French press review 13 May 2013

Championship success for Paris Saint Germain and France's looming pension problem are among the stories in today's papers...

We don't often mention the sports daily paper, L'Equipe, in our press reviews, but today is exceptional.

By beating Lyon yesterday by one goal to nil in the French League, our local team Paris St Germain clinched the first division championship for the third time in club history, after a wait which goes back 19 years, to 1994.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic did not score (that honour went to Man of the Match, Jérémy Ménez), but PSG's best-paid recruit was in form and made a huge contribution to the victory.

David Beckham made a brief appearance at the end, coming on with three minutes of stoppage time already played.

The title will be seen by many as a vindication of the ambitious investment policy launched by the club's Qatari owners. But, as L'Equipe points out, success this season has come at a very high price for PSG.

Paris St Germain has spent 250 million euros on playing personnel over the past two years, one hundred million more than Italian champions, Juventus, and streets ahead of Barcelona's modest 93 million euros.

They'll need a good run in the European Champions League to make that sort of money look half-way reasonable, and even then the club is likely to continue running a deficit for several years to come.

Retirement is the other big front page story this morning, but there's nothing to cheer about on that front.

According to business daily Les Echos, the current weight of the pension bill (13 billion euros) will have grown to nearly 30 billion by the year 2040. The number of people working to pay the pensions of those who have already retired is in steady decline, while the average pension paid is steadily increasing. All of which adds up to an impossible situation.

The company bosses, the trade unions and the Prime Minister are to meet later today to begin pre-negotiations for next month's so-called Social Conference, at which the financing of the pension bill will obviously loom large.

Right wing Le Figaro is harshly critical of the current socialist administration, saying the left consistently blocked right wing efforts to reform the retirement sector when the socialists were in opposition. They will now have to face reality, says Figaro's front page editorial, and accept that the retirment age has got to be increased, not reduced. They won't get away with bluffing this time.