The underdogs had held out for as long as possible but now, surely, it was over.
Second-tier Dunkerque had somehow succeeded in weathering an almighty storm at Lille, but with five minutes of the match remaining, Andre Gomes had popped up to give the Ligue 1 side a 1-0 lead.
The goal had been coming. This was the same Lille team who had beaten Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid and thrashed Feyenoord 6-1 en route to securing direct qualification for the Champions League last 16. Head coach Bruno Genesio had picked practically a full-strength team, spearheaded by prolific Canadian striker Jonathan David. They had hit the crossbar, twice, they had hit the post, twice, Thomas Meunier had seen a shot cleared off the line and David had squandered no fewer than three one-on-ones. But now, at last, the breakthrough had arrived and the Coupe de France quarter-finals were in sight.
Until, all of a sudden, they weren’t.
The final seconds of the announced five minutes of stoppage time had just elapsed at Stade Pierre-Mauroy when Dunkerque’s Brazilian left-back Abner swung a cross into the Lille box and substitute Kay Tejan rose to steer a header into the net. It was the visitors’ first attempt on target.
Lille re-asserted their heavyweight status by racing into a 3-0 lead in the penalty shootout. But then centre-back Alexsandro ballooned his penalty into the stands, Hakon Haraldsson’s spot-kick was saved and skipper Benjamin Andre hit the bar. The next instant it was 4-4 and sudden death, and up stepped Dunkerque’s 19-year-old reserve goalkeeper, Ewen Jaouen, who had saved with his legs from Haraldsson moments earlier, to thump a nerveless penalty past Vito Mannone and complete the most improbable of turnarounds. Dunkerque were through, Lille were out and the magic of the Coupe de France had struck once again.
Second-tier Dunkerque defied the odds to beat Lille on penalties (Francois Le Presti/Getty Images)
“It was madness,” says Dunkerque goalkeeping coach Christophe Lollichon. “A lot of emotion comes out. Because you’re ‘only’ Dunkerque, you’re playing against one of the biggest clubs in France, at their place, and what happens would have been impossible to script. You fall behind, you equalise in the 96th minute, you go 3-0 down in the penalty shootout and you end up winning. It was magnificent.”
Dunkerque, it should be said, are not your average cup underdogs. Backed by funds from Turkish investment group Amissos and with former West Ham United, Newcastle United and Chelsea striker Demba Ba piloting things as sporting director, Les Maritimes (The Seasiders) current sit in third place in Ligue 2 and are pushing for promotion to the top tier for the first time in their history. Hopes are high that Dunkerque will soon be duking it out with top-level opponents on a more regular basis. In the meantime, the cup is serving to whet local appetites.
Jaouen, who is on loan at Dunkerque from Reims, came close to leaving the club in January after losing his place in the starting XI, but his heroics against Lille have made him the toast of the town. With the kind of serendipity that only cup competitions provide, his reward is a quarter-final tie away to Brest, which is the club he grew up supporting. Lollichon, who previously spent 15 years on the staff at Chelsea, anticipates a “special day” for his protege.
Football fairy dust has already been sprinkled in Brittany this season thanks to Brest’s exploits in the Champions League and although Les Pirates’ continental adventure has now come to an end, the western peninsula is well represented in the Coupe de France. Second-tier Guingamp, whose Stade du Roudourou hosted Brest’s Champions League home games, also remain in contention and travel south to face fourth-division Cannes on Tuesday. But the Breton club making the biggest noise in this season’s competition are fourth-tier Stade Briochin from the little coastal town of Saint-Brieuc.
The minnows claimed a first top-flight scalp in December by bundling Ligue 1 strugglers Le Havre out of the competition and after seeing off second-tier Annecy on penalties, they pulled off an extraordinary comeback victory over Nice in the round of 16.
Nice, who are vying for Champions League qualification in Ligue 1, completely dominated proceedings at Stade Briochin’s poky 10,600-capacity Stade Fred Aubert and went ahead early in the second half. But the home side hung on and miraculously turned the tie on its head in the closing stages courtesy of an improbable brace of goals (88’, 90+7’) from centre-back Hugo Boudin. Cue pandemonium, a joyous pitch invasion and a stadium announcer who almost screamed himself hoarse.
Fourth-tier Stade Briochin — and their mascot — celebrate beating Nice (Fred Tanneau/Getty Images)
Just as the town was getting its breath back, the quarter-final draw landed.
Stade Briochin v Paris Saint-Germain.
“We’ve been in a washing machine for the last three weeks — it turns and turns and it never stops!” Stade Briochin’s general manager Coralie Labbe tells The Athletic. “There was the victory against Nice, which was crazy, brilliant. And then we get PSG in the draw, which is the same but 1,000 times over. The media interest, the interview requests, the demand for tickets — it’s all going off in every direction.
