“In his mind, things are clear, he wants to leave the Park, he has changed.” This confidence from an elected official from the Ile-de-France region, very familiar with the relations between Nasser Al-Khelaïfi and Anne Hidalgo, leaves no room for doubt. The president of PSG is convinced: the future of PSG is no longer written within the confines of the Porte de Saint-Cloud (16th century). The models of an ultra-modern stadium imagined by the architects finally convinced him. The Qatari leader wants to project his club into the next fifty years. According to him, this will not be possible by remaining at the Parc des Princes, an architectural masterpiece with an aging structure and limited potential.
At the start of the 2020s, no one at PSG imagined such a scenario. Jean-Claude Blanc, then deputy general manager of the club, quietly advanced his pawns and exchanged good understanding with Emmanuel Grégoire and Pierre Rabadan, Anne Hidalgo’s deputies. The Park extension project took shape even if it did not precisely achieve the objective of 60,000 places envisaged by Nasser Al-Khelaïfi. Then came the time of discord.
