Brian Glanville
where now for young talent?
UEFA Cup finalists in 1978 and French Cup winners in 1981, the implosion of Sporting Club de Bastia, when it came, was as bad as many on the island had feared, and a return to former glories will be far from easy.
French League Cup runners-up as recently as 2015, Corsica’s most famous club start the new season in the regional fifth tier, having been relegated from Ligue 1 at the end of the 2016-2017 season. With debts of 31million, players routinely receiving their wages late and a string of unpaid hotel bills from away
fixtures, SC Bastia lost their professional status, collapsed and were demoted through the divisions to Championnat National 3 due to financial irregularities.
Under much-loathed president PierreMarie Geronimi, SC Bastia were always on the brink financially and rarely liked on the “continent”, as mainland France is known on the Mediterranean island.
“Other clubs knew this, and when we tried to sell a player to survive they would know we needed 2m and they’d give us just 2m,” says long-serving head of press Jean-Philippe Thibaudeau.
SC Bastia’s fall from Ligue 1 has left Corsica with no top-flight representative, and while the island’s AC Ajaccio and Gazelec Ajaccio play in Ligue 2, they attract crowds of little more than 3,000. In contrast, Bastia would regularly fill their 16,000-capacity Stade Armand Cesari for games against Paris Saint-Germain and Marseille.
“People come from across Corsica to support Sporting Club de Bastia,” says Benoit Tavernoit, who was one of more than 30 people to lose their job after the club collapsed.
“Sporting are the club of Corsica and I feel sorry that people who have been supporting the club for 60 years will not see these big matches again.”
For many on Corsica, Bastia’s demotion was about more than just punishment for sporting failings. “In the stadiums they called us terrorists,” says Thibeaudeau.
For four decades the National Liberation Front of Corsica (FLNC) waged a violent campaign for independence that saw the island’s prefect, Claude Erignac, assassinated in 1998. In 2014, the FLNC downed arms, but the island retains a wild reputation that some even trade on. T-shirts showing armed separatists and hand-grenade fridge magnets proliferate on Bastia’s seafront, while a small element of SC Bastia’s supporters have a reputation for hooliganism. In the team’s last topflight season, Nice striker Mario Balotelli was racially abused and a pitch invasion during a game against Lyon led to a three-game home ban.
But while no one on the north coast of Corsica is defending either incident, they do want to add some context. “Those people on the pitch against Lyon were young people,” sighs Guillaume Longo, secretary of fan group Socios Etoile Club Bastia. “They did not know what they were doing, but they were also shouting against Geronimi.”
When the club collapsed in July 2017, 11 people came forward with rescue plans but most were deterred by the size of the job. In the end, two Corsican businessmen, Claude Ferrandi and internet entrepreneur Pierre-Noel Luiggi, teamed up to revive SC Bastia.
Luiggi resides in Paris, so Ferrandi, who lives in Bastia, took the presidency, and both are fully aware of the task they have taken on. “People need to love us again,” says a glum Ferrandi.
Forty years ago SC Bastia were the pride of France after beating Sporting of Portugal and England’s Newcastle United in the UEFA Cup before losing 3-0 on aggregate to Dutch side PSV in the Final.
The club retained support after a terrible disaster at its home ground in 1992, when 18 people died after a stand collapsed during a French Cup semi-final against Marseille, but the intervening years of violence and hooliganism eroded those sympathies.
The violence may be over but the calls for greater autonomy are growing. Nationalists won local elections three years ago and last June they took three of the island’s four national assembly seats. In December, a new island-wide council was formed.
Leading Corsican clubs such as SC Bastia want to stay in the French system and the local council has helped to rebuild the stadium – known locally as the Furiani after the adjacent train station – to meet top-flight standards.
Clubs in France operate on two levels: a professional operation and an association, and all the associations have a registration number with the national federation which is key to keeping the club alive. And while SC Bastia’s professional wing is no more, the association remains.
After Ferrandi and Luiggi came forward, a handful of ex-employees such as Thibaudeau worked for free to revive the club and they were cleared to take the place of their reserve team in Championnat National 3. However,
with just four players signed up, and loan deals not permitted in the fifth tier, just getting a team together in time was touch and go.
only one regular player from the 2016-17 campaign remained, and with an eye on moving into coaching, veteran Gilles cioni joined the new set-up, whose official name is now sporting club Bastiais. Ferrandi then made a call to former France under-20 midfielder Gary coulibahy, who was born in Bastia and began his career with the club but was playing in Greece with Levadiakos after spells with, among others, Monaco and Belgian side Waasland-Beveren.
“i left when i was 22 but Bastia gave me my life, so of course i came,” says coulibahy, who is now 32 and has signed a three-year contract.
stephane rossi was recruited as coach from local rivals Fc Bastia-Borgo and the ranks were swelled by academy players such as Nicolas Medori, Julien Benhaim and Naoufal Mesbah. Eventually, 16 players were recruited under contract, with another six deemed to be “amateurs”, and sc Bastia began their season, albeit a month late, with a 1-1 draw with Le Pontet.
Despite the turmoil, sc Bastia were among the favourites to win group D, but in the end they finished the season in second place behind Marseille Endoume, who had signed up a number of former olympique Marseille academy players and beat Bastia home and away.
Yet just having a club to support means so much to sc Bastia’s followers. Now they can start to focus on the long
road back to the top.
“People come from across Corsica to support Sporting Club de Bastia” Benoit Tavernoit