Football: Paris searches for team to support

Football: The French capital has a magnificent stadium that hosted the World Cup final but no team to call it home

HERE IS a tale of two cities. The first has six top-rank football clubs, including one which has no home stadium. The second has two magnificent stadiums but only one First Division club. Next season it may have none.

Football in the English capital is booming, with French immigrants - Wenger, Petit, Vieira, Anelka, Desailly, Leboeuf and Ginola - leading the way. Football in the French capital, the capital of the world champions, is failing, as ever.

On Wednesday of last week, however, something strange happened: something which has not happened for more than 40 years. There were two big football matches in Paris on the same night.

Paris St-Germain, the wealthiest club in France, the 13th wealthiest club in the world, scrambled a 0-0 draw before 40,000 people at the Parc des Princes. The result was greeted by local fans, players and press as a turning point. Some of the highly paid stars in red and blue seemed to have grown backbones, ending a sequence of jellyfish-like performances which had reduced their perennially under-achieving club to the shame of an end-of-season relegation struggle.

At the same time, at the magnificent Stade de France, just north of Paris proper in St-Denis, the second club in greater Paris, Red Star, were losing 2-1 to the resurgent French "club of the 70s", St-Etienne. Despite a defeat which brought relegation to the national league (in effect the Third Division) a step closer, this match - the first league game held in the new stadium - was hailed as a breakthrough by the Red Star management.

The attendance, 45,000, was the highest ever in a French Second Division game. It would, Red Star argued, restore their status as the leading candidate to fill the embarrassing and expensive vacancy for a "resident club" at the stadium where France won the World Cup (and the Welsh rugby union side recently became the first country to defeat any French team).

As often in the long, bumbling history of Parisian football, both turning points may prove to be illusory - square passes rather than shots on goal.

Within three days of that 0-0 triumph, PSG had fired their coach, for the second time this season. To lose one coach in modern football is normal, to lose two in a season is laughable.

Alain Giresse, the former international midfielder, was dismissed as their coach in October for failing to challenge for the title with his team of international stars (Marco Simone from Italy, "Jay-Jay" Okocha from Nigeria, Christian Worns from Germany). For good measure, PSG also fired their president.

The new coach, Artur Jorge from Portugal, began well but since the winter break PSG have not won a game. In recent matches, he packed the team with defenders and defensive midfielders, but still lost by two or three goals.

The nadir came last Saturday when PSG lost 2-0 to Montpellier in the League Cup, ending their last chance of appearing in Europe next season. On Monday a mob of PSG fans invaded the club's training ground, the Camp des Loges in the Paris suburbs, and hurled a couple of tear-gas grenades before being ejected. "You make us cry every Saturday," they seemed to be saying. "Now it's your turn."

The incident provoked a player revolt, led by the former international, and former West Ham, goalkeeper, Bernard Lama. He accused the imported stars, especially the team captain, Simone, of exaggerating injuries and being interested only in their next contract.

Lama described Simone as a "Milan reserve" and a "diva". That is "diva", not "diver". He presumably meant that Simone was an over-weight, overpaid Italian, who constantly bleats about the cruel fates which have marooned him in a failing football club.

On Saturday, Jorge was fired and replaced by his deputy, Philippe Bergeroo. PSG are five points clear of the relegation zone with eight games remaining. Several of their rivals have games in hand. The Second Division beckons unless Bergeroo, part of Aime Jacquet's coaching team at the World Cup, can rebuild the team's morale, starting with a difficult visit to Auxerre on Saturday.

What is wrong with PSG? They had a brief purple patch in the early 1990s; they won both the French Cup and League Cup last year. But the club - created in 1971 to provide a resident club for the Parc des Princes, heavily subsidised by the city of Paris, owned by the pay-TV company Canal Plus - has always lacked history, roots and soul.

Thanks to the television connection, money to buy good players is no object but the effect is always like cut flowers stuck into sand: the team blooms for a while and rapidly fades.

Manchester United fans may take this as further evidence of the dangers of being owned by a TV company. But the PSG malaise precedes Canal Plus ownership. It seems to be almost spiritual.

Paris, unlike Manchester or London or Rome - unlike Marseilles or Bordeaux - is not a football city. The support for PSG, averaging more than 40,000 a game, is surprisingly loyal, mostly middle class, mostly white. There has actually been a slight increase in gates this season (as there has, to record levels, in France as a whole, thanks to the World Cup victory).

In Paris, however, you never have the sense that the city lives and breathes its football club (or clubs) as do the people of Manchester or London or Milan or Marseilles. Parisians are more likely to be talking about movies or food or sex or shoes. As the American singer, Tom Waits, once observed: "Paris just isn't a man's town".

What hope then of manufacturing a second Paris top-flight club to occupy the Stade de France? (PSG refused to move because they would have lost their subsidies from Paris town hall). The consortium which runs the stadium gets pounds 7m compensation from the government for every year that there is no resident football club playing there. For months, the French government has been desperate to find, or create, a club big enough to occupy the newest and loveliest stadium in Europe.

Red Star seemed once to be the certain choice. But their president is now under investigation for fraud; they have slumped to the bottom of the Second Division; and their fan base is no more than 4,000 to 5,000. The 45,000 who saw Wednesday's "experimental" game were mostly St-Etienne fans and locals taking advantage of cheap ticket prices to watch a game - any game - in an already mythical stadium.

And now Red Star have a serious rival - L'Olympique Noisy-le-Sec 93, a local Third Division club. Noisy-le-Sec is not one of the great names of European football. It is a measure of the sports ministry's desperation that its candidature is being taken increasingly seriously: as if Brentford were being encouraged to give up Griffin Park and set up home at Wembley.

The club's director, Jamel Sandjaki, is of North African origin. He believes that Noisy-le Sec can become the team of the Paris suburbs: in other words the club to tap the talent and the support of tens of thousands of Zidane and Anelka "wannabes", the football-mad, African and Arab-origin kids of the banlieue, who mostly despise PSG.

Several large companies have promised to invest in Noisy, if they move to the Stade. There is a problem, however. In the background lurks Sandjaki's friend, Bernard Tapie, the disgraced former businessman and politician and former match-fixing owner of Olympique Marseilles.

The possibility of Red Star and Noisy sharing the Stade de France has also been mooted. No rapid solution is likely, unless...

Surely, London has one football club too many. With the rocky road to Dublin barred, could Sam Hammam not be persuaded to move Wimbledon to the Stade de France? Paris St-Germain once had a team in the Rugby Super League (another PSG failure). Why not Paris-Stade de France (the club formerly known as Wimbledon) playing in the Premiership?