They are the two images that define FC Girondins de Bordeaux’s bewildering season.
The first was a dramatic 93rd-minute equaliser from the club’s goalkeeper Lassana Diabate in their opening match last month, although no fans were there to see it.
The second came earlier this week, when controversial owner Gerard Lopez shushed angry supporters outside a court after they had once again called on him to leave the club.
Welcome to the chaotic world of Bordeaux, one of France’s most famous clubs, which is now on its knees following years of financial chaos.
That tailspin saw Bordeaux file for bankruptcy in the summer and lose their professional status, falling into the amateur Championnat National 2, the French fourth tier, where they face a worrying future.
For those who watched Bordeaux mixing it with Europe’s elite in 2010, when they reached the last eight of the Champions League, and producing stellar talents such as Zinedine Zidane, Christophe Dugarry, Aurelien Tchouameni and Jules Kounde, it all feels like a nightmare without end.
Zinedine Zidane (right) was one of Bordeaux’s most famous players (Derrick Ceyrac/AFP)
“It’s the biggest financial failure in European football after Glasgow Rangers,” David Gluzman, a fan and director at Deutsche Pfandbriefbank told The Athletic, in reference to the 55-time Scottish champions who were also condemned to the fourth tier of their league after being declared insolvent.
Another fan, Alex Perie, put it slightly differently. “For French people, Girondins are a great team, a top-five club in France,” he told The Athletic in August. “It’s like the Titanic.”
Travel north of Bordeaux city centre, following the River Garonne, and you will eventually hit the Matmut Atlantique.
Bordeaux’s 42,000-capacity home, built for the 2016 European Championship, is a striking sight — all clean straight lines and jutting steel poles. It was regarded as one of the most sophisticated stadiums in France when it opened nine years ago after costing €318million (£267m; $355m at current rates) to build, but it now stands as a monument to its tenants’ hubris. Bordeaux — who rent it from the city council — having been locked out since last season.
Instead, the club have begun life in the Championnat National 2 at the tiny, 3,000-seater Stade Sainte-Germaine, five miles south-west of the Matmut Atlantique, and less than a tenth of the size.
Bordeaux were still attracting attendances of over 20,000 last season in Ligue 2 but so far, fans have been prevented from watching home games due to security concerns, exacerbated by a row between the club’s two main fan groups — the Ultramarines (who have been more sympathetic to Lopez) and North Gate. It means moments like Diabate’s unlikely equaliser on the season’s opening weekend against Stade Poitevin have been met with eerie silence, although hundreds of fans still turned up to show their support outside the ground.
Bordeaux fans have been beset by in-fighting (Romain Perrocheau/AFP via Getty Images)
Not only have Bordeaux lost almost all their playing squad from last season, their manager Albert Riera, the former Liverpool winger, returned to NK Celje in Slovenia. The successful women’s team also lost their professional status.
“We did everything we could to try and save the women’s section,” Lopez told The Athletic over email. “We found investors with a good project that had the support of the (Bordeaux) mayor and other stakeholders. Unfortunately, they were dropped by one of their investors at the last minute”
Lopez announced 70 staff redundancies in 2022 but said that he will now have to carry out a fresh round of cuts. “When I arrived, the club was living well beyond its means, with over 200 employees — twice as many as other Ligue 1 clubs,” he wrote. “I should have made this effort (to cut jobs) as soon as we went down to Ligue 2, or when we didn’t come back up to Ligue 1. I preferred to protect jobs because I knew it would be painful, but it’s even more painful today.”
For fans, the gloom feels unrelenting. “It’s catastrophic,” supporter Nicolas Pietrelli, 50, told The Athletic over a drink outside Pizza Capri in the city centre in early August. “It affects an enormous amount of people, and the fans are depressed by the situation. In 140 years of history, we’ve never been so low (in the pyramid). And now we’re not professional. We’ve had many legends — (Alain) Giresse, Zidane, (Bixente) Lizarazu…”
Across the same table, his friend Djino Forte, 35, is angry.
“There’s no vision for the future,” he says. “We’ll still follow the team, of course. We will go to the stadium. But it doesn’t feel real. To see the youngest players leave the club for other teams is a very sad feeling.”
For many Bordeaux fans, there is one clear focus for their fury — Lopez.
“There is an expression in French that says, ‘The fish rots from its head’,” Pietrelli said. “In Bordeaux, it’s the same. It rotted from the head, and gangrened the entire club. So Gerard Lopez is the principle problem. Management? Failure. Financial stability? Failure. He only knows how to divide – the dressing room, the stands, the club. So the problem is him.”
Lopez, a Spanish-Luxembourgish financier with a background in technology and energy, bought Bordeaux in the summer of 2021. It was a turbulent time: the club had just been placed into administration having had three different owners in three years, M6, a television channel (who had been in charge for 19 years), General American Capital Partners (a consortium headed up by Joseph DaGrosa), and King Street, a U.S. investment firm.
With Bordeaux haemorrhaging money in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the collapse of the Mediapro TV rights deal for Ligue 1 matches, Lopez was the man willing to step in.
Gerard Lopez has been a divisive presence at Bordeaux (Thibaud Moritz/AFP via Getty Images)
His reputation, however, was already dented. His previous French club, Lille, had won the Ligue 1 title, with a spokesperson for Lopez insisting that the owner had been responsible for identifying many of the players they had recruited and for helping achieve record income from player sales.
But they also racked up heavy losses and in 2020, as reported by The Athletic, Lopez was forced to sell the club by his main creditors, Elliott Management Corporation and JP Morgan Chase.
