Paris Saint-Germain

Paris Saint-Germain enter the second half of 2026 as reigning European champions, having won their first UEFA Champions League title by beating Arsenal in June. The club's next assignment of note is the August 2026 UEFA Super Cup against Aston Villa, a fixture UEFA has handed to Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan after a US visa refusal shut him out of the World Cup.

Founded in 1970 and based at the Parc des Princes in Paris, PSG has been owned by Qatari Sports Investments since 2011, whose sustained spending built the benchmark club in French football around successive generations of star talent, including Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Edinson Cavani, Kylian Mbappe, Lionel Messi and Neymar. The Champions League breakthrough followed a decade and a half of near misses, including a runners-up finish to Bayern Munich in 2020, alongside multiple Ligue 1 titles.

PSG's imprint on the 2026 World Cup ran through its players rather than the club itself. Arsenal's William Saliba aggravated a back problem during the 120-minute Champions League final defeat, leaving co-host France's defence in doubt before the tournament. The club also supplied both sides of the tournament's first quarter-final, Morocco's Achraf Hakimi against former team-mate Kylian Mbappe's France; Mbappe's second-half goal helped eliminate Morocco 2-0, ending the continent's record ten-nation entry without a semi-finalist.