Here we are. This Sunday evening, RC Vannes will become the first Breton club to play a Top 14 match. When they host the all-powerful Stade Toulousain, the Rabine’s lair will be sold out (12,000 seats) for the fifteenth time in a row, after an exemplary season in Pro D2 which had already drawn crowds to the prefecture of Morbihan.
“It’s a historic event for the club, and even for rugby in France,” assured fly-half and scorer Maxime Lafage last weekend on France 3. “But we’ve moved up to the Top 14 and we’re not here to make up the numbers. We want to show the best side of RCV and of all of Brittany, of an entire people.” The speech could have been delivered with a sailor’s sweater on his back, after a fest-noz.
Lafage, a member of a multinational Vannes dressing room like in any professional club, was nevertheless born in Toulouse before being trained in Colomiers. But he was adopted by a region which, if it remains associated with the football-cycling diptych, is increasingly giving in to the charms of the oval ball, long reviled by the powerful Catholic Church, because it is far too “carnal” with its multiple contacts.
A very strong increase in the number of licensees
“Rugby was banned in Breton playgrounds, there is a century of catching up to do compared to other regions,” recalls Fabrice Quénéhervé from Finistère, president of the Brittany League, which will celebrate its 100th anniversary in July 2025. “We are working on it, even if there is still a lot of room for improvement. But RC Vannes is not the tree that hides the forest.”
In office since 2020, the elected official sets out his record: “in four years, and despite the health crisis, we have gained 46% of licensees, with a strong development of educational rugby, a recreational practice which is exploding, a school practice with enormous demand and a lot of actions. We finished last season with 13,609 licensees.”
Of course, we are far from the more than 75,000 players in the Occitanie League for 400 clubs (66 in Brittany), but the historical breeding ground has absolutely nothing to do with it. Lenaïg Corson can testify to this. A former emblematic figure of Stade Rennais, the ex-2nd row of the XV of France was already scouring the lawns of the women’s elite when the RCV, promoted to Pro D2 in 2016, was still hanging around in the anonymity of the amateur divisions.
“We got a lot of comments because we were Bretons, while rugby was supposed to only concern people from the South,” remembers the Paimpol native. “But we were proud to represent the west of France, Brittany, a region where we are very proud of our culture, our origins, what we do. Everywhere we played, we brought our flag.”
The RCV shines throughout the region
The gwenn ha du, capable of infiltrating any global event bringing together more than 100 people, naturally feels at home at the Stade de la Rabine. “The rise of the RCV is a strong symbol,” continues Lenaïg Corson, now a media consultant but also organizer of 100% women’s training courses, such as this summer in Perros-Guirec. It’s a big club that will “boost” all of Breton rugby. When I see the club’s enthusiasm and desire to build additional stands, it proves that there are spectators who come from all over the region.”
Including his beloved Côtes-d’Armor, the least populated and logically the least “rugby” of the four departments of administrative Brittany (because no, we did not want to address the thorny issue of the cultural identity of Loire-Atlantique in this article). “In terms of image, it’s great,” emphasizes Eric Dezé, president of Rugby Kreiz Treger (RKT), the club in the village of Vieux-Marché (1,300 inhabitants). With “a few hundred members” and a budget of barely 30,000 euros, it presents a flagship team in Regional 1, in the heart of a mission land acquired from En Avant Guingamp (L2).
“For the match against Toulouse, the RCV offered two tickets to each club in Brittany. And here, a few took out a season ticket. It’s the Top 14 effect.” However, a good two hours’ drive separates Vannes from this town near Lannion, where the RKT was founded in 1984, thanks to students from the Pommerit agricultural high school, under the guidance of a sports teacher named Philippe Corson, Lenaïg’s father.
“There is a certain stability in our workforce,” says Eric Dezé. “The difficulty in growing is finding volunteers to supervise the rugby school, the women’s team, the seniors. That’s really the crux of the matter because the structure relies on a small number of men and women.”
The lack of land, a real handicap to be filled
And then, with only one pitch to train and play on, it’s not easy to grow. “Today, there are more than 2,000 football pitches in Brittany and only 125 rugby pitches,” notes Fabrice Quénéhervé, the head of the regional rugby union. “The challenge of development lies in the infrastructure, the changing rooms, the pitches or the slots for use when the pitches exist but the ball that is not round is not necessarily welcome there.”
If the rise of the RCV in Top 14 will improve the attractiveness of the sport, the challenge of loyalty remains to be won, in the wake of a 2023 World Cup that has already brought back its flood of licensees. The French XV had however stopped at the quarter-finals, unlike its counterpart in the army, winner just before the military World Cup organized in Brittany, with a nice popular success to the key and a spectacular final against Fiji, naturally organized in Vannes.
“We worked in advance to avoid falling into the trap of the 2007 World Cup, after which there was a huge increase in the number of licensees, half of whom turned back the following year because we were overwhelmed, with insufficient supervision,” says the president.
Thanks to a now satisfactory regional offer, adult or young boys’ teams (this is not yet the case for girls) no longer need to endure long trips to Normandy or the Pays de la Loire, which have discouraged more than one apprentice rugby player. After the women’s selections, the region now irrigates the French youth teams, with for example the La Rochelle pillar Louis Penverne (21 years old, trained in Lorient and passed through Vannes) or the Vannes center Robin Taccola (19 years old).
RCV promised to descend? So what…
At the upper echelon, lovers of rugby made in Breizh hope not to wait 63 years to support one of their own in the big Blues after Nolann Le Garrec. The Racing 92 scrum-half born in Vannes (definitely…) became during the last Six Nations Tournament the distant heir of the Finistère second row Gérard Bouguyon (nine selections in 1961).
None of our interlocutors fear the effects of a possible express return of RCV to Pro D2, which observers and even other Top 14 coaches promise them, as shown by the traditional pre-season survey of Olympic MiddayThe seed of rugby is well and truly planted in Brittany, and it is not a sporting hazard that will compromise its growth.