Threat to pro rugby in Biarritz is very real
On paper, there was little out of the ordinary about Friday’s preseason friendly between impending Top 14 rivals Biarritz and Bordeaux. Fifteen days out from the start of the new season, the two sides took to the pitch to iron out a few of those last remaining avant-campaign kinks in a glorified in-game training session – a chance to try out combinations and moves, blow off some cobwebs, test game plans and compare fitness notes in front of a few thousand fans, grateful at long last to warm-up their vocal chords.
The two squads were expectedly bloated in a 28-7 victory for Bordeaux, with the rival coaches keen to give as many players as possible something of a run-out in a match situation, while avoiding any lastmoment injuries.
On the other hand, neither side would have been keen to give too much away. They meet in earnest at 2pm on September 4 at Parc des Sports Aguilera, in the opening game of the new season. Under Friday night’s lights wasn’t the time or place to unveil that surprise training ground-planned move.
The interesting thing about the night was the little matter of the game’s location.
This pre-season outing hosted by Biarritz was not at Aguilera. To be fair, that’s not entirely unusual. These friendlies quite often take place at smaller grounds as something of a tour of nearby clubs.
This match, however, wasn’t at a feeder club venue. It wasn’t even in southwest France.
Friday’s Biarritz-Bordeaux preseason friendly kicked off at Stadium de Villeneuve D’Ascq. That’s in the northern French city of Lille – some 1,000km, give or take a kilometre, from Biarritz’s Basque Country heartland.
Officially, the friendly was part of a rugby development plan for the region. Lille has hosted Top 14 semifinals in the past, and the city will host England during the World Cup in 2023.
But we’ve been here before. More specifically, Biarritz bosses have been to Lille before. Last March, rumours of a schism between the club and the local authority over the financing of development plans at Parc des Sports Aguilera hit the papers.
Back then, Biarritz council decided it could not afford to cover the cost of a long-planned and muchneeded upgrade of the sports complex and instead suggested private investors should stump up the bulk of the required euros.
That did not go down well. Club owner Charles Gave and president Jean-Baptiste Aldigé threatened to take their club elsewhere. And Lille was quickly identified as the location most likely to gain a professional rugby team. Things got to the stage that Aldigé travelled to Lille in an attempt to firm up plans for a union with Marcq-en-Baroeul from the start of the 2022/23 season.
That idea quickly seemed to fall apart – but, although all then went quiet on the southwestern front, the row continued to roil behind the scenes. This week, the argument spilled out in to the media again. And it just got serious.
“The threat is quite real,” mayor Maider Arosteguy told regional newspaper Sud Ouest. “It’s what Louis-Vincent Gave told me during the Top 14 accession playoff win over Bayonne, namely that the population pool was too small in Biarritz, and that Lille was much more interesting.
“This is not a provocation, it’s serious. All my work is to try to keep the club as long as possible on its territory.
“Leaving makes no sense in a sporting, legal, or moral capacity ... On the other hand, economically, it certainly makes sense.
“I feel [the club is] much less interested than in the past to make Aguilera great again, because I think they are fixed on Lille. But I’m optimistic by nature and I think this project still has a chance to happen.”
Arosteguy added that the city had stumped up €50,000 for work on the changing rooms as a ‘gesture of goodwill’, and had agreed to cover the cost of the water bill for an unspecified ‘temporary’ period.
But her fears for the future of professional rugby in Biarritz could yet prove well-founded. The club has already provisionally decided – under the ‘regional development’ banner, no doubt – to host its two ‘home’ Challenge Cup matches this season in Lille.
The players have spent the whole week in Lille as guests of the city – Midi Olympique reported on Friday that the club only forked out for transport costs from Biarritz: the rest of the trip has been financed by the capital of the Hauts-de-France region. On Wednesday, they met players from football’s Ligue 1 champions Lille OSC.
Everything bears the hallmarks of a mutual charm offensive between club and potential host city.
The question, then, is what happens next. Relocating a professional sports club in France is not that simple. They are not standalone entities and must be linked to an amateur association.
The pro side could, in theory, maintain its link with its amateur section in Biarritz while playing its professional matches somewhere else. But the notion of a Biarritz side playing its home matches in Lille would be beyond bizarre – even by standards that kept increasingly fanciful Biarritz-Bayonne mergers in the news for so long.
Midol mentions a ‘source at the FFR’ who told them that the situation is something of a legal vacuum. “Morally, relocation is difficult to defend,” the source told the paper, “but in fact nothing prevents Biarritz SASP (the professional arm of the club) from leaving.”
Owner Gave could file papers at the Bayonne Commercial Court to change the name of the professional section of the club and move it with or without an FFR affiliation number – to the northern city.
Whether that would happen remains to be seen. It’s something of a nuclear option, and the club needs that FFR affiliation number.
Talks between Biarritz city officials and a club delegation led by Serge Blanco, are continuing. By the end of it all, a deal could be agreed to keep the club in its historic home.
Right now, however, the threat still stands. An unnamed elected official from Lille is quoted in Midol as saying: “Biarritz is coming to promote rugby in our region. For the rest, if there is any, we will talk about it again in the weeks or months to come.”
When lined up with everything else, it’s easy to imagine that there’s something to see here in that political ‘nothing to see here’ comment.
“It bears the hallmarks of a mutual charm offensive between club and potential host city”