The travels of Paris Saint Germain continue to stir up controversy. PSG published a video on its Twitter account on Sunday September 18 showing the Parisian players traveling to Lyon by plane. A trip by air while the capital of Gaul is less than two hours by train from Paris, and which did not fail to react two weeks after the controversy of the “sailing tank”.
/2022/09/19/phpEz3yKr.jpg)
The promotional clip, intended to highlight the shirt sponsor of the club and accompanied by the text “From Paris to Lyon with Qatar Airways”, showed the Parisian players before and during their flight to Lyon. The Minister in charge of Transport, Clément Beaune, commented on this tweet resuming the beginning of a famous Latin formula: “Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum”that is “To err is human, to persevere [dans son erreur] is evil”.
Errare humanum est, perseverare… https://t.co/nufsISrNxm
— Clement Beaune (@CBaune) September 18, 2022
If the passion between football clubs and private jets is not new and is not the prerogative of PSG, this extremely polluting mode of transport makes people cringe at a time when energy sobriety is put forward by the government.
In the video posted by PSG on Sunday, we also notice that the players get on a bus in the colors of the club. “They also have their bus which is in Lyon which we can see very well on the video, they could take it to return to Paris. It’s crazy”, was indignant for example the association “Uni-Vert Sport”. The practice is common among professional clubs: the coach travels empty, while the players take the plane, and it is only used to make the round trip between the airport and the stadium.
Paris Saint-Germain, in embarrassment, later deleted this content from the social network. Two weeks ago, the capital club found itself under fire for its modes of travel. The club had chosen to fly to Nantes on September 3, and the boss of TGV-Intercités had asked the club about the possibility of making this trip by train. The controversy had intensified after a touch of irony from Christophe Galtier on the use of “sailing carts” for club travel. The coach later admitted “a joke in bad taste”.
PSG had for its part indicated that it had been negotiating since “several months” with the SNCF to ensure certain journeys. “We study the best travel opportunity for each trip through numerous criteria (cost, travel time, security, public order, time of day, match venue, stadium accessibility and environmental protection)”, explained the club in a press release. The late schedule of the match against Lyon, as against Nantes, and the question of recovery seem once again to have won the day in the face of the climate emergency.