Clash of the champions will open new season
Two blockbuster matches are scheduled for the opening weekend of the 2022/23 Top 14 season as European champions La Rochelle entertain Top 14 winners Montpellier at Stade Marcel Deflandre, while Bordeaux welcome Toulouse to Stade Chaban Delmas.
France’s Ligue Nationale de Rugby (LNR) released the fixture list for the new Top 14 and ProD2 campaigns on Thursday, just 13 days into first-time champions Montpellier’s stint as holders of the Bouclier de Brennus and with a few players’ hangovers still likely receding.
Elsewhere, European Challenge Cup champions Lyon head to Brive as the new season kicks off on the weekend of September 3; Bayonne’s return to French top-flight rugby kicks off at born-again Toulon; survivors Perpignan keep the Pyrenees to their left as they head to Pau for the first match of their difficult second season back in the top flight; Racing 92 host Castres, a side lumbered with the uniquely French and faint-praise-damning title of vicechampions until next June; and Stade Francais’ ‘promising’ new scrum-half Morgan Parra could be set for an early reunion with his former team-mates as Clermont head to the capital.
Preseason has already started at some French top-flight clubs – others, including the finalists, will return to action by the end of this month. La Rochelle’s phased preparations for the new campaign begin on July 18.
By the time the Top 14 kicks off, the second-tier ProD2 season will be two matches in – and most clubs are now back preparing for the new campaign, which will open on Thursday, August 23.
Relegated Biarritz face a tough opener at home to fiercely ambitious Oyonnax, while promoted sides Massy and Soyaux-Angouleme host northwest representatives Rouen and Vannes respectively.
The two leagues’ fixture lists were the last in a flurry of statements from the LNR this week.
The first concerned a new agreement between the FFR and the LNR, which will run through to the end of the 20262027 season.
It includes a 10-point plan to continue developing the game at all levels in France, with the 2023 World Cup and the 2024 Olympic Games particularly in mind. The release made notable mention of women’s rugby, which has a long way to go to catch up with standards in England – though details were hard to come by in the convention text itself.
Under the new deal, France head coach Fabien Galthie retains the right to select 42 players for training ahead of each international, and for the World Cup training camp between June 25 to August 28, 2023.
He must release 14 players back to their clubs on the Wednesday prior to an international match, while the World Cup squad will be cut to tournament-level 33 on August 28, following warm-up games against Scotland (twice), Fiji and Australia.
The agreement also prompts Galthie to release between nine and 14 players to their clubs for the first two Top 14 rounds of the 2023/24 season on August 19 and 26, while those players not selected in the World Cup 33 will be free to play for their clubs on September 2, the third and final round of the domestic competition before the World Cup begins.
The Top 14 will then go on hiatus until October 29, the day after the World Cup final at Stade de France.
A percentage of profits from the World Cup itself will be invested in “support and development of trainacross ing within professional clubs”, meaning that “the legacy of 2023 will contribute to the development of generations that will feed the French national team for the 2027 and 2031 World Cups”.
Intriguingly, it also included news that promotion from the third-tier Nationale 1 will, from the 2023-2024 season, fall into line with the ProD2 and Top 14 – namely that the side that loses the Nationale 1 final will host the second-from-bottom side in the ProD2 in a promotion-relegation play-off.
While the new convention looks firmly to the future, another release looked back over the stats and facts from the 2021/22 season, and suggested that the senior professional men’s game in France is starting to recover after the ravages of Covid-19.
For all but two weeks in January, matches were played without restrictions on crowd levels, and Top 14 clubs welcomed a combined total of 2,325,654 fans through the turnstiles the season at an average of 13,349 per match outside restricted weekends. ProD2 crowds, meanwhile, averaged nearly 5,000 per match, according to the LNR’s press release.
Nearly 80,000 filled Stade de France for an unfashionable Top 14 final on June 24. Meanwhile, the showpiece match, broadcast on pay-TV broadcaster Canal Plus and, as is traditional on France 2, attracted a combined TV audience of more than 4 million viewers – 3.22 million of them on the free-to-air channel.
Toulouse’s trip to Clermont was the most watched match of the regular season on Canal Plus, attracting a total audience of 722,000. That match was knocked down the list by the two play-off semi-finals, which attracted a total pay-TV audience of more than 2million viewers. The audience for the Friday-night Castres-Toulouse semi-final peaked at 1.22million, Canal Plus’ figures revealed.
“Morgan Parra could be set for an early reunion with his former teammates at Clermont”