yeah, i know about the Canal+ backing, and that they weren't exactly a plucky financial underdog by the standards of that era. I don't know how close that support would bring them to the top sugar-daddied Italian teams/Spanish big two etc....but it does seem to have been one of those rare times (maybe 85-95 roughly? with downfall of Marseille bringing an end?) where some French teams were spending similarly to Italian/Spanish.
PSG has an interesting history. I've only read the basics, but plastic seems an unfair perception of their creation during the Paris FC merger/split. The side that became modern PSG are directly traced to Stade Saint-Germain (formed 1904) and were the only active football club involved, providing all of the players and infrastructure. Paris FC was basically the newly formed stake of 2/3 of the financial backing that were trying to transition this provincial team into being the main professional club of Paris. the other part (Patrelle) was already the president.
During the split that happened a few years later the Patrelle/Stade Saint Germain side (to this point the actual football component) gets fecked. Keeps the new PSG name, but relegated to division 3 and losing professional status; Paris FC become a real individual club, keep top-division status, use parc des princes and most of the squad. After this it's interesting...You would think Crescent and Guyot's Paris FC would be the one to establish themselves, yet the club failed within a few years, spending most of its time in lower divisions after that. PSG climbed quickly back up using youth academy players, retake the parc des princes residence and go on to be ligue 1 regulars.
If you wanted to call an element of it all plastic/no history etc... it would definitely be the Paris FC side, but i guess to fans of other clubs, PSG were still basically playing at being the new fancy capital club, especially if they knew their history was really as a small town/suburbs one.
"Plastic" is a bit of a provocative or anachronistic term, I am of the opinion there is some historical continuity to the QSI takeover. I think there's a lot of misplaced delusion or mythology in football especially among the fandom of big clubs that their place in the hierarchy is purely built on merit. Buying your way to success, leveraging your competitive advantages and entrenching your position against nouveau riche contenders is the name of the game. Some do it better, smarter or more soundly. The biggest failing of QSI, leaving aside moral and political considerations, is that they have been unable to build a coherent team and football project.
I think it's notable that PSG is a relatively recent club that owes its early existence to a group of well connected show business amateurs (including Hechter and Belmondo) then was owned by the main football broadcaster using it as a gondola head for their product before being bought by QSI.
I think the Paris FC never had time to properly exist to really compete for legitimacy. Since climbing to the top division in 1974, PSG never was relegated in half a century, holding the current running record for elite presence by quite a large margin (Lyon is second, present since 1989). Out of those 50 seasons in the elite only finished 10 times (iirc) below 9th on the league table and that's despite being run like a circus since 1998. PSG never was weak enough to let open the opportunity for a fight on its own turf.
In the 1980s, French industrialist Lagardère bankrolled the Racing Club (an old sport club founded in Paris but historically located in Colombes, in the wealthiest quadrant of Paris suburb, that held the place of the more relevant football club in the region at one point), literally renaming it Matra Racing after his company, in an effort to establish itself as a Paris club but threw the towel after a decade of going nowhere.
Paris FC have a new president since 2012 and I think then they tried to play up the marketing angle of being the real Paris club unlike the QSG. They've been on a slow but steady rise to the top since then, finished upper table in Ligue 2 last season. I'd say you never see a Paris FC jersey anywhere, but I don't even know what a PFC jersey looks like. I'm sure some people care ? And they have fans ? Never ran into them. Red Star and Créteil-Lusitanos are more likely to come up in a convo about football in the region.
Though the PSG wouldn't exist without the much older Saint-Germain club that was an absolute necessary host for the Paris Football Club project / investor group, the only lasting heritage (apart the name) is that PSG training grounds and center has very long been Le Camp des Loges, the Saint-Germain grounds. PSG is due to move out soon (or already has) to the brand new training center QSI funded (in Poissy). Rugby club Le Stade Français should move in as the new tenants for training.
PSG itself coopted as its own mythology the 1970 founding year, it was part of the crest from 1996 to 2012. There's some debate over what the exact founding date of PSG should be but the salient point is that neither the club nor the fans really care about the whole Saint-Germain 1904 club legacy except as an historical footnote. Saint-Germain is a posh, far away suburb, I don't think it was ever a pro football club. The core component of PSG is that it is the Paris team, playing in Paris intra-muros, after decades of sport and particularly football being kept to the outskirts of the city itself. That probably explains why Ultras are so protective of le Parc des Princes. It's been floated a couple of times last two decades they could move the big Saint-Denis Stade de France which has no residency and everyone hates the idea. The biggest challenge of long-term ownership is probably right there, if they need to renovate or expand the home stadium. Le Parc is basically right at the border of Paris proper in a sport complex of sort (there's Jean-Bouin just aside, where the aforementioned rugby team play and the Roland-Garros grounds) in maybe the wealthiest district of the city. There's not exactly room anywhere else in the city to build a bigger stadium.
Edit : I think the peak financial / attractive competitiveness of French clubs (outside 2000s Lyon and current PSG) was the first half of the 90s. After the Bosman ruling the game was up and French football, while fairly large and wealthy, just couldn't keep up as a whole. Canal+ started to divest from PSG, Tapie was finally caught by the patrol for a bunch of corruption in and out of football. Monaco had a rowdy ride since. The other historical clubs that didn't get that extra financing stagnated. Legacy elite clubs that relied on their academy (FC Nantes Atlantique for example) just fell behind.
L'Olympique Lyonnais is the only one that managed to raise its standing but even at the apex of their golden years never entered the closed cabal of "European top clubs".
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