What was meant to be an unforgettable feast after nineteen years of drought ended in dismay as thirty people were injured and a further twenty-one detained by the police in the aftermath to PSG’s title celebrations on Monday, underscoring the progress remaining to be made by Nasser al-Khelaifi in his bid to gather not just a worldwide fan base for PSG but the citizens of the club’s own city to start with.

It is hard to determine whether club president Nasser al-Khelaifi was too candid or simply too ignorant when he picked Paris’ coveted Place du Trocadero facing the Eiffel Tower on Monday evening to celebrate the club’s first league title in almost twenty years. What was meant to be a display of sharing from the PSG players and staff with their fans turned out to further enlarge the thinly veiled, yet steadily increasing gap between the club’s nouveau riche status with a $300 million payroll, and its mostly suburban national fan base.

There was a cynical contrast between the location chosen by Nasser Al-Khelaifi, at the heart of the French capital’s leafy 16th district where sport is only heeded once a year when the tennis clay court season reaches its apex in nearby Roland Garros during the French Open, and the people who gathered to celebrate PSG’s first league title since 1994.

Many of the enthusiastic singers of trademark chants « Ici c’est Paris » (« This is Paris ») on Monday did not even live in the city itself, but rather in its numerous suburban satellites which in total gather 8 million people, an eighth of France’s total population. The « Saint-Germain » bit in the name Paris Saint-Germain itself designates the neighbouring city, half an hour West of the French capital where PSG have their training ground, as if to display the club as a footballing all-rounder in the Ile-de-France department, all-encompassing magnet of football masses in a region deprived of another potent club.

Many outside observers wondered why title celebrations in the French capital going so wrong for a city supposed to have only one club, while Manchester United’s twentieth Premier League crown was celebrated without a hitch in a city divided between red and blue. However, the answer to their questioning lied in their question itself – indeed a club as all-encompassing as PSG, supposed to bring together almost ten million people across the city’s inner and peripheral area, is home to supporters of vastly diverse economic and social fortunes, which sometimes are bound to boil over.

The two main stands of the Parc des Princes (itself located in Boulogne-Billancourt), Virage Auteuil and Virage Boulogne, are named after small localities just outside the French capital. They became renowned over the years for their contrasting if not conflicting sets of supporters (Auteuil being home to the sons and grandsons of North African immigrants while Boulogne hosted far-right born and bred Frenchmen) whose only common point was that they mostly resided not in the French capital itself but its crankier suburbs, known for their concrete cités of endless height at the bottom of which kids would play football all day, deprived of any opportunities of upward mobility through education.

It is such suburbs which saw the rise of Blaise Matuidi (Fontenay-sous-Bois), Jérémy Ménez (Longjumeau), Zoumana Camara (Colombes), Clément Chantôme (Sens) or Nicolas Douchez (Rosny-sous-Bois). Like all French international footballers, they learned their trade in the heavily competitive environment of Paris’ banlieues, far from the glowing lights of the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe. And despite the ethnic differences between Auteuil and Boulogne supporters having mostly been erased under the QSI tenure with the increasing number of clashes between both sets of fans leading to several deaths in the past decade, the irony of Leonardo and al-Khelaifi looking for « homegrown » Parisian players outside of Paris has not been lost.

Some fans making their way to the Place du Trocadero on Monday evening could be heard defiantly shouting at the local residents to « come out of their buildings and celebrate » PSG’s title, a symbol of the social discrepancy dividing the club’s core fanbase from the 16th district’s core population.

What the Qatari owners failed to grasp as they invested in the club’s global potential, with Paris a world renowned tourist destination, is the wider context of PSG’s social background. Contrary to what he thought, Al-Khelaifi did not buy the club of the city of Paris – he bought Paris Saint-Germain. A distinction he will surely be able to make after Monday’s dramatic unfoldings, where segments of fans ran havoc in a district of Paris they simply never related to or accepted as part of their normal, day-to-day surroundings.

In his bid to buy and showcase the global potential of PSG as a football destination, by showing off his club’s league title in one of the capital’s poshest squares, Nasser Al-Khelaifi hoped the images of Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Thiago Silva lifting the French league trophy against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower would boast his future raids on European football’s more established names. Instead, the footage the world will see is that of unhinged troublemakers clashing the police as PSG players tracked back to their team bus mere minutes after they came out.

These rioters go beyond the context of football and underline the increasing gap between the various social strata composing the 10-million strong Paris population and its foremost club. The PSG supporters filmed climbing the scaffolding surrounding the platform where the PSG players were supposed to be presented the trophy were not waving French flags but Algerian or Serbian ones, showing once again the path that remains to be walked for France to re-acquire a national identity. How can these fans feel Parisian if they do not even feel French ? What’s more, many do not even relate to the club’s players and do not admire the likes of Ibrahimovic (who recently hit out at the Parc des Princes’ lack of support for its own players) and other millionaire star names making up PSG’s squad.

The fragility of the club’s core support as displayed on Monday will further harm PSG’s attempt to reach a wider fanbase. While foreign Barcelona fans relate to the socios electing the club’s president, or foreign Borussia Dortmund fans relate to the unequaled Südtribüne loyals, it is difficult for a foreigner to picture a typical PSG fan and thus to become one himself.

Altogether, Nasser al-Khelaifi may well end up succeeding in his task to make PSG a successful name in European football. What he most certainly will fail to do however, is to solve the problems which fail to make PSG the football club Paris so badly craves.