Denis Le Saint is not usually one to get carried away. A gentle, understated man, he has built his reputation — in business and in football — upon quiet competence rather than showmanship. On this occasion, however, he let the moment sweep him along.
“It’s exceptional, extraordinary,” he said on French television, a twinkle in his eye. “It’s like we have climbed Mont Blanc.”
Le Saint was speaking in late August, just before this season’s Champions League draw in Monaco. He had never attended such an event before. It is safe to assume the idea had never figured in his wildest dreams when he became president of Stade Brestois 29 in May 2016.
At that point, Brest were in Ligue 2, French football’s second tier. They were back there as recently as 2019. Last season’s third-placed finish in Ligue 1 took them into European competition for the first time in their history. Le Saint has every reason to feel proud of that achievement.
That, though, isn’t even the half of it.
For one thing, Brest have gone on to subvert every expectation in the Champions League. They have won four of their seven matches, meaning a place in next month’s knockout play-off round is already secure. They are above Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City in the standings with one of the eight league-phase rounds remaining. Beat reigning European champions Madrid at home tonight and there is a chance Brest will finish in the top eight and progress directly to the round of 16.
Then there is the wider context.
Look only at the Le Saint era and you might be tempted to assume Brest were sleeping giants, just waiting to be shaken back into life.
The reality is far more interesting.
Brest only played top-flight football for the first time in 1979. In 1991, the club almost disappeared entirely, brought to its knees by financial mismanagement and liquidated to pay creditors. For 13 years, they operated outside France’s professional leagues, bottoming out between 1997 and 2000, when they dropped into regional amateur competition.
Real Madrid won two Champions Leagues during those years. Brest were playing Plabennec, Avranches, Fecamp — essentially village teams — and Caen’s reserves.
To go from there to where they are now is not just a fairytale. It is something like a miracle.
Given that starting point, it is entirely logical that Brest would not look much like a Champions League club in 2024-25. Still, as Madrid arrive in their home region of Brittany, in the far north-west of France, it is worth reiterating just how big the divide between them is — and the extent to which Brest are punching above their weight.
Madrid have just been named the richest football club in the world, with revenues topping €1billion (£840m, $1.04bn) in 2023-24. Brest’s annual budget is believed to be around €50m — the fourth smallest in 18-team Ligue 1.
Madrid have just renovated their 78,000-seat Bernabeu stadium, at a cost of €1.17billion before interest. Brest have been planning a new ground for years but still reside at the 15,000-seater Stade Francis-Le Ble — “a stadium at the end of its life,” in the words of the city’s mayor. As the ground does not meet UEFA regulations, Brest’s Champions League home games are being played in Guingamp, a town an hour’s drive to the east.
Transfermarkt puts the total value of the Brest squad at €120million. The same website estimates Madrid’s is worth over 10 times that.
Brest’s players have 82 international caps between them — fewer than Madrid’s Luka Modric alone. Or David Alaba. Or Thibaut Courtois. Or Kylian Mbappe.
BrestComparisonReal MadridSeasons in the European Cup/Champions League
Madrid’s main shirt sponsor is a Middle Eastern airline. Brest’s is a local yoghurt producer.
You get the picture.
On paper, tonight should be a walkover. Brest, though, have bloodied the noses of bigger clubs — drawing with German champions Bayer Leverkusen, beating Dutch title holders PSV — in this competition. They will not simply roll over for their illustrious visitors.
“The team carries the image of the indomitable Breton, the little guy who beats the big guy, like in (comic book) Asterix,” says Adrian Prigent, who covers the club for local newspaper Le Telegramme. “The whole of France has taken a shine to them. They have shown you can still win without money.”
It is not hard to understand why Le Saint — who runs a successful vegetable distribution business with his brother — is a beloved figure.
Brest’s wilderness years were in the rear-view mirror by the time he took over, but they were still yo-yoing between Ligue 1 and Ligue 2. In that position, many football club owners try to establish a foothold by investing heavily in players. Le Saint, though, saw things differently.
“His main desire wasn’t to bring in big stars, but to improve the day-to-day life and comfort of the players here,” Bruno Grougi, who played for Brest between 2009 and 2018, recently told So Foot magazine.
Brest always used to train on a muddy pitch near the stadium; Le Saint found them a new facility in Guipavas, just outside the city, where they now have top-quality hybrid pitches. The same surface was installed at the Francis-Le Ble. There may still be a homespun charm to the operation — fans are allowed to watch training and press conferences take place in a prefabricated building — but things are more professional where it matters.
“Le Saint and his brother know how to run a business on a budget,” says Prigent. “They also know how to surround themselves with competent people. Everyone has their role, everyone has their place.”
This is also a story of belonging. The Le Saints were born in the port city of Brest. Brendan Chardonnet, the long-serving club captain, was raised in Saint-Renan, a few minutes inland. Those from outside the region tend to be won over, too — by the club, by their city and by Brittany, a nuggety little Celtic enclave whose culture has more in common with that of Cornwall than places such as Carcassonne and Cannes elsewhere in France.
“The club definitely has a unique identity,” Steeve Elana, who made 246 appearances for Brest between 2005 and 2012, tells The Athletic. “It’s partly a geographical thing: when you’re in Brest, you’re miles away from everything.
“Then, when you start to look more carefully at the history of the city, you realise it was completely destroyed during the war and has gone through this process of reconstruction. It’s the same story with the club. It has suffered a lot over the years. It has had to build itself back up, year after year, from a very low point.”
