Red Bull continues to grow its sporting empire. And its new target is French. As announced by L’Equipe, this Wednesday, October 9, Paris FC is about to change majority shareholder, leaving a large part of the capital to the Arnault family and another 15% to Red Bull. The energy drink company has reached a new milestone in football, having recently appointed Jürgen Klopp, the former Liverpool manager, as the overseer of football clubs in its football galaxy.
Indeed, today, it is no longer just the company that revolutionized extreme sports. Beyond board sports, skydiving and free fall, other entities have taken wings. In 2005, the Austrian company purchased the club SV Austria Salzburg (Austria) and renamed it Red Bull Salzburg.
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The other clubs purchased subsequently bear the same prefix: Red Bull New York (2005), RB Leipzig (2009), Red Bull Bragantino (2019). Between these four teams, and the satellite club FC Liefering of RB Salzburg, the progress is made quickly for the players. “Recruiters have a common database. And the two teams (Salzburg and Leipzig) have the same style of play »explained Maxime Schär, scout and analyst, for Ouest-France. 25 players have moved from Liefering to Salzburg over the last five seasons. 17 from Salzburg to Leipzig since 2014, including a certain Dayot Upamecano. Erling Haaland and Sadio Mané also appeared in these databases.
Two F1 teams
Red Bull is obviously F1. Today on the roof of the world in this discipline with the coronations of its driver (2021, 2022 and 2023), Max Verstappen, the Austrian company has been invested in it since 1995. And with the purchase of Minardi in 2005, renamed Scuderia AlphaTauri then Racing Bulls, it became the owner of two teams out of ten in the championship.
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Behind F1, in Motocross, MotoGP and Rally, the brand’s bull is far from unknown. The French pilot, Sébastien Loeb, often collaborated with it.
A cycling team
Before this potential agreement with the PFC, it is in cycling that Red Bull has already signed a new partnership during the year 2024. In January, it became the majority shareholder, at 51%, of the cycling company. Ralph Denk, who owns the German team Bora-Hansgrohe. Other players, individually, already had an agreement with the energy drink brand. This is particularly the case for Wout Van Aert.
Events and partnerships with e-sports players
The brand with the famous slogan has also given itself the opportunity to establish itself in e-sport. It sponsors events, as it does with breakdancing events such as Red Bull BC One for example, but also players. One of them is a Frenchman well known in the world of video games: Corentin Houssein, more often called Gotaga and nicknamed « The French Monster ».
The group also owns a multi-sport training center in Thalgau, a town near Salzburg, and the Eisarena Salzburg, an ice rink where its ice hockey club, EC EC Red Bull Salzburg, plays.
