Mehdi Hemici (Chief Loyalty & Ecommerce Officer at ALL Accor), what is your assessment of your partnership with PSG, which began as a jersey sponsor in 2019?
Our ALL Accor reservations platform was launched for PSG jersey sponsorship in 2019. We have created a reservations and loyalty ecosystem with experiences and benefits in hotels to bring together the 45 brands in our group. We have nearly 7,000 hotels and we create a link between all these brands in order to experience very unique moments. It was also our communication platform which marks our experiential and sporting territory. We said to ourselves that we were not going to give money to media specialists. We really wanted to be part of a dynamic with a French brand that has global ambitions, quite simply like Accor. Of course, Sébastien Bazin was previously the president of PSG, so there were a lot of links between the two companies and a common ambition. We have created a fruitful partnership since 2019.
The arrival of Lionel Messi in 2021, in addition to the presence of Kylian Mbappé and Neymar, was a boon for Accor!
The arrival of Messi alongside Neymar and Mbappé was a huge media platform for us. We had more than 180 million media coverage of Messi’s arrival. It was the epitome of a successful partnership. After three years, our brand being established, we continued with PSG and we kept only what we considered to be essential in our relationship, that is to say the customer experience, access to players and the possibility of continuing to work in an innovative way. For example, we created the Novotel suite, here at Parc de Princes. It is the only permanent suite in a football stadium in Europe. We started working around strong experiential moments. We are now renewing our partnership, over the period 2026-2030, with a film being released with Marquinhos, who is of course the emblematic captain of this team and who is the most loyal. When we talk about loyalty, we are there for the good times and for the more difficult times. The year they are European champions, we were not going to mark our break. On the contrary, we even extended our relationship over four years.
Lionel Messi, Neymar and Mbappé at PSG in 2021.
You were a jersey sponsor for three seasons, have you managed to quantify the number of jerseys with the All mention?
Messi’s first season, which was the final year of our partnership, resulted in the club’s all-time record for jersey sales. More than 1.3 million jerseys have been sold by the club. It was the Jordan line, very lifestyle, with the red collar and the plain blue jersey. This line was the most sold with the arrival of Messi. It was a pleasant surprise. Afterwards, when you are no longer on the jersey, you are still present in the stadium since the supporters continue to wear the jerseys. All over the world you always see the PSG jersey with All. We can’t afford a new jersey every year. For the Champions League victory last year, a lot of PSG supporters wore the All jersey. This loyalty bears fruit well beyond the three years we were on the jersey.
“We took Marquinhos in an Ibis to play bass”
What campaigns have you been able to run with the players?
We got to know the players, we learned to live with them. We took Marquinhos to an Ibis to play bass with a French band, L’Impératrice. He was still talking to me about it a few months ago because he told me that we had made him do some pretty crazy things. He said to me: ‘I remember when I had to learn bass in the space of a day to play in an Ibis hotel.’ There are moments like that that are created with the players and it happens in a very natural way.
Many companies use stadium naming. Your partnership with PSG was even more productive…
It was definitely the right choice. We know the naming, we did it with the Accor Arena. Everyone talked about it as Bercy, now we also talk about it as Accor Arena. All the likes that come out with Accor Arena, it’s the naming, we’ve had this naming for over 10 years now. We have another naming in Sydney, which is the Accor Stadium, it is the Olympic stadium for the 2000 Olympics. The naming is a physical place. We associate ourselves with a place and this gives us a lot of scope in terms of activation and experience. Here, we wanted to be with a football club that had the same DNA as us, French, lifestyle, with global ambition. This is why we joined forces with PSG. Now we come to PSG to see the best in football. We don’t just come to see PSG. Before, it was for French fans, now it’s football fans from all over the world who come, so it’s extremely unifying for our brand.
The Dream Tournament at the Parc des Princes with All members and 12 PSG legends
is in its second edition. It’s a great event for the participants. What future for this Dream Tournament?
Three years ago, we created this concept because at the end of each season, the lawn is torn up. We said to ourselves that it was a shame not to do something with this lawn before it was replaced. Discover it before it stops living. So we created this tournament for our customers, but also to unite everyone, that is to say the footballers, the former members of the club, the managers of PSG. It had worked extremely well. Players asked us when the next edition was. We waited three years to ensure the longevity of our partnership. As we have just renewed for four years, I can tell you that this will not be the last edition.
Pedro Miguel Pauleta, Javier Pastore, Ezequiel Lavezzi, Mamadou Sakho, Jay-Jay Okocha, Claude Makélélé, Kevin Gameiro, Guillaume Hoarau, Ludovic Giuly, Jérémy Ménez, Nene, Mario Yepes, Salvatore Sirigu, Clément Chantôme, Gregory van der Wiel, and even Amara Simba.
