While international rugby league risks vanishing from French television screens, two determined organisers in Lézignan have shown what can be achieved through sheer persistence.

ALL my father required to watch a Rugby League World Cup on the ORTF – the only television channel France had – was a television set. Today, to watch it in a so-called pluralist media environment, I need a credit card, all the necessary equipment, and a stack of subscriptions. The game has not disappeared. It has simply been priced out of reach.

It almost disappeared from French screens altogether this year, with only a last-minute deal ensuring it could be watched, like in many other countries, through the Premier Sports Player.

Decades ago, French rugby league was visible. Not mainstream, not dominant, but present. When the national team played, there was at least a ripple in the sporting press. Today, that voice has gone. And the cruelty of it is that the sport has never stopped trying. It tries harder than ever. The silence is not the result of apathy. It is the result of indifference to a sport that refuses to lie down.

On 11th and 12th September, a tournament took place at the Stade du Moulin in Lézignan-Corbières that illustrated this paradox with painful clarity. Cyril Cabrol and Ludovic Maunier had spent a year building it – not their first attempt, having previously created the Lézignan Nines. They knew what it took. And yet the road had been unforgiving. Albania withdrew over budgetary constraints. The Czech Republic never answered. Poland stayed silent at first – but may yet find its way back: the national side is now in talks to face the France Police Municipale squad in a friendly fixture. For weeks, the list shifted, carried by email threads and Facebook posts – the only channels through which information travels in this corner of the rugby league world.

United Protectors, the second French law-enforcement side, tell the last chapter of that story differently. They travelled to Lézignan – they were there, on the ground – but arrived barely eight strong, undone by injuries and the hierarchical authorisations that never came. And the organisers, for safety reasons, declined to let them play. Consider that decision for a moment: two men running what the outside world would call a minor tournament, drawing the line a federation would have drawn. Nothing about that weekend was casual.

Five sides took to the pitch: the France Police Municipale Rugby League side this column introduced last year; a selection from the Aude drawn from US Ferrals and Villeneuve Minervois; Scotland, with their student team – and not a single English side, a regret worth recording; a Portugal team that is not a resurrection but a restart, built not on imported heritage players but on local lads, the diaspora in France and England, and one South African of Portuguese descent; and an Exiles team constituted in barely a month after Albania’s withdrawal – predominantly English, alongside Frenchmen from Pamiers, Tonneins and Saint-Gaudens, a Serb, an Italian, and New Caledonians — playing, as it happened, in kit borrowed from Tonneins. When their anthem was played before the final, they had chosen “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” There could not have been a more fitting song for a team united by nothing except being away from home and wanting to play.

Someone from within our own Treiziste community will probably explain, with knowing authority, that the best players were not on the pitch. Consider, then, Bastien Scimone. A prop who came through the Catalans Dragons system, earned a call-up to the France squad in 2023, and helped Pia win the French championship last season. Since the start of the summer, he has been a municipal police officer in Pollestres. He was at Lézignan, playing for France PM. That is not nostalgia. That is fact. The reflex to dismiss such tournaments rarely survives contact with the team sheet.

The format was that of a competition, not a festival: pools of three on day one, matches played in two twenty-minute halves, then finals at full length. In the triangular contest that closed the weekend, the Aude beat Portugal 8–4, then edged France PM 6–4 — a single conversion between them – while France PM beat Portugal 24–0. The Grand Final pitted the Exiles against Scotland Students, and ended 40–4. The young Scots, praised by the speaker for their youth and rightly applauded at the final whistle, resisted for a long while through speed and enthusiasm before yielding to the power and experience of a more seasoned side. George Lauer, a former FCL junior, was named man of the match.

Around two hundred spectators watched in punishing heat, drifting to the rear of the ground where a sliver of shade survived, the Maïque stand still wrapped in scaffolding. Anthems were played before every match. An “ecocup” appeal went out on Facebook, like a picnic between friends. A bodega-guinguette closed the evening. TO XIII provided the balls; the federation, the post-match kit. Two organisers, a year of work, a municipality lending its premises, players paying for their own petrol. This is what the true international development of rugby league looks like: not the press releases, not the sponsorship dossiers, even if in this case they were numerous, but the work woven backstage.

I spoke with Cyril Cabrol during the day. He will not organise a tournament like this again, he told me. Too much organisation, for two men. The following Monday, his local daily revealed that a nines edition was being considered for 2027. Whether the flame survives in lighter form, nobody yet knows. But that sentence — too much organisation, for two men — should worry us more than any scoreline. The paradox closes on itself: the more we build, the quieter it gets. And the builders burn out.

Because the silence, this time, was near-total. On the Friday, L’Indépendant — the regional daily that follows every twist of Super XIII in the Aude — carried no preview of an international tournament on its own doorstep. Nothing on Saturday, nothing on Sunday. Only on Monday evening, three days after the first kick-off, did an article appear online — penned by a local correspondent, and framed, tellingly, around the Amicale de la Police municipale: to the regional press, this international tournament was, first and foremost, the policemen’s event. Better late and skewed than never, one might say. Meanwhile, in England, League Express printed the full results in its Monday edition, down to the composition of the Aude selection – sent, as it happens, by this columnist. If the tournament was not worth covering, why did editors across the Channel judge that their readers would care? The event was never the problem. The prism was.

While the major institutions engage in endless hyped talks about multi-million-dollar takeover bids and the consolidation of power – none of which ever reaches the ground – two men in the Aude spent twelve months building something real, only to conclude, exhausted, that they will not do it twice. The idealised economic standards the Chicago School would happily endorse govern the talk; the borrowed Tonneins kit governs the game.

With the upcoming World Cups, increasingly tailored to the Oceanian market and possibly invisible even on French pay-TV, French Treizistes finally have confirmation of what was long only an educated guess. The international stage is no longer a place the French are invited to; it is a space they must build for themselves. And so, in Lézignan, Cyril Cabrol and Ludovic Maunier spent a year doing precisely that. Not with billions, not with television contracts, but with persistence and a borrowed hall. Whether someone will pick up the baton in 2027, nobody knows. The silence from Paris will continue. But last Saturday, in 30-degree heat before two hundred people, the game spoke for itself.

Treiziste Diary is an opinion column written in a personal capacity and is © Pierre Carcau

First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 525 (October 2026)