Many of those who played a part in that recovery remain emotionally invested. “A lot of my former Brest team-mates are still there, working behind the scenes,” says Elana. “That’s another big plus: the people making decisions have history at the club.”
A case in point is Grougi, who is now Brest’s first-team coach. He told So Foot that he sees the club’s small-town outlook — passed down through the generations — as its greatest strength.
“In terms of mentality, nothing has changed,” he said. “We know we’re not the best, but we don’t envy anyone. We do our job, do it as well as we can. We’re going to fight with our strengths, with our values. We make sure we defend the badge with pride.
“We do all the things you can’t do at big clubs. We’ve stayed on a human scale.”
All of those factors set the scene for what has happened in the past 18 months, but they don’t quite explain it. Maybe nothing does. But if there was one single moment of ignition, it was the appointment of Eric Roy as manager in January 2023.
To call Roy a left-field pick would be to undersell it.
His coaching CV included just one previous job in senior management: an 18-month spell at hometown club Nice, which ended in 2011. Roy, a former journeyman midfielder, then worked as a television pundit for 12 years, pausing only for brief stints as sporting director at Lens and English club Watford.
When the call came from Brest, teetering above the Ligue 1 relegation zone and increasingly desperate for a saviour, Roy could barely credit it. “The adventure with Brest happened at a moment when I did not believe it could happen any more,” he recently told UK newspaper The Guardian.
The now 57-year-old led Brest to safety. Then, last season, to third in Ligue 1, the highest finish in their history. They are eighth this season — not much of a drop-off considering they are juggling domestic duties with European fixtures.
Roy has won plaudits for the tweaks he made to Brest’s system. Their busy, high-pressing game scares the life out of even the best teams in France, and his reinvention of rangy midfielder Pierre Lees-Melou as a deep-lying playmaker last season was a masterstroke. This has not really been a tactical revolution, however. Far more critical has been Roy’s ability to connect with players and fans, to engender feelings of pride and unity.
“When Eric arrived, he made the players understand that we will only succeed as a collective,” said Grougi. Prigent, the journalist, says Roy has brought “a bit of soul” to the club.
In the first instance, Roy is an advocate for hard graft and intensity. He wants his players to compete, to snap into every tackle. “We’re a bit of a mob out on the pitch, a bit crazy,” veteran midfielder Jonas Martin told French newspaper L’Equipe in November. “You should see us in training; there’s a lot of grumbling and moaning because we’re all so competitive and hate to lose. The coach often calls us pirates and we live up to that name on the pitch.”
Yet that approach is tempered with a sense of gratitude and — yes — joy. Another manager, for instance, might have projected stony-faced gravity at the prospect of playing in the Champions League. Roy expressed his excitement and encouraged Brest’s fans to make the most of every second. “We’d be stupid not to try to enjoy it,” he told newspaper Ouest-France.
Beyond that, there is a sense of identification. Roy may be a Southerner but the fans believe he understands what it means to be Brestois.
“I share the same values as them,” he told The Guardian. “I’m attuned with their idea of football. People here savour the present. They know it might not last.”
Even this season, Brest have overcome hurdles.
Several key players, including Lilian Brassier and Steve Mounie, departed in the summer. Another, left-back Bradley Locko, ruptured an Achilles tendon the day before their opening match. Signing Champions League-level replacements proved far more difficult than expected. “We wanted to, but it was a financial impossibility,” sporting director Gregory Lorenzi told L’Equipe.
There were arrivals on deadline day at the end of August, but this is still very much a mish-mash squad. A handful of the side’s regular starters are loanees. Only five Brest players had experienced Champions League football before the game against Sturm Graz in September. If some of the names on the team sheet — Lees-Melou, Edimilson Fernandes, Massadio Haidara — are familiar to anglophone football fans, it is only because they had underwhelming spells in the Premier League earlier in their careers.
Having to decamp to Guingamp’s Stade de Roudourou — itself a fairly modest venue holding just under 20,000 — for every Champions League home match has been a logistical challenge and a wrench for supporters. Indeed, feelings threatened to bubble over this month when it was mooted that Paris (more than 300 miles/350km away) could play host to Brest in the knockout phase — a solution that would have filled the club’s coffers but completely contradicted its values. In the end, after protests, those plans were shelved.
Through it all, Roy has been serene. And the players, novices as most of them may be at this level, have grown in confidence with each positive result. Case in point: Chardonnet, the captain, speaking on French television after a 2-1 win at Sparta Prague took Brest second in the Champions League standings in early November. “We deserve to be here and we’re giving it everything,” Chardonnet said.
They have fallen off a touch since, dropping to 13th following an uncharacteristically meek 2-0 away defeat against Shakhtar Donetsk last week. All told, though, there is a great deal to be proud of. A lot to look forward to, as well — tonight and beyond.
“The fans have been living a daydream,” says Prigent. “It has been a unique adventure, an anomaly.”
Elana, the former Brest stalwart, is even more emphatic.
“I never could have imagined this,” he says. “It has been an extraordinary season and playing against Real Madrid is a kind of consecration. I hope the players see it like that, too. They deserve to still be in the competition and deserve to enjoy this match.
“I’m also happy for the fans who have stuck with the club through the difficult years, happy that they get to experience a match like this. I hope everyone enjoys every moment.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
