With Red Bull as a minority shareholder, Agache, the Arnault holding company, is to buy FC Paris from its current owner, Pierre Ferracci. The aim is to give the club the means to rival PSG as the capital’s second most powerful club.
The Arnault family has decided thattwo soccer clubs for Paris is no luxury!
The information, which appeared last week in the sports daily L’Equipe and has since been widely reported, has now been confirmed.
In a press release dated Thursday October 17, Agache, the Arnault family holding company, stated that it had “entered into exclusive negotiations with a view to acquiring a majority stake in Paris FC, an iconic and popular soccer club founded in Paris in 1969, which current owner Pierre Ferracci has developed with talent and energy”.
LVMH-Red Bull alliance
As L’Équipe had already hinted, the Arnault family is not acting alone. They explained that they had been advised by the Austrian company Red Bull, specialists in energy drinks and very active in the field of sports. According to a source close to the matter, the Arnault family will initially acquire a 55% majority stake in the Ligue 2 club from Pierre Ferracci, with Red Bull acquiring a 15% minority interest.
LVMH and Red Bull have already come together recently. Last September, the world’s number one luxury goods company announced that it would become Formula 1’s global partner for ten years from 2025. Red Bull, with its Red Bull Racing team, has been involved in the iconic motor sport for several years.
“Drawing on its successful track record in top-level sport, particularly soccer in Germany, Brazil and the United States, Red Bull will be involved primarily in the sporting dimension in an advisory role, whether this involves stepping up the detection of young talent capable of joining the training center or targeting the best profiles capable of boosting the competitiveness of the men’s and women’s first teams,” emphasized Agache in its press release.
A change of dimension
For her part, Agache, who says she is “very attached to respecting Paris FC’s own identity, its values and its popular dimension”, intends to “bring to the club her entrepreneurial vision and all her know-how in terms of economic development and brand influence over the long term”.
In short, “with the arrival of Agache as the club’s majority shareholder, the Club will change dimension and aim for new successes”, the holding company assures us, offering it “the necessary means to pursue its economic, civic and sporting development”.
A “dual ambition” is aimed at: “to ensurethat the men’s and women’s teams remain among the elite of French soccer and in the hearts of Parisians”. This will be achieved by “embodying another facet of soccer in the capital” and “contributing to the influence of the club’s unique values”.
A second club for Paris
By investing in Paris FC, the Arnault family is giving a second Parisian club the chance to finally break through, and to do so with majority French capital.
For more than four decades, no club had come to compete with PSG, and even more so since the arrival of its powerful Qatari shareholders in 2011, transforming it into a veritable war machine.
This era is about to come to an end, allowing the French capital to join the ranks of most European capitals, which, with the exception of Berlin, boast more than one iconic soccer club.
After its highly successful, high-profile premium partnership of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Arnault family is set to contribute even more to the sporting influence of the Parisian capital.
This announcement comes just in time to recreate a positive buzz around LVMH, headed and owned by Bernard Arnault. The world’s number one luxury goods company has just announced a 3% drop in sales for the third quarter of 2024.
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Featured Photo: © FC Paris
