{"text":[[{"start":6.1,"text":"The night Paris Saint-Germain reached their second straight Champions League final, I biked through the happy chaos of Paris, and realised, with surprise: this has become a football city. I’d watched PSG’s semi-final against Bayern Munich at a friend’s flat, and cycling back along the river, I dodged honking cars and dancing fans waving club flags. As usual in Paris, celebrations doubled as a riot: police made 127 arrests. I fell asleep to the bang of fireworks. "}],[{"start":32.8,"text":"In Saturday’s final, PSG meet Arsenal of north London. I’ve spent most of my life in Paris and London, and watched their football identities expand and change. This is, as they say, a tale of two cities. "}],[{"start":48.449999999999996,"text":"As a schoolboy in London 40 years ago, I began taking the W7 bus to watch Arsenal at Highbury. You’d walk the last bit through terraced streets, and only on turning a corner would you spot the little stadium — capacity 38,000. I never became an Arsenal fan, but couldn’t resist watching decent football for £5, a price occasionally affordable even to a teenager, if you didn’t mind craning your neck on filthy, packed terraces to glimpse the underwhelming attack of Perry Groves and Martin Hayes. "}],[{"start":79.94999999999999,"text":"Compared with other regions, London football lacked tradition. The English professional game developed in the north and Midlands, and no southern team won the league until Arsenal in 1931. Football clubs tend to matter less in capital cities. Once, in the 1990s, I watched fans from a provincial city march down Baker Street chanting their club songs at passers-by. In their minds, they were shaming the Londoners, invading the capital, making all the noise. But the Londoners they were chanting at — many of them foreigners anyway — didn’t care. Arsenal, Chelsea and Spurs have never been bearers of London’s identity. Each club is just a tribe inside London — a source of belonging for tribe members, bonded by their team shirts, in a vast metropole where few people are now attached to a place of worship, political party or any other civic group. "}],[{"start":135.85,"text":"Football mattered even less in Paris, where I arrived in 2002. PSG then were a terrible team, supported largely by violent cretins, ignored by most Parisians. Wearing a team shirt outdoors meant social death. You could spend your life in Paris without knowing that football existed. PSG “will never become the focus of Parisian pride”, Stefan Szymanski and I wrote in our book Soccernomics. "}],[{"start":159.04999999999998,"text":"Even by 2011, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome and Moscow had won a total of zero Champions Leagues. Provincial cities like Manchester, Liverpool, Barcelona and Milan dominated European football."}],[{"start":173.95,"text":"But things were already changing, as capitals pulled away economically. In 2011, Qatar Sports Investments bought PSG. The club’s president, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, told me why: “It’s the only club in a capital of Europe. You have 12 million people living around this city.”"}],[{"start":192.79999999999998,"text":"Meanwhile, Arsenal had left Highbury for the 60,000-seat Emirates Stadium, and consistently sold it out. No London club before had averaged such large crowds, but Arsenal’s rivals West Ham and Spurs now match that in their new grounds. London clubs charge England’s highest ticket prices. Europe’s 10 richest clubs, as ranked by business advisory firm Deloitte, now include five from capitals: Real Madrid, PSG, Arsenal, Chelsea and Spurs. Money buys trophies. In 2012, Chelsea won London’s first Champions League. PSG finally triumphed last year, thumping Inter Milan 5-0. On Saturday, the eighth capital team in 11 years will become European champions."}],[{"start":235.29999999999998,"text":"Arsenal still don’t represent London. In fact, London’s other football tribes hope they’ll lose. But I now think we were wrong in Soccernomics: PSG is finally becoming a focus of Parisian, or more precisely “Grand Parisian” pride. That is, the club represents both the city and its much larger suburbs, the banlieues. The eight million banlieusards are finally being connected with Paris, chiefly through the building of 68 suburban metro stations. Parisian suburbs have also probably become global football’s biggest talent pool."}],[{"start":268.54999999999995,"text":"Most symbols of Paris — Haussmannian buildings, ancient monuments, elegant people on café terraces — don’t represent the suburbs. PSG do, even if Qatari gentrification has pushed many poor fans out of the stadium itself. In street celebrations, some fans wear PSG shirts that bear the number of their suburban département: 92 or 93. Like the “yellow-vest” protesters of 2018, they invade the elite citadel that usually excludes them."}],[{"start":298.94999999999993,"text":"Even in Paris, football is always more than just football."}],[{"start":302.8499999999999,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram"}],[{"start":317.19999999999993,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1780107471_6677.mp3"}