Clermont visit Northampton on Friday evening in one of their most important matches in years. A decade ago the French club was one of the most dominant in Europe. They reached three Champions Cup finals – 2013, 2015 and 2017 – and though they lost them, they did win two Top 14 titles that decade to the delight of their fans, the famous and vast Yellow Army.
The Champions Cup last 16 clash against the Saints is a sign that Clermont might be on the early stage of the comeback trail. They failed to qualify for Europe’s showpiece tournament last season and in 2022-23 Clermont didn’t reach the knockout stage of the competition.
2023 was the year Clermont reached rock bottom. They finished tenth in the Top 14, missing out on the play-offs and the lucrative Champions Cup. Consequently, instead of receiving €756,000 from the EPCR, they had to make do with the €508,000 given to all Challenge Cup qualifiers. That was a lot of money for a club already in economic crisis.
Two of their marquee players, Damian Penaud and Arthur Iturria, were lured away by Bordeaux and Bayonne. It was a painful sign of how far Clermont had fallen.
Furthermore, two of their former star names, Sébastien Vahaamahina and Alexandre Lapandry, launched legal action against the club in 2023, alleging that Clermont had not fulfilled its responsibilities after they suffered concussion. Vahaamahina said he was “disappointed and hurt” by his treatment.
All this conveyed the impression of a club in crisis.
The decline was a long time in the making. It began in 2016 when the squad that had been assembled by first Vern Cotter and then the man who replaced him as head coach, Franck Azema, began to break up. That summer two of the lynchpins moved on as they hit their mid-30s – lock Jamie Cudmore and fly-half Brock James. More followed in 2017, including props Vincent Debaty and Thomas Domingo, flanker Julien Bardy and centre Benson Stanley. Other key components of the squad, the likes of Aurélien Rougerie, Benjamin Kayser, Wesley Fofana, Morgan Parra and Nick Abendanon were past their peak as the decade drew to a close.
Crucially, the men who were brought in to replace them weren’t of the same calibre. Clermont failed to qualify for the 2018-19 Champions Cup, but what really damaged the club was Covid.
In October 2020, the Clermont board began to warn that their economic survival was on the line, and by January 2021 the club was teetering on the brink of disaster.
The stade Marcel-Michelin holds 20,000, and in the glory years each home game was a sell-out. They had to be, to pay back the €5m in bank loans that the club had taken out to pay for their state-of-the-art training centre, which was opened in 2015.
But then came Covid. The Top 14 was abandoned on March 13 2020, a crippling blow to every club in the championship. The new season wasn’t much better; there were matches but the capacity was limited to first 5,000, then 1,000 and then games were played behind closed doors.
In October 2020, the Clermont board began to warn that their economic survival was on the line, and by January 2021 the club was teetering on the brink of disaster. “If we don’t get any fans back by the end of the season, we’ll have a €9m deficit on a budget of just over €26m,” explained Jean-Michel Guillon, the club’s president at the time. “How do we live then?”
Les Clermontois retrouvent la victoire en #TOP14 🔥 pic.twitter.com/0dRe8AYiXR
— TOP 14 Rugby (@top14rugby) March 31, 2025
They benefited from a ‘solidarity’ fund set up to help clubs, which amounted to around €2.5m, but nonetheless Clermont had to impose a 16.2% wage cut on all player contracts above 100,000 euros a year.
The situation prompted Clermont, in the words of Guillon, to “review our business model”.
The upshot of the review was announced in 2023, just as Clermont reached rock bottom. The Michelin Group, whose headquarters is in Clermont, became the 100% shareholder. Hitherto, the club was almost entirely owned by ASM Omnisports, partly financed by the Michelin Foundation.
Reconstructing the club off the field will count for little with the fans if Clermont remain a middle-ranking team on the field.
The agreement meant an injection of €11m into the club, which helped slash their deficit. The aim of the partnership, said Michelin, was to ensure the club’s long-term future. It added: “The shared ambition of the Michelin Group and ASM Clermont Auvergne is for the professional team to relaunch its sporting ambitions as quickly as possible, while promoting the brand and image of the Yellow and Blue.”
To achieve this aim, a new post was created, director general, and Benoît Vaz, was appointed to the role. A three-year plan was launched to have the club turning a profit by 2026, and at the heart of his strategy is the construction of the Clermont ‘Rugby City’, to coincide with the start of the 2026-27 season.
Costing €19m, the project will house Clermont’s youth, women’s, amateur and professional teams, as well as providing supporters with outlets to shop and dine. Vaz describes it as “the very essence of the club’s reconstruction strategy”.
Reconstructing the club off the field will count for little with the fans if Clermont remain a middle-ranking team on the field.
Last season they finished eighth in the Top 14, one point ahead of Pau, and thereby securing the last of France’s Champions Cup places. Clermont currently lie sixth but they are only five points ahead of Racing 92, who are 11th in the table. If Clermont don’t qualify for next season’s Champions Cup it will seriously undermine their reconstruction strategy.
In the short term, however, it is the visit to Northampton this Friday that is focusing minds. The English champions should be a source of inspiration for Clermont. Their Premiership title last season was their first major silverware for a decade. Like Clermont. Northampton hit hard times a few years ago, and it required the arrival of a new chief executive – Mark Darbon in 2017 – to kickstart their revival with a bold new vision.
The Saints are now back marching, and Clermont’s Yellow Army will be hoping that before long they will be a force to reckon with once more.
