Paris Saint-Germain rounds off Japan and Korea Tour in style
Yesterday in Busan, Paris Saint-Germain completed its historic tour of Asia, which took the club out to meet its supporters in Japan and Korea. The players stopped off in the Japanese cities of Osaka and Tokyo and also visited the Korean city of Busan for the first time.
The summer tour once again showed the increasing popularity of the club and its unique offer, thanks to the presence of its football and handball squads in Japan, the first ever visit of the football team to Korea, a series of premium pop-up stores/locations in both Japan and Korea and its now-traditional emblematic collaborations with top designers in both markets.
In total, more than 100,000 spectators came to cheer on the Paris Saint-Germain football team in its three matches played in Japan and more than 20,000 fans came to watch the handball team's two matches, breaking the record for spectators at a handball match in Japan. The club also brought together more than 45,000 spectators during its first trip to Korea.
Thanks to the many activities organised – Discover Osaka and Tokyo, training sessions open to the public, chats with Japanese and Korean fan clubs, meet-and-greets with the fans organised by partners Nike, Goat and Accor – the players were able to meet with fans and discover the secrets of Japanese culture.
The passion felt for the club also came through on social media. In just over 1,400 publications, the club generated 22.5 million engagements and around 117.5 million views for its videos. The Club continues its rapid growth on local social networks: more than 198,000 Japanese and 102,000 Koreans now follow Paris Saint-Germain. It is now the 3rd most-followed soccer club on Twitter Korea (20,700 followers) and on Naver TV (35,000 followers).
Following the opening of the PSG Academy in Tokyo in 2022, around a hundred children were coached by the Parisian coaches in two daily training sessions in Osaka, primarily children from the city's disadvantaged neighbourhoods. In Korea, some of the children from the PSG Academy – around 1,500 children attend the Academy year-round in the Seoul area – joined the 43,500 spectators to cheer on the Parisian players in their match played in Busan.
Like it does for every tour, Paris Saint-Germain demonstrated its unique creativity with some iconic collaborations with Futura Laboratory, Kengo Kuma, Poggy and Verdy in Japan, and G-Dragon’s brand Peaceminusone in Korea.
Paris Saint-Germain also showed how well its network of stores is doing. The club has adopted a unique development strategy for its network of official stores. Stores are open year-round in Tokyo and Nagoya in Japan and Seoul in Korea. For the duration of the tour, two pop-up stores were opened in Osaka and on the prestigious Omotesando avenue in Tokyo. The club ended up breaking its sales record set during the 2022 tour, with a 70% increase in sales.
The tour was also an opportunity to announce a new global partnership with the Japanese brand Brilliantcyrpto. This is the twelfth sponsor signed up by the club's Asia-Pacific branch since it was opened five years ago.