From Louis XIV to Louis Henry I

It's easy to associate PSG, by name, with Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the sophisticated Parisian neighborhood of Brasserie Lipp and Les Deux Magots, where intellectuals like Camus, Sartre, Hemingway, Simon de Beauvoir, Picasso, Bertolt Brecht, and James Joyce would go to drink and talk about everything under the sun. But not about football .

However, the roots of the Champions League finalist are not in Boulevard Saint Germain and the boutiques and hotels of the 6th arrondissement, but in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, an elegant town of wealthy families 19 kilometers west of the capital, in the Yvelines department, where Louis XIV was born in 1638, where he lived from 1661 to 1681, where the English monarch James II lived in exile until his death after the Glorious Revolution, and where the treaty certifying the fragmentation of the Habsburg Empire and the independence of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) was signed in 1920. Between 1940 and 1944, it was the headquarters of the German Armed Forces Command on the Western Front (Oberbefehlshaber West).

The Parisian suburbs are the largest football academy in the world after the slums of Sao Paulo.

PSG was formed in 1970 as a merger between Paris FC (which provided the financing) and Stade Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which provided the majority of the players, the coach, and its place in the second division of French football. Thus, the Ligue 1 champion can boast of sharing its origins with the Sun King, an absolute monarch like Qatar, the club's owners (through Qatar Sports Investments). That's symmetry.

But just as Saint-Germain-en-Laye is a prosperous suburb, the breeding ground that feeds the current edition of PSG is a good stretch along the Périphérique (Paris ring road), in places (not to call them ghettos) such as Sarcelles, Suresnes, Pantin, Montfermeil, Bondy, Aulnay-sous-Bois, Les Ulis, Roissy-en-Brie or La Cité des 3000, so named for the three thousand Brutalist-style popular housing units built in the seventies, with its small Camp Nou.

Under Luis Enrique, PSG has shifted its emphasis away from superstars like Neymar and Messi and instead placed it on the talent found in the Île de France region, which produced some thirty players who competed in the World Cup in Qatar and has the largest raw talent pool of footballers in the world after the slums of São Paulo. Along with poverty, crime, unemployment, and industrial estates built in response to the 1950s migration wave, now inhabited by North Africans, Caribbeans, and people from sub-Saharan Africa, a recurring element of the landscape is football pitches—sometimes grass, often cement, often small—where kids dream of being the next Henry, Mbappé, Kanté, Fofana, Mahrez, Pogba, Saliba, Moussa Diaby, Nicolas Pepe, or Zaire-Emery. Competition in the sixth tier (amateur) of French football is enormous. Around a thousand clubs and 270,000 registered players participate in the Parisian banlieue league , the luckiest of which earn a scholarship to Clairefontaine, an academy considered a national Masia or the Harvard of football (but without Trump's involvement).

The existence of so many soccer fields is an official policy to try to keep young people away from drugs and crime, but the ghetto law forces successful kids to give a large portion of the money they earn to family, friends, and even to support entire villages in Mali or the Ivory Coast.

Centuries have passed since the reign of Louis XIV. But if PSG wins on Saturday, all of Paris will enthrone Louis-Henry I.

Read also LIFE IN THE 'BANLIEUE' Agents, scouts, extortion and many broken dreams

In the French team that lost the World Cup final in Qatar, there were eleven players from the Parisian suburbs who learned to play football among the gray concrete blocks of places like Seine Saint-Denis and teams like Espérance Paris 19ème and Solitaire Paris-Est, almost all from humble families (unlike Germans, who are middle class). In the Île de France, all the kids dream of being the next Pogba or Mbappé; those who show promise have an agent at eleven years old, and extortion to get money from them is rife. That's why some prefer to go to England, Spain, or Germany.