Bordeaux Blues: The Cautionary Tale of a French Football Giant.

While Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United were racking up an eleventh Premier League title at the conclusion of the 2008/09 season, over in France it was a team in blue, rather than red that was celebrating.

Girondins de Bordeaux had just clinched their sixth Ligue 1 crown, and their first in a decade. They were, once again, the kings of French football.

And yet, today, they are plying their trade in the fourth-tier….having just about avoided extinction altogether.

Some Bordeaux fans have likened it to the sinking of the Titanic, but at least the guests of that doomed vessel had a live band to listen to as they went down; in Bordeaux, the only soundtrack to the misery is a chorus of boos and whistles from the club’s famous ultras.

So how did Bordeaux get into this mess….and where do they go from here?

Les Misérables

The tale of Bordeaux’s ascent is a cautionary one: the club welcomed overseas investment in 2018, and since then everything that various new owners have tried to restore the good times has failed spectacularly. 

Great American Capital Partners sounds like the ideal name for a football club seeking a new, cash-rich benefactor, but in truth they brought very little to the party when acquiring a major shareholding in Bordeaux back in 2018. 

So much so, it was barely a year later when they sold their stake to a different consortium: King Street Capital.

That coincided with the heart being ripped from the club: youth team starlets Jules Kounde and Aurelien Tchouameni were sold, as was the fantastically-named Malcom. Between 2018 and 2021, Bordeaux had a net transfer gain of a cool £92 million, but the club’s owners refused to reinvest that money into strengthening the playing squad.

Something fishy was afoot. And then the pandemic came along.

The 2020/21 Ligue 1 season was ended prematurely in March, costing clubs significant sums in lost revenue via gate receipts, TV money etc. To make matters worse Mediapro, who owned the TV rights to French football, went bust….meaning that clubs once again missed out on a much-needed revenue stream.

As if all that wasn’t enough, King Street Capital revealed that they could no longer sustain the club financially; Bordeaux was put on the market, and in June 2021 it was sold to Luxembourgish entrepreneur Gerard Lopez, who acquired the club for a snip of a price.

The only way was up….right?

Rock Bottom

Due to the parlous state of the club’s finances, a further fire-sale of players was necessary.

It led to a further regression in the quality of the playing squad, and so it came as no great shock when Bordeaux were relegated to Ligue 2 at the end of the 2021/22 season, having finished bottom of the table. 

But things were, remarkably, about to get even worse. So bad were their accounts that the DNCG, a French organisation that monitors the financial position of professional football clubs in the country, decreed that Bordeaux should be relegated automatically to Championnat National; the third tier of French football. 

Lopez and his legal team challenged the verdict, and there was a huge sigh of relief when their appeal was upheld and Bordeaux were reinstated to Ligue 2 for the 2022/23 campaign.

Somehow, Les Girondins almost got promoted back to Ligue 1, finishing third, and therefore outside of the promotion places, before they settled for a mid-table finish in 2023/24.

Or so they thought….

The financial situation had reached a point of such desperation that Bordeaux were administratively relegated to Championnat National – they could simply no longer fulfil the obligations of a professional football club.

There were hopes of salvation with Fenway Sports Group, the same consortium that owns Liverpool, said to have been considering a rescue package for the beleaguered Bordeaux. However, that ultimately came to nothing. 

And so the club was soon forced into administration by the DNCG and declared bankrupt, which then meant they were automatically demoted to the fourth-tier of French football: Championnat National 2.

All player contracts were torn up and the training ground closed, which has effectively forced them to rely on their youth team in order to fulfil fixtures during the 2024/25 campaign.

That was, until a ponytailed knight in shining armour from Wearside rode in to save the day….

Carroll On a Song

Zinedine Zidane, Bixente Lizarazu, Christophe Dugarry….Andy Carroll.

Bordeaux has boasted greats of the game and World Cup winners, while producing many stars of the future via their vaunted academy.

Now, their star name is a hirsute frontman that, these days, is as likely to be on the front pages of the papers, thanks to his dalliances with reality TV stars and influencers, as he is the back.

For reasons only he knows, Carroll finds himself in the fourth-tier of French football with Bordeaux, having walked away from his contract with Ligue 2 outfit Amiens. He has since admitted that the wage he’s paid by Bordeaux is less than the rent on his house.

The former £35 million man, capped nine times by England, has lost none of his prowess when crosses are floated into the box, notching five goals in his first three appearances for Les Girondins.

The club, however, remain (at the time of writing at least) perilously poised in the relegation zone of Championnat National 2.

Carroll’s new teammates include Paul Baysse, who had been retired for two years before Bordeaux begged their former youth team graduate to return at the age of 36, former reserve team coach Rio Mavuba (the 40-year-old hadn’t played for six years) and Cedric Yambere; last seen at Faroe Islands outfit KI Klaksvik.

And if all that wasn’t chaotic enough for you, in their opening game of the season Bordeaux nicked a point courtesy off an injury-time equaliser from goalkeeper Lassana Diabate.

Quite where the Bordeaux journey goes in 2024/25 is anybody’s guess. Hopefully, their successful academy can yield some more gems, while that unlikeliest of heroes in Andy Carroll continues to bang in the goals that save the club from extinction.

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