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AP Luzenac is a football club based in a tiny village of 650 inhabitants lodged in the Pyrenees mountains in France, and this club’s meteoric rise in the last five years has captured imaginations everywhere. The team’s budget was increased last summer to be in tune with their improved ambitions – to around £2m – an aberration in times when single superstars go under the hammer for as much as £80m.
The Dream Run
AP Luzenac were an amateur club competing in regional French leagues until 2009 when they gained promotion to the Championnat de France National – the country’s third tier league. Their entry into competitive football was not very smooth, they only narrowly survived relegation for two consecutive years; subsequent financial pressures threatened to dissolve the club. A knight in shining armour then appeared in the form of a wealthy Toulouse businessman, Jérôme Ducros, who helped the club stave off extinction for then but whose masterstroke was to come only during last years’s summer transfer window.
The 2013-14 season was to be the season this group of underdogs would take a leap to the next level, and with this aim in view Fabian Barthez, himself a native of a nearby village called Lavelanet, was hired to be the next managing director. Barthez proved to be a shrewd operator, luring talented players jettisoned by other clubs to form an unit that would become the highest scorers in the league, and more importantly, would finish second. Luzenac played their matches last season in a slightly larger stadium which has a capacity of 3000, even which is too few for Ligue 2 standards.
“We had planned to gain promotion in three years so we are well ahead of schedule!” declared Ducros. “It’s incredible, exceptional, extraordinary!” exulted the club’s long-serving defender Jérôme Hergault. “When I came here we were struggling to stay up in CFA [fourth tier], now to be going up to Ligue 2 is hard to believe. People often just saw us as mere peasants playing football – this will make a lot of people shut up.”
AP Luzenac are already the tiniest club ever to play in the French third division, but their deserved status of being the same in the second division is under threat from financial regulators of the game.
The Killjoy
Just as the euphoria over an incredible campaign was abating, the big dream was dashed when The Direction Nationale de Contrôle et de Gestion (DNCG) banned the club from accepting the promotion, critics opining the only reason for this being the small size of the club. DNCG is the body set up by the French Football Federation in 1984 to check the financial rectitude of professional clubs, with each having to submit accounts for approval every year.
The declared aim is to preserve clubs by making sure that expenditure does not exceed income but Luzenac allege that the workings of this body is not as transparent as it would seem and that it is used to keep the status quo between small and big clubs and prevent unfancied new faces from joining the elite.
This incident is symptomatic of the loopholes inherent in Financial Fair Play policies, where big clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City are only allowed to get bigger and small clubs are disallowed from expanding.
The most vexing thing about this denial is that no specific reason has been given for this decision. It is thought that the issue of having to pay a season-long stadium rent has been a factor behind the decision, but club authorities have professed indignation at what they feel is clearly injustice. Ducros said, “I’ll say it again: shame on the FFF! We answered every question and presented fully audited accounts. I’m going to fight to bring this system down, they are ruining the hopes of an entire district!”
Luzenac insist that they have a sound budget for the season ahead and that their books are perfectly balanced – “we are not even one euro in arrears,” said Barthez – and that they are being punished not for anything that they have done but rather for what the league suspects they will not be able to continue doing; in other words, not for any mismanagement, just for being small.
On Thursday, 30 July, the club will make their last stand when the case is heard by a Toulouse court whose verdict will be final: if Luzenac lose, they will have to accept getting no reward for last season’s heroic campaign and they will consigned to an uncertain fate; if they win, Ligue 2 will have to be expanded to feature 21 teams rather than 20 next season and organisers will have to devise a new fixture list accordingly – just two days before the campaign kicks off. Football’s smallest powers are taking up the fight against the whole organization with all odds stacked against them. The small-towners are however determined to put up a struggle with all their might, seen here in a call-to-arms issued to all well-wishers.
Only time will tell whether the little guy can enjoy upward mobility in the heavily corporatized world of modern football.
The Road Here On
The amount of attention AP Luzenac’s heroic campaign has attracted might help in the long run, even if they are denied from now. The club is in contact with David Moyes, a coach with previous experience of taking a team of mediocres to the highest level.
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