Outgoing PSG Chair Blames the Players for Being Scared of the Fans

Paris St. Germain are not a healthy team. They’ve played in France’s Ligue 1 since their inception, but this season they’re looking more and more relegation bound with each game they play. This past weekend they lost 3-0 to Caen, which puts them three points away from safety with just four games to play. And if they get relegated, the fans have indicated that there will be hell to pay.

Who’s responsible for this mess?

Alain Cayzac, the chairman who announced his resignation this week, blames the players. For being scared of the fans.

“I’m angry with the players because they played the first part of the season gripped by fear.

“It’s hard to play in Paris because of the pressure but when you play in Paris you are not allowed to be scared,” he added.

Okay, so maybe he didn’t mention the fans specifically as the reason for the fear. Maybe I’m just projecting.

So far this year, PSG fans have boycotted the team. They’ve been involved in riots. They’ve broken into the compound of one of their best players and vandalized his car, and possibly also sent him death threats. (Reports differ.) And just last week the main ultra fan group, the Boulogne Boys, was banned for ongoing racist and violent behavior.

And if we want to go back before this season, in 2006 a policeman killed one PSG ultra and wounded another after an angry group of fans pinned down a fan of a rival Israeli team in a McDonald’s near the stadium, then tried to attack the policeman who came to his rescue.

And this week, after the Caen loss, fans

painted graffiti saying: ‘If we go down, we’ll shoot you down’ and ‘PSG in Ligue 2 = Riots’,” one of the witnesses told Reuters.

During Saturday’s match, a PSG supporter invaded the pitch and started running towards goalkeeper Mickael Landreau before heading back. Media reported that after the match PSG fans tore the windscreen wipers off the team’s bus.

They also smashed the windows of player Sylvain Armand’s Porsche.

So what on earth do the players have to be afraid of?

The team is playing miserably. Their best players want to leave. Other good players don’t want to transfer in. So what’s the answer?

PSG is a club in crisis, and not just on the field. I’ve said this before elsewhere, but players who play scared don’t play well. (Ask the Iraqi football team who played under Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday.) The team has a small minority of “supporters” who are terrorizing the team and its players. Management and the government need to take a page out of the playbook of England and the EPL and crack down on these people, hard.

Maybe that and a season spent regrouping in Ligue 2 can help cure the soul-deep rot that’s taken over PSG.

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Category: French Ligue 1, World Football