Demotion – “The club smelled too much of motor oil”: Why Peugeot dropped Sochaux (and will not return)

Nobody knows today where the fall of FC Sochaux-Montbéliard will stop. In National 1? Much further in the event of a bankruptcy filing? But everyone has identified, on the other hand, the beginning of the tumble and problems: July 6, 2015. That day, Peugeot formalizes the sale of the club to the Chinese from Ledus. It’s the end of an 87-year history. In 1928, Louis Maillard-Salin and Maurice Bailly, two Peugeot employees, created the club with the support of the factory manager, Jean-Pierre Peugeot. The FCSM will become the first French professional club and will develop the first training center in France.

Sochaux is Peugeot and Peugeot is Sochaux. The stadium is nested in the middle of the brand’s factories. “In my time, there were four local players whose parents worked at the factory: Pierre-Alain Frau, Camel Meriem, Jérémy Mathieu and Benoît Pedretti, exposes Jean-Claude Plessis, president of the FCSM from 1999 to 2008. There was a real link between Peugeot and the football team which aroused enthusiasm” In France, there is no equivalent, no model as advanced. No local company, even Casino in Saint-Etienne or Nicollin in Montpellier, has contributed so much to the structuring and influence of a French football club. .

Abroad, on the other hand, there are many examples: Fiat with Juventus, Volkswagen with Wolfsburg, Philips with PSV Eindhoven or Bayer in Leverkusen. “In Montbéliard, there was the Peugeot family that you could see in the streetscontinues Plessis. Me, it was Eric who made me come, it was his grandfather’s club. The family was very attached to the club” Except that the leaders of PSA do not have the same fiber so, in 2014, when Thierry Peugeot was ejected from the group’s supervisory board, the sale of the club was no longer taboo.

The economic situation of the group is difficult, Carlos Tavares, the big boss, wants to concentrate on the automobile activity. Anyway, that’s the official message. “It is not in the mission of the PSA group to manage football clubs, we could only have done a very bad job at its head“, he confesses in a hearing at the Assembly in 2020. “This sale first served as a message to the employees of the factory in Sochaux: ‘you are no longer the darlings of the brand’, explains Jean-Baptiste Forray, journalist and author of book At the heart of the great decommissioning, the lost pride of Peugeot-Sochaux (Les Éditions du Cerf, 2022). The message was received 5 out of 5 since at the factory, productivity has increased.”

Branding vs Betrayal

One evening in 2019, Isabel Salas Mendez, director of sponsorship and partnerships at Peugeot, delivers another version of the disengagement at the microphone of Europe 1: “Football is a sport that does not go too well with our values. It conveys popular values, whereas we are trying to move upmarket.“It would therefore be an image story for a brand that continues, for example, to appear at Roland-Garros and on Stade Toulousain jerseys.”The club smelled too much of waste oil and gypsy“, synthesizes Jean-Baptiste Forray. On the side of the Sochaux supporters, we see it, even today, as a terrible betrayal.

“Today, I am very angry with Peugeot and Carlos Tavaresnotes Fabien Lefevre, president of the Planète Sochaux supporters group. A week after having paid for an entire page in L’Equipe where one could read: “1 Renard (note: for Hervé Renard then trainer) and 11 Lion cubs are going to fight – Peugeot support of Sochaux since 1928”, they messed up the club and their responsibility is overwhelming in what we are going through today. They committed infanticide when we know the links that united Sochaux and Peugeot.”

In April 2019, after 4 years of risky management, while Sochaux is playing for maintenance in L2 and celebrating its 90th anniversary, the president of the club and of Ledus Wing Sang Li, is declared in personal bankruptcy by the High Court of Hong Kong court. Asked when the future of FC Sochaux-Montbéliard was still unclear, the president of PSA Carlos Tavares let it be known that he would not come to the bedside of the club. The cord is cut, no question of backtracking. No more today, in 2023, when the whole region fears a bankruptcy filing. Sochaux is no longer Peugeot. And Peugeot is no longer Sochaux.