When Brest played Real Madrid last month, one school in the port city in France’s far north-west replaced its breaktime bell with the Uefa Champions League anthem, signalling local pride at the underdog team’s game against the competition holders.
Brest lost the encounter but had already qualified from the tournament’s league stage, marking a remarkable rise for a club that was in the third tier of French football as recently as 2004.
While many clubs’ ascent to European competition has been driven by deep-pocketed owners, Brest’s uptick in fortunes has relied on canny use of its small budget and a focus on experienced players.
“It has been thrilling,” said Corinne Le Madec, owner of Le Penalty, a tobacconists and bar across the street from its stadium, which holds just over 15,000. “When they qualified for the Champions League, the fans asked us to open and it was absolutely magical.”
Its old-school model of local owners and prudent transfers is the antithesis of cash-rich clubs such as Paris Saint-Germain. To stay in Europe’s elite club competition, “the Pirates” face a tough second-leg match at PSG next week. The team lost the first-leg to its French rivals 3-0.
The tie highlights the stark disparities between the tournament’s biggest and smallest teams. Over the past decade, Qatar-owned PSG has spent close to €2bn on transfers, according to Transfermarkt — 40 times more than the Britanny club. Brest reported revenue of €51mn for 2022-23, a fraction of the €807mn earned by its Parisian rival over the same season.
When Brest qualified for the Champions League alongside PSG, Monaco and Lille, some commentators forecast the team would fare so badly that France — whose top division is not as competitive as those in England, Germany, Italy and Spain — would lose one of its four spots in the competition.
Instead, the red-and-white team performed admirably in the league stage, winning four games to secure a second round play-off. Even if it fails to progress, a €51mn payday from Uefa for participation in this season’s tournament will help Brest continue to improve.
Denis Le Saint, owner and president, said the Champions League funds “give us firepower that we can reinvest [in the team] this year, the next year and maybe even the year after that”.
Stade Brestois 29, the club’s full name, has a loyal fan base in the rainy industrial port with working-class roots. Yet the team’s success has struck a chord beyond Brittany at a time when French clubs are grappling with the fallout of a botched TV rights auction that has threatened the game’s financial stability, and a controversial investment deal with private equity firm CVC Capital Partners
“We don’t have pension funds [or] financial powers backing us so we stick by the core principle of not spending money we don’t have,” Le Saint told the Financial Times.
With his brother, Le Saint runs the eponymous food distribution company founded by his parents in 1958. Le Saint group has grown from a local enterprise to become one of France’s leading fresh food distributors.
With a relatively modest budget of €48mn, Brest often waits until the end of transfer windows to recruit players who have not secured deals elsewhere, such as former Lyon winger Mama Baldé.
“[Brest] has to be clever and find luck with players who are good but not yet discovered or players who are already very experienced and want a fresh start,” manager Éric Roy told the FT. “It’s not easy because in this world money is often the decisive factor.”
Brest has one of the oldest squads in France’s Ligue 1, according to Transfermarkt, based on all players used this season. It includes former Lille midfielder Jonas Martin, 34, and Pierre Lees-Melou — 31, and a former amateur player.
“They have this ability to scout amateur talent and find beauty in what is thriving around them rather than asserting that they’re the richest and can buy the best player in the world,” said Antoine Racki, a Dijon fan who travelled to Brest for a recent game.
Roy, 57, was appointed in 2023 after more than a decade out of work. Le Saint admires his “ability to reassure” a squad that does not rely on individual superstars.
As Roy settled in the Atlantic coastal city known for its grey concrete buildings, he was reminded of Sunderland, the industrial city in north-east England where he played as a midfielder.
“In Brest, people are marked by their club for life and that doesn’t change even if their club is in the third division . . . It’s a more similar tradition to England,” said Roy. “In France, the clubs that bring supporters together are usually the winning clubs.”
Far from dreaming of European glory, Roy’s initial objective was to pull the club out of Ligue 1’s relegation zone.
“[The Champions League] was not something that was imaginable,” said Roy. When the team did qualify last season, its performance was boosted by an expansion of the European tournament to 36 teams and a tweak of its first phase to a single-league format involving eight games.
Playing on Europe’s biggest stage brought financial challenges, said Le Saint. Its four home games cost €2mn alone, as Brest, whose ageing stadium did not meet Uefa standards, had to play matches 100km away in Guingamp. It paid to renovate the host club’s stadium and split ticket revenues.
Not playing at home also damped euphoria in the city, which has a population of 140,000. Shops, bars and restaurants missed out on potential windfalls. While Le Madec’s bar screened every game, she said it was “unfortunate” not to receive a bigger boost from the European experience.
Brest’s stadium is squeezed between a high school and residential flats and cannot easily be expanded. But Brest-headquartered mutual bank Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, a bank with agricultural roots in the region, is co-funding a new 15,000-seat stadium just outside the city that will be fit to host European games.
“It’s an opportunity for us to shine in our city and beyond,” said Arkéa chair Julien Carmona.
While a second-leg comeback against PSG is unlikely, Brest feels it has met its objective of proving the sceptics wrong.
“We just want to show that we are capable of existing in the Champions League,” said Roy.
Additional reporting by Josh Noble in London
