EDITORIAL - "The Béziers rugby club will be the first to give in to petro-dollars"

The Béziers rugby club is about to be bought by a Franco-Emirati investor who wants to make it the largest club in Europe. It can be good news, to see rugby open in this way, but be careful not to lose the soul of this game.

French rugby is at a crossroads. Will clubs become the new targets of wealthy investors around the world or will they remain upright in their values? Béziers will be the first French club to succumb to petro-dollars as they say, even if I don't like the expression too much because it gives a negative a priori and that I don't see why we would have this a priori.

The Franco-Emirati investor puts the package. 30 million euros, for a club certainly legendary in French rugby, but which is vegetating at the moment in the middle of the table of Pro D2, the second division. It is a sum more than plump. It must be said that the objectives are pharaonic: to make it the largest club in Europe, quite simply. It's funny, I heard that somewhere before, but in another sport. It is said that rugby may finally interest other investors, beyond the restricted circle of aficionados.

And with the current difficulties of the clubs, this can obviously open up other perspectives. But isn't that going to provoke an overbidding in an environment that already lives in a financial bubble? This is what worries me a little. The club of Béziers is already ready to panic the transfer market, by recruiting loud names, as well among the players as in the staff. And the others may want to follow, we can't really blame them. The problem is that they seemed to be taking a different path, and I fear that it will reshuffle the cards.

Most of the Top 14 clubs have rightly decided to be very reasonable in dealing with the crisis. The latter made the rugby clubs realize that they were living beyond their means. And almost all the elite clubs have managed to sign wage reduction agreements with their players. Between 10 and 20% decrease, it is substantial. It is very different from what we have seen in football clubs for example, where there were no global agreements. Simply because the history of these two sports is very different.

Certainly, rugby is professional now, but there remains an attachment to the club, to the leaders, which is much stronger than in football, there is less individualism in rugby, let's be clear. These are the famous values ​​that rugby players love to talk about. But there, with the arrival of investors who have no basic rugby culture, the risk is that we will go to the end of professionalization, forgetting what makes the particularity of rugby, its essence. We cannot make this sport a kind of football with an oval ball.