Cyrille de La Morinerie / Photo credit: SEBASTIEN BOZON / AFP
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7:41 a.m., July 13, 2023
The Football Club Sochaux, created almost a century ago, has just been demoted to the third division. A decision taken by the National Management Control Department, the financial policeman of French football. In question, its abysmal debt, the club could even file for bankruptcy.
For eight years and the withdrawal of Peugeot, it has been a slow agony for the Sochaux football club. After the prosperous years, victories in the Coupe de France and the Coupe de la Ligue in the 2000s, the lion cubs fell into the anonymity of Ligue 2. Several owners succeeded one another and, the current one, a Chinese billionaire, refuses to meet the debts estimated at more than 11 million euros.
“We must remain combative”
The president of the Planète Sochaux supporters club is disappointed. “We are tens of thousands of supporters crying and angry, but we must also remain combative. We cannot abandon our club”. Fans fear the worst. Without fresh money, the Sochaux club administratively relegated to the third division could file for bankruptcy, which would result in the closure of the very famous Sochaux training center attended in particular by Benoit Pedretti or Marcus Thuram.
“The training center is our DNA, without the training center, Sochaux would not exist. We are still in the best training centers in France. If Thuram and his son are trained at the Sochaux training center, it is good that there is a reason”, declared Jean-Claude Plessis, emblematic former president of the club. The latter has received hundreds of calls from supporters asking him to find a solution and he has already found local entrepreneurs ready to invest to save Sochaux from disaster.