All-expense-paid invitations to Qatar in business class, seats in VIP boxes for matches at the Parc des Princes… As part of a judicial investigation opened since 2022 into PSG and its president Nasser Al Khelaïfi, the authorities would have found in the phone of Jean-Martial Ribes, former communications director of the Parisian club, investigated on December 1, 2023 for seven offenses including, in particular, corruption and influence peddling, several exchanges with Pascal Ferré, former editor-in-chief of magazine France Footballreports investigations by Mediapart and the World.
In these exchanges, we discover the privileged relationships between the two men, the first notably asking the second to delete sites France Football And The Team dispatches reporting certain matters affecting the president of PSG, Nasser Al Khelaïfi. Which would have been accepted by Pascal Ferré, today director of press and media relations for the PSG first team. He would also have published in France Football glowing reports on Qatar, then the future organizer of the World Cup.
Lobbying for the Ballon d’Or
Less serious, but just as problematic, these investigations reveal that PSG, via its president and Jean-Martial Ribes, would have tried to influence the result of the Ballon d’Or, which is organized by France Football, so that Lionel Messi, newly arrived in Paris, wins the trophy. Invitation to the Parc des Princes, meeting in a large Parisian hotel, discussions with the president of PSG and discussions around the front page of France Football are thus on the menu of exchanges between Ribes, Al Khelaïfi and Ferré.
“The Ballon d’Or voting system involves 180 independent journalists around the world. It is impossible that PSG, and a fortiori Jean-Martial Ribes, could have influenced this vote,” replied the lawyer of the former PSG communications director to Mediapart.