“It’s a long time since we heard a French Prime Minister talk about Rugby League,” commented a Toulouse newspaper colleague after last Tuesday’s press conference announcing France as host of the 2025 World Cup.
This was by any standards an exceptional event, covered in the print media the world over, with Jean Castex taking fully 24 minutes to declare France the venue for the competition for the first time in over half a century.
The enthusiasm in the Prime Minister’s voice was almost palpable as he declared his nation’s “unreserved support” for a project that fits with a policy of welcoming and promoting great international competitions in France, three of them coming in quick order, with the Rugby Union World Cup, the Paris Olympics and now the Rugby League World Cup.
He has a personal interest. A native of the very rural department of the Gers, whose only town of any size is the 22,000-population capital, Auch – home of the late Jacques Fouroux – Castex explained that it would have been unusual if he hadn’t been interested in rugby. As mayor of Prades, 25 miles from Perpignan, for more than a decade, as well as a departmental and regional councillor, he is well aware that rugby of both codes goes with the territory.
As he said, “It’s not just a matter of my own personal taste, but a French passion.”
And nowhere does that passion run deeper, as he will have discovered for himself, than at the Catalan Dragons’ Stade Gilbert Brutus or at Stade Aimé Giral, stamping-ground of rugby union’s USAP, whose interim Chairman at one point was of course Luc Lacoste.
Castex had clearly been well briefed, even referring to the not widely-known fact that the fledgling French Ligue de Rugby à XIII had called for a world championship in 1934, the year of the game’s implantation in France.
Equally surprising was his mention of the fact that Rugby League “had managed to survive the fateful Vichy regime.” It is rare indeed that a high-ranking French politician should speak publicly of the iniquitous ban. The honourable exception was the minister who commissioned the 2002 report into Vichy’s policy on sport, Marie-George Buffet, formerly leader of the French Communist party.
In the present era, thankfully, the two codes of rugby can co-exist without constant warring. The fact that the French Rugby League’s candidacy for the World Cup was supported by a letter from Bernard Laporte, the former France XV head coach and president of the French Rugby Union Federation since 2016, speaks volumes. As does Luc Lacoste’s switch of codes from union to league – a far cry from the acrimony surrounding Fouroux’s “defection” in 1994.
The Prime Minister also pressed the FFRXIII representatives assembled at Matignon last Tuesday morning, saying, “When you play at home, you have to win. That is the aim I assign to you.”
But it’s not just on the field of play that results will matter. No mistake, this is a massive undertaking for a small federation.
Assistance will likely come from the RFL, who helped put the candidacy dossier together, from central and local government departments, and perhaps from French rugby union, who will have trodden the same path two years earlier.
But a huge amount of work will fall on the shoulders of treizistes who work for nothing. To raise the 59 million-euro funding is one thing. To stage a 128-match competition across four disciplines (men’s, women’s, junior and wheelchair) at as many as 40 venues the length and breadth of France, some of which might have no Rugby League infrastructure, is another.
Luc Lacoste has always asserted the value of ambition. In terms of scale, this will be French Rugby League’s most ambitious undertaking of recent times.
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