From soccer town to rugby country, the rise of Bordeaux Bègles is no ordinary success story

This month marks the 30th anniversary of FC Girondins Bordeaux reaching the Uefa Cup final, where they lost over two legs against Bayern Munich. To qualify for the tournament, they had to come through the Intertoto Cup the previous summer, during which goals from Zinedine Zidane and Christophe Dugarry earned them a 2-0 win over Bohemians at Dalymount Park.

Bixente Lizarazu captained FC Girondins Bordeaux that season and just a couple of years later, Zidane scored two goals in the 1998 World Cup final when France beat Brazil 3-0. For good measure, Dugarry and Lizarazu also lined out in the World Cup final at Stade de France.

Ask former Bohs midfielder Peter Hanrahan how he did against Zidane at Dalymount Park and he’ll point to his pocket, as if to infer that’s where he had his opponent all evening.

Alas, there was only an estimated 1,500 there to see the great Zizou, Lizarazu, Dugarry et al in that star-studded Bordeaux team.

Meanwhile, in that same 1995-96 season, the Club Athlétique Bordeaux-Bègles Gironde rugby team – or CA Bègles as they were known – had been knocked out in the last 16 of the French championship. They had fallen from the heights of their second title in 1991 when Bernard Laporte was the scrumhalf behind a famed pack. As for the city’s other rugby club, Stade Bordelais, they were languishing in the third tier.

The soccer club would win Ligue 1 in 1998-99. By the time they won their sixth domestic league title in 2009, Bègles had gone from competing in rugby’s inaugural European Cup in 1995 to being declared bankrupt in 2004 and relegated to the amateur leagues.

At the end of that 2005-06 season, Stade Bordelais were promoted to ProD2 and the concept of a merger was first mooted. Laporte and another influential former Bègles player, Serge Simon, were both supportive of the idea.

And so, in 2006, Union Stade Bordelais-CA Bordeaux Bègles Gironde, to give them their full new title, was born. This was abbreviated to USBCABBG, and then, mercifully, to Union Bordeaux Bègles, or UBB, in 2008.

Significantly, Bordelais and Bègles retained a degree of amateur autonomy and continue to oversee their own adult and youth rugby teams.

Nor was the hostility between the two clubs quite as pronounced as that between Bayonne and Biarritz, where protests by supporters and objections from former players have scuppered any proposals for the Basque clubs to merge.

There have also been other significant staging posts along the way, beginning in 2007 when Laurent Marti became club president. A successful businessman from Bergerac who had played in the Toulouse academy, helpfully, he had no skin in Bordelais or Bègles.

“Laurent Marti has done everything,” says Arnaud David, a long-time rugby writer based in Bordeaux with the Sud Ouest newspaper. “He’s been the architect. He’s been the money-backer. He’s been, in many ways, the first recruiter, or first sporting director, spending hours and hours looking at videos of players and trying, with a small budget at the beginning, to find the best players. And, of course, he’s rugby-mad.”

Lucky UBB.

“The first thing was that I don’t have history with Stade Bordelais or Bègles. I was neutral,” Marti recently told The Times. “I understood very quickly that their goal was to protect their own history. They were thinking, ‘if Stade Bordelais and Bègles disappear, my story disappears’.

“I said, ‘we are going to respect your history, sir. You will have photos in the clubhouse. The colours on the badge. But most important now is the future, is your son, it’s not your history. If we stay like this there will be no more history in Bordeaux’.”

Indeed, when Les Girondins FC won their sixth Ligue 1 title in 2009 (when their average home attendance at the Stade Chaban-Delmas was 26,953), UBB were battling relegation from the ProD2 in front of an average crowd of under 5,000 at Stade André-Moga in Bègles. However, that same year Marti took a ProD2 derby between UBB and Agen to the Stade Chaban-Delmas and more than 20,000 turned up.

Just three years into its existence, this demonstrated the untapped potential of the club. UBB won promotion via the play-offs in 2010-11. “And then,” as Marti puts it, “the new story started.”

Critically too, just as the foundations were being built for a new stadium in Bègles, the city-owned Stade Chaban-Delmas became available.

“They managed to get the stadium,” says David, who has also written a history of the club. “The Girondins Bordeaux football club had to move out before the Euro 2016 football [tournament] when the new stadium (Stade Atlantique) was built just outside the city.

“So, the old (Chaban-Delmas) stadium was free and they couldn’t turn it into a project for flats and offices, and the club already had done matches there and they had seen there was a public for rugby.

“Bordeaux is the capital of the southwest. There are so many young guys who come from the Basque Country and from everywhere in the southwest, and they all are so keen on rugby. So, it was easy to build a support.

“The access to the old stadium is so easy, so comfortable. The people like going there and they play a good brand of rugby. They had the first generation of players coming from abroad, created something about the club identity, which was lovable,” adds David.

He cites the Kiwi Matthew Clarkin and South African Heini Adams, who stayed for six years, and Australian Blair Connor, who also joined in 2010 and stayed for a decade.

“You wanted to support that team because of the way they played, because of the way they interacted with the public. And the second thing is that the Girondins Bordeaux Football Club, slowly but surely, was going down, and there was also a transfer from football to rugby.”

FC Girondins Bordeaux suffered severe financial difficulties after the pandemic. Following administration in 2021 and successive relegations, it sadly went out of existence as a professional club in July 2024.

As for UBB, with an average home crowd of 34,000, they have become the best-supported club in the Top 14. Whereas the pre-match preamble at the Aviva Stadium especially is lacking in supporter engagement, for anybody who has ever been at a UBB home game – with bands and food outlets outside the ground and the crowds assembling in their thousands to welcome the team bus – it is an experience.

They have assembled a star-studded team but are at the maximum of the annual €12 million salary cap; note the loss of Pete Samu and Guido Petti at the end of last season. Louis Bielle-Biarrey is out of contract at the end of next season but, as Arnaud points it, is a prized asset.

“He’s renegotiating his contract at the moment. They want to keep him. I think he will stay, but they’ve got to find the budget because they are at the limit of the salary cap and when he signed his first contract it was not the value that he was now. He’s the second-most-popular player in France.”

UBB are a very modern-day success story, typical of the “urbanisation” of the Top 14 and also the success of rugby over football at club level. Witness Canal+ agreeing a record €696.8m extension to show French Top 14 rugby from 2027 until 2032, which has helped it maintain its status as the most lucrative domestic league in the sport.

Akin to La Rochelle under Ronan O’Gara, UBB’s attitude toward the Champions Cup has been transformed under Yannick Bru, a former winner of the competition with Toulouse. As an example, the 42,000-plus Stade Atlantique was sold out for the semi-final against Bath within two hours of tickets going on sale.

Winning a cherished Bouclier de Brennus remains the holy grail in the long-term. But tellingly, in beating Bayonne 40-38 away and Perpignan 37-32 at home over the last two weeks, the talismanic trio of Maxime Lucu, Matthieu Jailbert and Louis Bielle-Biarrey (twice) have been used off the bench.

UBB have thus retained sixth place, but retaining the Champions Cup is clearly a more plausible route to silverware this season. Just like La Rochelle in recent times, UBB have had a taste of long-overdue title success via the Champions Cup. And they want it again.

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