Paris Saint-Germain have found themselves at the centre of a freaky legal dispute with London-born rapper M.I.
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Not much on the field, since the sports are different despite the use of the word “football” by both.
Today, M.I. A leaked a document on Twitter that had been sent to her team on December 14 2015 by Paris Saint-Germain, which formally requested the removal of all imagery of the shirt from the video and M.I. The NFL was upset by a one-fingered salute the singer gave while on stage at the 2012 Super Bowl halftime show with Madonna, a case that was settled out of court mid-2014.
Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, better known by her stage name of M.I.A, posted a letter sent through to her record company, Universal Music, in which it complains about the use of a PSG shirt during the video for Borders – a song about the migrant crisis that has seen millions of refugees flee war-torn countries such as Syria.
In the video – which features several images of refugees packed in boats – M.I.A. altered the team’s sponsor’s slogan “Fly Emirates” to say, “Fly Pirates”.
In a letter addressed to Universal Music and signed by PSG chief executive Jean Claude Blanc, the club it received an “unpleasant surprise” upon seeing the video, which was released in November.
PSG – owned by the Qatar Investment Authority since 2011 – wrote to the artist and referenced a €1 million donation ($1.56 million) to charity Secours populaire and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) as part of the relief effort.
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“This association is all the more hard to understand that nothing in our activities and in our daily initiatives suggests we have anything to do with the problems highlighted by M.I.A”.
