Soon after moving to Paris in 2002, I went to watch the city’s only top-division football club, Paris Saint-Germain. I emerged from a metro station near the stadium to see a small white skinhead chucking a plastic cup of beer at a black man, then chasing after him. Confusingly, both men were PSG fans.

After a dispiriting game, we emerged into the bourgeois streets of the 16th arrondissement, where nobody cared. Back then, most Parisians only noticed PSG if forced to, for instance on Bastille Day of 2002 when the club’s “ultra” supporter Maxime Brunerie tried to assassinate President Jacques Chirac with a .22 rifle. Snooty Paris just wasn’t a football city.

It is now. PSG face Inter Milan in Saturday’s Champions League final as favourites to become European champions for the first time. The family of Bernard Arnault, boss of the LVMH luxury group and Europe’s richest man, has bought a previously almost unnoticed local club, Paris FC, which has been freshly promoted to the top division. Paris has also become global football’s biggest talent pool. What happened?