Nice punish PSG

I was checking a French football website just now to find out if the draw for the next round of la Coupe de France has been held yet. It has not. But the headline on the front page of the website set me to surfing. It seems that Nice has defeated Paris-Saint Germain in Ligue 1 play. As a result of the defeat PSG has fallen into the relegation zone and must confront the possibility of demotion to Ligue 2.

I have in the past done a little reading around mostly Wikipedia about football in Paris and therefore know that there is another team in Paris, Paris Football Club, which currently competes in the Championnat National, the 3rd league in the French hierarchy. I found a place where I could check the general classification for le Championnat and discovered that Paris FC is currently 3 points adrift from the promotion zone in that table. This raises the intriguing possibility that PSG could be relegated to Ligue 2 in the same year that Paris FC wins promotion to that same league. Apparently the followers of the two teams are somewhat antagonistic towards one another. PSG is very much the team of les Bobos (or with English subtitles by King Negrito), the self styled trendsetters of Parisian life. The average Paris FC fan would claim that football is what is important, that PSG is about image and therefore not worthy of serious consideration. So the two teams in the same league could be fun.

In truth, both PSG and Paris FC are relative newcomers to the scene. Top flight league football had fallen on hard times in Paris in the early 1970s. Paris found itself in the embarrassing position of having no representation in Ligue 1. A new team was formed, partially by the fusion of an existing Paris FC and Stade Saint-Germain, and partially from funds gathered from nearly 20,000 subscribers. The creation of the new Paris Saint Germain marked the reappearance of a major club in Paris after the demise of most notably RCF Paris and Red Star. However, shortly after the new team was formed it came under pressure from the Paris City Council to remove the reference to Saint Germain from the team name and it split again into two forming the current Paris Saint Germain and Paris Football Club.

Historically the two top teams in Paris through the formative years of French football were Racing Club de France, and Red Star of suburban Saint Denis. Both currently play in in the Championnat de France Amateurs, the fourth tier of French football league system, although in different groups, RCF in Groupe A, Red Star in Groupe B.

One final note, "Red Star" is not a translation; the club's name in French is "Red Star", rather than "Étoile Rouge".

Enough French football for today.