Lopez had also bought Belgian top-flight club Royal Excel Mouscron in 2020, only for it to file for bankruptcy two years later.
It wasn’t just football. Lopez was president of the Lotus Formula 1 team when they accumulated significant losses. He said the team’s debts totalled £114million in January 2014, before a buy-out by Renault a year later. Lopez’s spokesman attributed Lotus’ financial struggles to higher-than-anticipated costs related to the introduction of hybrid engines.
The issues at Bordeaux, however, have been on another level. Some questionable signings and terrible on-field form led to them finishing bottom of Ligue 1 in May 2022, with relegation bringing another drop in revenue. The DNCG — French football’s financial watchdog — was initially set to relegate them again that summer, to the third tier, due to concerns over their sustainability, only for Lopez to appease their concerns with a debt restructuring plan.
That summer of 2022 was viewed as a chance to cut the high wage bill and start afresh but costs remained stubbornly high. According to their last set of company accounts, in the 2022-23 season, the ratio of Bordeaux’s wages to their non-transfer earnings was 129 per cent. In total, from the period 2018 to 2022, they had accumulated losses of more than €200m.
Even more disastrously, Bordeaux just missed out on promotion in 2023, and followed that with another miserable campaign in 2023-24, finishing 12th.
Bordeaux fans have been left disenchanted (Thibaud Moritz/AFP via Getty Images)
“The task of rescuing and rebuilding this club was and is enormous, and we came very close to succeeding,” Lopez told The Athletic. “It came down to a disastrous match in Annecy (a 1-0 defeat in 2023), which cost us a direct return to Ligue 1.”
There was the possibility of an unlikely saviour in Fenway Sports Group, the Boston-based investment that owns Liverpool FC and the Boston Red Sox and which was keen to add to its football portfolio. Ultimately, however, FSG decided that the costs of the stadium — a new owner would need to pay around €50million to buy Matmut Atlantique from the city council — and the wider economic uncertainty around French football posed too much of a risk.
With the FSG talks dead, Bordeaux filed for bankruptcy on July 23. They were demoted to the fourth tier a week later.
It is hard to decipher which is more improbable: the six-time French champions playing in the rustic environs of Stade Sainte-Germaine, or Lopez still being in charge to oversee it all.
Angry fans have staged protests across the city to demand his departure, the latest of which came on Tuesday when, after a hearing on the club’s future, a group held up a banner saying ‘Whatever the decision, the future of the Girondins must be written without you’. Pierre Hurmic, Bordeaux’s mayor, has echoed those sentiments, telling local TV station TV7 that the club needed to start preparing for a “post-Lopez future”.
Yet Lopez — whose spokesperson said had invested €60m of his own money in the club, including €40m to finance last season — is vowing to fight on.
After a long period of silence, he wrote an open letter to Bordeaux fans on July 31, on the eve of the first league match, admitting he had made “mistakes” and saying he should have invested more at the local level and spoken more in the dressing room during the final games of the 2022-23 season, when promotion back to Ligue 1 was still a possibility.
He told The Athletic that while he “understood” the fans’ anger, “they should blame those who sank the club” before he arrived. “I tried to turn things around and paid with my own money in doing so, and I’m still here saving the club,” he added. “Today, if I withdrew from the club, it would simply disappear.
“We’ve made a phenomenal effort to reduce the debt inherited from previous shareholders. When I took over the club, the financial debt was around €100m, and today it’s just €11m.”
Bordeaux supporters will be forgiven for feeling cynical, although there are glimmers of optimism.
Results have not been impressive — Bordeaux have drawn two and lost one of their opening three games — but given the club only had 14 players in their matchday squad for that first game of the season (the only survivors from last season were three teenagers) that is not surprising.
Since then, the squad has been strengthened. Former players such as Cedric Yambere, Soufiane Bahassa and Younes Kaabouni have returned to the club, and former Newcastle United midfielder Amadou Diallo joined last week.
Following Riera’s exit, they are now managed by Bruno Irles — who was at City Football Group’s Troyes for a year in 2022 — while John Williams, a friend of Lopez who is sporting director at Amiens SC, is heading up their recruitment. Williams is still employed by Amiens but their owner, Bernard Joannin, was quoted by local newspaper Courrier Picard as saying he was happy for him to help. One of Williams’ first acts was to persuade former England and Newcastle United striker Andy Carroll to swap Amiens for Bordeaux.
Most significant of all, however, was the news this week that Bordeaux can now return to the Matmut after a dispute between Societe Bordeaux Metropole (SBA), the management company responsible for the ground, and the club over organisational and technical costs was resolved. The council has said it has also waived Bordeaux’s outstanding rental debts of around €20m.
The Matmut Atlantique will welcome back Bordeaux (Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)
According to a statement released on the stadium’s official X account, Girondins have agreed to pay some operating costs (between €45,000 and €51,000 per game) and will return to the Matmut on Saturday for the match against Voltigeurs de Chateaubriant, albeit with a reduced capacity of 12,000.
It will be an emotional homecoming, although Bordeaux supporters are under no illusions that bigger trials await.
Championnat National 2 may be the basement league, but promotion is not guaranteed: only one team goes up from each of its three 16-team divisions. It also includes sides with big ambitions, such as Cannes, part of the Friedkin Group that owns AS Roma and has tried to buy Everton.
“For the city, it’s been a huge loss, because it means there’s no professional team at all in the region,” explained Gluzman. “You have to go to Toulouse, 200 kilometres away, to find a Ligue 1 game.”
It is a long road back to the top of French football. But at least Bordeaux have started the journey.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
