Paris Sends a Postcard Before Every Match
PSG took pennant and handed it to artists. What the captain gives away before kick-off now says more about the club than the crest stitched on it.
Before kick-off, two captains swap pennants. You accept the other club's symbol; you promise to play with honour. For decades the object barely changed: crest, colours, date, a gold tassel.
The custom never went away; it happens before every European and international match. What vanishes is the object: once handed over, clubs rarely know where their own pennants end up.
O4 BRIEF
What are PSG's artist pennants?
Custom pennants the PSG captain hands to the opposing captain before major matches, designed by illustrators and, since 2024, by students of Parisian art schools.
Who designs them?
One school per season: Penninghen (2024/25), École Camondo (2025/26) and GOBELINS Paris (2026/27), whose designs also run as the club's matchday posters.
Why does it matter?
It turns a gesture of respect into portable club identity, and tests whether football's oldest rituals can carry contemporary design.
SOURCES
How PSG built a matchday poster programme (2015–today)
The pennant came second. First came the poster. Since 2015 PSG has commissioned one for every European match, summer tour and major domestic fixture, working with illustrators such as Ceizer, Kongo, La Boca, Tyrsa, Parede and Sanghun Kim.
The choices were rarely safe. Filip Pagowski drew a Real Madrid tie in the typography of old show bills. For a Barcelona tie, the club hired Nairone, a street artist who knew basketball and skateboarding better than football.
When did PSG start making artist-designed pennants?
In February 2024. For the Champions League round of 16 against Real Sociedad, PSG commissioned a bespoke pennant from illustrator Greg Podevin. Marquinhos handed it to Mikel Merino.
From then on, poster and pennant became one artwork in two sizes: one for the wall, one for the opponent.
Who designs PSG's Champions League pennants? Penninghen, Camondo, GOBELINS
Since 2024/25 authorship is collective: one Paris art school per season, with carte blanche.
2024/25 — Penninghen. Twenty-six students, eight league-phase matches. The Stuttgart pennant (MHP Arena, 29 January 2025) sets Ici c'est Paris over a gothic VfB monogram.
2025/26 — École Camondo. A Parc des Princes painted like Van Gogh, a chessboard for Bayern, a metro carriage where rival fans meet. Collector prints sell in the club shop, with part of the revenue going back to the school.
2026/27 — GOBELINS Paris. Animation students, so every poster now also moves. The series opened at the Etihad on 14 October: rain, a lamppost, two small figures beneath it.
How PSG chooses a pennant design: the opponent comes first
The brief is not draw PSG. It is draw the meeting. Students work from the history, culture and identity of the opposing city and club.
That is why the object works as a gift. Barcelona received Paris in Catalan stripes. Atlético, met at the Rose Bowl in June 2025, got a cartoon palm tree rather than an Eiffel Tower. A pennant that only talked about its sender would be a business card.
Why does PSG invest in football art? Patronage or soft power
The French press has long tied the programme to Nasser Al-Khelaïfi's ambition: make PSG a diversified brand, as central to Paris as its art and its food. This month it went further. During Art Basel Paris, players warmed up for Barcelona in a shirt drawn from Nadjib Ben Ali's work Et on dansera.
Critics of the club's Qatari ownership read this as soft power with good taste. Others see a club finally treating its city's culture as an equal. The cloth does not settle the argument; it only makes it visible.
Where do PSG's match pennants end up?
Here the story goes quiet. PSG publishes its posters, sells them, archives them. Nobody publishes the afterlife of the pennants.
Do they hang in Barcelona's museum, sit in Inter's archive, or lie in a kit man's drawer? The pennant is the only piece of this programme that leaves Paris, and the only one nobody tracks. That is where O4 goes next.
Do other football clubs reinvent the pennant? Entella, Palestino, Venezia
No other club runs a programme on PSG's scale, but a few have touched the ritual. Virtus Entella dropped the pennant altogether: at home, its captain hands opponents AlterEgo, a painted resin sculpture made exclusively for the club by Genoese artist Alessandro Piano.
Chile's Palestino, founded by Palestinian immigrants in 1920, gave every opponent of one season a pennant sealing a fragment of rubble from Gaza. New Caledonia's captain added a piece of local handicraft to the pennant in a World Cup play-off against Jamaica.
Venezia, Italy's most design-driven club, puts its art into shirts rather than pennants, and stages the graduation show of IUAV, the city's design university, at its stadium. PSG changes the design, Entella changes the object, Palestino changes the message.
Why other clubs should follow PSG's pennant example
I'll say it plainly: this is one of the coolest things happening in football design right now. A ritual that never stopped, but rarely got a second look, has become a small gallery handed over at the centre circle.
Most clubs keep the pennants their opponents give them. In some trophy rooms and club museums, those walls look genuinely imposing: decades of visitors, a map of everyone the club has ever faced. Imagine them filled with pieces like these.
I hope many clubs follow Paris, not by copying its look but by finding their own: their city, their artists, their schools. The point is not to be PSG. It is to give the opponent something worth keeping.
The story ends here.The conversation doesn’t.
Every Sunday, O4 members step outside the four lines to answer The Bigger Question.
