the club’s previous record, by 37%.
“What is really important for us is that it's part of a lifestyle. So it's not only for a football fan, it's because it's trendy, it's a lifestyle. It's interesting in terms of revenue. But as I was saying, it's also very much interesting in terms of brand exposure.”
Revenue diversification
Melero explains that positioning of PSG as a lifestyle brand is a move that is not only driven by a drive for revenue maximization but rather necessitated by French soccer’s ongoing domestic media rights crisis.
He points to the 2024-25 campaign, where the English Premier League’s bottom-side Southampton generated €128 million ($150 million) in domestic media rights revenue, which is close to triple the figure that PSG reportedly earned from its domestic broadcast mix over the same period.
While revenue from UEFA competition remained strong, owing to PSG’s performances, the fact that they can so easily eclipse domestic income highlights how much needs to be done to make up the gap between Ligue 1 and Europe’s other so-called top-five leagues.
Melero says, “For sure, it's key for us to be able to diversify our revenue, and something we are working on. It's also to develop all this brand content that's really a new way of communicating," adding that this is only made possible by the sheer number of assets available to PSG to leverage.
The day after we spoke, PSG announced the launch of its global running program, headlined by the ‘We Run Paris’ 10km mass participation event, which Melero hopes will aid the club’s entry into the wellness business.
He says, “We've got various partnerships and events that we are trying to connect. We've got Nike, of course, we've got [Zing Coach] app, and we have organized the second edition of the run.” That event will feature pre-race activities and on-course activations, before finishing at the Parc des Princes, PSG’s stadium, tying together the varying strands of the club’s commercial business and cultural identity into one.
Fiscally, this strategy is already bearing fruit. In the recent Deloitte Money League table, which ranks soccer sides based on revenue, Paris Saint-Germain finished fourth, with revenue across the 2024-25 season of €837 million, in spite of the domestic media rights shortfall.
That turnover grew year on year in spite of the domestic rights decline showcases the steps PSG have taken to reduce their dependence on what is typically a core revenue driver.
Traditional revenue streams do, of course, play a major part in PSG’s financial mix. Matchday ticketing, for example, contributed to around €175 million of that overall figure, of which Melero reveals that around half was from hospitality. PSG does not own the Parc de Princes (in fact, the club is already looking to depart the venue for a more permanent home), and as such, the club is still limited in its ability to monetize its fanbase and its highest-profile fixtures. Making the most of what it has in this regard, then, is of the utmost importance.
“We've got a limited capacity, and with roughly 10% of that capacity, we were able to achieve close to 50% of [matchday] turnover. I think that that's one important point, because it really shows the savoir-faire of Paris Saint-Germain. Because if you compare in terms of revenue per hospitality seat, we have the highest revenue [in Europe].”
Beyond matchday, the club is still able to utilize the venue for the likes of stadium tours and visits, as well as corporate events such as conferences, a business sector that is expanding thanks to the Poissy training center, which is capable of hosting similar events.
While making the most of the stadium is a must, you can forgive PSG for focusing on the merchandising golden goose that the club has worked to cultivate over the last decade. The biggest revenue sector in PSG’s financials across the 2024-25 period was undoubtedly sponsorship, merchandising, and other diverse commercial sectors that come with being associated with the iconic Eiffel Tower brand mark that is the club’s crest.
Commercial revenue stands at around €367 million, Melero states. “That's a good example of what we are doing here,” he adds. “We are increasing our commercial revenue, because we are offering more than the club, meaning things like the jersey, providing LED [matchday branding]. We are giving, through this kind of event (La Maison), another kind of exposure. So that’s a way to attract new fans, and also it's a way of promoting brands.”
Melero specifically points to Stanley and Visit Rwanda and their presence at La Maison as illustrative of what PSG offers sponsors beyond the traditional pitchside hoarding and social media branding assets.
While Sportcal visited La Maison, the top floor played host to a Q&A featuring PSG icon David Ginola, a fashion-forward figurehead in his own right. The PSG that Ginola played for in the 1990s was markedly different from the club of today, but capturing the essence of that side, which carved out a position as Paris’ sole representatives in the top-flight (which was the case up until this season), is key to entrenching the club’s position as a representative of the city, globally.
With a potential clash against either Barcelona or Chelsea on the cards in the next round of the UCL, PSG still has plenty of traveling left to do in 2026 before even considering the next La Maison pop-ups. But the idea that both endeavors will contribute to the club’s revenue diversification in their own ways will doubtless encourage the club in its global branding push.
It is clear that drawing from all aspects of Parisian culture, from fashion to music to cuisine, has helped form a cornerstone of PSG’s commercial strategy. And in looking to become the latest French export to break the global market, PSG is perhaps proving that in the modern era, the actual soccer element only needs to be a part of that.
