Can they do it on a cold winter's day in Strasbourg?
Why Stade de la Meinau represents the present and future of football
The home supporters section at the RC Strasbourg-FC Metz match didn’t make a peep, and it reminded me of how my gym in Paris is as quiet as a library. The ultras didn’t even celebrate Diego Moreira’s 12th-minute opening goal. The French sure are reserved, I thought, again.
Then at the 15th minute, chants and flares and banners seemed to erupt from earth’s core, and they didn’t relent until the whistle that sealed Strasbourg’s 2-1 victory. The ultras were protesting, I realized, and the modern game could be viewed through their territory. If sports and politics were roads, then they’d intersect at Stade de la Meinau’s west stand.
I was unprepared for the game—I froze my ass off. Strasbourg was much colder than the capital, which had been experiencing, to my material delight and existential dismay, unseasonably warm and sunny weather. My French is also poor, it didn’t occur to me that, on a Sunday in January, nearly everything in Strasbourg would be closed, and my knowledge of Racing was limited to the drama surrounding Liam Rosenior’s departure to Chelsea. Is that Ben Chilwell, formerly of Leicester City and Chelsea, playing for Les Bleus et Blancs? Yep. Is that Valentin Barco, who, during his brief stint at Brighton, generated a ton of preseason hype and ruined my Fantasy Premier League team by getting transferred? Sure is.
At 29-years old, Chilwell is something of an aberration for Racing. Last year, when they were by far the youngest squad in Europe’s Big Five, the club beat eventual Champions League winners Paris Saint-Germain in one of their matchups, finished seventh in the Ligue 1 table, and qualified for the UEFA Conference League, which they now lead.
It was a remarkable turnaround from the 2010-11 season, when the club had gone bankrupt and was administratively relegated to the fifth (and amateur) tier of French football. A French ownership group, backed by local Alsatian business executives, quickly put the club on stable footing, and in five years Racing was back in the top flight. In 2019, they won the now-extinct Coupe de la Ligue.1 With a new stand and renovated facilities opening soon at Stade de la Meinau, last season should have marked the completion and served as the crowning achievement of Racing’s literal and figurative rebuild.
Except Todd Boehly exists.
The private equity billionaire took over Chelsea in 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Roman Abramovich to sell the club. The next year, Racing sought minority investors; recent relegation battles indicated to owners that they needed more resources to stay up in Ligue 1 and compete for European spots. They approached Boehly and his BlueCo consortium, who, in typical American fashion, didn’t listen to the locals. In June 2023, RC Strasbourg became Boehly’s.
Racing’s ultras protested immediately—as HITC Sevens noted, the 15-minute protest started in BlueCo’s first season as owners—and their worst fear came to fruition. The club morphed into Chelsea’s farm team, a place to stash and develop young players and coaches alike and to comply with fair spending rules. Rosenior’s ascension to Chelsea is latest example of that.
At one point during the game against FC Metz, the ultras hung banners that, in my rough translation, read: “Rather a modest Racing that stands on its own, than a rich Racing on its knees.” In an apparent rebuttal, the video board at Stade de la Meinau encouraged fans to support the team “from the first minute to the last.”
Clubs, managers, and players typically fawn over their supporter groups, so I was surprised by Racing’s audacity to push back, if only gently, on the in-game protests. In retrospect, it’s indicative of a rift in Alsace, one that the club is clearly trying to leverage.
Rosenior himself had called out the ultras, contending that the lack of atmosphere in the first 15 minutes of home games hurts the team’s performance. The BBC reported that casual Racing fans—for whom the message on the video board was obviously tailored—had booed the ultras lack of support amid one of the most successful and exciting eras in the club’s history. That’s due in part to BlueCo’s massive investment. Racing outspent PSG last summer, and coincidentally or not, Racing are favorites to win the Conference League. If they do that, then they earn automatic qualification to the Europa League. But that might be irrelevant. A strong finish in Ligue 1, where they currently sit seventh, could place them in the Champions League for the first time in decades.
As it relates to modern football and therefore all of sports (and therefore the economy writ large), it’s all there in Strasbourg: private equity and foreign investment, the consolidation of clubs, financial engineering, the commodification of talent, amenitizing facilities, and the segmenting of customers.
In reflecting on my time at Stade de la Meinau and in researching this piece, I find myself nostalgic for an era of independence and provinciality I never experienced for a club I know almost nothing about. At the same time, I recall the immortal words of Herm Edwards: You play to win the game. Alsatians will find out first which worldview endures.
Like England’s EFL/League/Carabao Cup, the Coupe de la Ligue was a cup competition exclusive to the professional ranks of French football. It was scraped in 2020.
You come to save me from the incessant drug and truck commercials that are today’s NFL. Thanks for curating a new world to us “soccer” fans.