PSG also winning France's popularity contest

All of a sudden, there were Zlatan Ibrahimovic jerseys everywhere.

In several French beach towns, at the height of the holiday season there last week, you couldn't turn in any direction on the boardwalks without seeing one. Other Paris Saint-Germain merchandise, too. In France, PSG has become a thing.

And that's new.

Growing up in Belgium, I spent a large part of my summers in France. And it used to be that you wouldn't see PSG gear outside of Paris. Even in the capital, there wasn't a whole lot of it.

It's easy to forget now that PSG was only founded in 1970 and that until 2012, it had won the French league just twice and boasted no significant European success other than the 1996 Cup Winners' Cup. And it took the club a long time to gain traction in a world capital for so many things – fashion, food, tourism, culture – that didn't seem to have all that much interest in soccer.

The curious thing is that for a league widely considered to be the best in the world behind the Big Four of Spain, England, Germany and Italy – in no particular order – France has never really had a megaclub. No team has won the French league more than 10 times. None have much resonance outside of their own market. Marseille did for a brief spell two decades ago and still counts fans outside the city, and Lyon caught the imagination for a while. But there has never been any one team that attracted fans all over the country, like Juventus in Italy, Real Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, Bayern Munich in Germany or Manchester United in England.

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And the title record holder is Saint-Etienne, which hasn't won the thing since 1981 and lifted most of its 10 championships in the 1960s and '70s. Second comes Marseille, with nine championships, but only one since 1992. That club remains significant but has been disastrously mismanaged since a 1994 bribery scandal ended its run of four straight titles and a Champions League crown.

Nantes has eight titles but hasn't really mattered since the last one in 2001. AS Monaco and Olympique Lyon each have seven. But the former has fallen away some after a Russian billionaire pumped in oodles of money before taking most of it out again after an expensive divorce. And while Lyon's seven straight titles from 2002 through 2008 were hugely impressive, its own sugar daddy owner got hit hard in the financial crisis, and, with severely diminished resources, neither he or the club have been the same since.

Then come Stade de Reims and Bordeaux with six titles apiece. Reims last won it in 1962. Bordeaux, while a rock solid club, doesn't really capture the imagination.

And then, finally, we arrive at PSG, winners of the last three Ligue 1 seasons – by 12 points, nine points and eight points, respectively. In those same three years, they also reached the quarterfinals of the Champions League. They now charge up the historical standings with five titles.

Since the Parisians were taken over by their Qatari owners in 2012, they have made enormous strides. The club has hoarded elite talent – Ibrahimovic, Javier Pastore, Blaise Matuidi, Marco Verratti, Thiago Silva, Edinson Cavani, Angel Di Maria and all the rest – and created a far more family-friendly product, to the consternation of longtime fan groups who were priced out.

Traveling through France for the first time in more than a decade, PSG's sudden reach and influence were apparent. It could be, of course, that all those jerseys spotted on the western coast were merely donned by Parisians on vacation. But even that would suggest that the club now matters in the capital.

Paris Saint-Germain is the beneficiary of many luxuries, a book of blank checks being the biggest one. But its new owners also got to step into a power vacuum, a major league with no dominant powers. That was a fairly unique landscape to start doing business in. Imagine a new software company starting up in an industry with no well-established players.

In a country that takes its soccer seriously, monetizing all of this newly imported star power isn't difficult for PSG. While the club was never exactly poor, it seldom stood out. Its most famous player prior to a few years ago was Ronaldinho, who was sold at age 23 to Barcelona, where he truly became a star.

The Parisians are French soccer's nouveaux riches, but there is no existing aristocracy to look down on them. While amassing talent, they are building a national fan base. And that's how clubs become megaclubs.

It begins with the jerseys by the beach.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.