“The gap between the clubs is colossal. It’s not just that we’re a National 2 club and they’re in Ligue 1 — they’re one of the best teams in the world at the moment. We’re not even in the same galaxy. It’s insane.”
Mismatches scarcely come more sizeable. PSG have a global reputation, are the most decorated club in France, have an annual budget of €800million (£662.9m; $838.2m) and employ 746 full-time staff. Stade Briochin have 10 full-time employees, a budget of €1.3m and count as their finest achievement the three seasons they spent in the French second tier in the mid-1990s.
The game has been switched to Rennes’ 29,778-capacity Roazhon Park in order to allow Stade Briochin to capitalise on the occasion. Although PSG coach Luis Enrique is expected to field a weakened line-up, the prospect of seeing their players going toe-to-toe with the likes of Ousmane Dembele, Bradley Barcola, Marquinhos and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia has sent the town of Saint-Brieuc into a state of fervent anticipation.
“It’s a medium-sized seaside town, with a population of 42,000 people. And not much happens here!” laughs Labbe. “I’m so happy for the players, who are going to experience an insane match. For us (on the staff), it’s going to be crazy — it’s already crazy — but you only get to experience something like this once in your life.”
Along with fellow National 2 outfit Cannes, Stade Briochin are this season’s petit poucet or ‘little thumb’, which is the name given to the lowest-ranked side left in the competition (it was fifth-tier Bourgoin-Jallieu, before they fell to Reims in the last 16 after sensationally eliminating Lyon on penalties in the previous round). The expression comes from a 17th-century French fairytale of the same name (known as Hop-o’-My-Thumb in English), in which an ingenious little boy spares the lives of his six brothers by tricking an ogre into slaying his own daughters while they sleep.
For all that the tournament has tended to be dominated by major clubs such as 15-time winners PSG and 10-time winners Marseille, it is the competition’s petits poucets that are the custodians of its romance. Algerian amateur side El Biar created one of the first major shocks of the post-war era in February 1957 by eliminating the mighty Reims, who had lost to Real Madrid in the inaugural European Cup final only eight months previously.
Fifth-tier Bourgoin-Jallieu celebrate being Lyon earlier this season (Jeff Pachoud/Getty Images)
US Quevilly, from the western suburbs of Rouen, have a longstanding tradition of giant-killing, having finished as runners-up in 1927 and 2012, and reached the semi-finals in 2010. Marseille were one of Quevilly’s victims in 2012 and have proven particularly susceptible to elimination by lowly opposition in the 21st century, with Carquefou (2008), Andrezieux (2019) and Canet Roussillon (2021) among the other minnows to have claimed their prized scalp.
Knockout competitions always throw up surprises, but in the Coupe de France, upsets are deliberately baked into the format. Since 1989, when two-legged ties were abandoned, clubs drawn to face opposition at least two levels higher in the French football pyramid have systematically been given home advantage in order to maximise the chances of surprise results. Initially, matches that were level after extra time went to penalties, but the extra period was scrapped in 2020, meaning that amateur clubs now need only hold out for 90 minutes in order to get a shot at a shootout.
With Ligue 1 teams entering the competition in the middle of winter, invariably still willing life back into their limbs after the mid-season break, and often drawn to play away from home on heavy pitches against battle-hardened amateur sides that have already had to grind through multiple rounds, it is no surprise that upsets abound.
“It’s almost easier to play a professional club who’ve only just entered the competition than an amateur club who’ve already played six or seven matches and have created some momentum,” says Stephane Masala, who led third-tier Les Herbiers to the final in 2018. “A team like that is more dangerous and harder to beat. That’s why you get so many surprises.”
Les Herbiers, from the western Vendee region, are the last team from below France’s top two divisions to have reached the final, having eliminated second-tier Auxerre and Lens en route to the ultimate glamour tie at the Stade de France against the PSG of Kylian Mbappe, Edinson Cavani and Angel Di Maria. The David and Goliath encounter, which finished with a 2-0 victory for PSG, remains the most-watched final in the tournament’s history, having attracted a TV audience of nearly 6.4m people.
“I wanted us to spend pretty much the entire first half in our own half and then, if there was still only one goal in it, we’d go for it,” Masala recalls. “In the 60th minute, we were 1-0 down and I sent on my two forwards. But when I took off my No 6, Valentin Vanbaleghem, Paris cut right through the middle and scored the second goal.
“We’d come close to writing the story we’d wanted to write though. We didn’t lose 7-0. And it introduced Les Herbiers to the whole of France.”
The competition’s ultimate underdog story belongs to Calais and the team of talented and spirited fourth-tier part-timers who enchanted the whole of France by battling their way to the final in 2000.
Calais’ class of 2000 return home heroes after their semi-final win (Antoine Serra/Getty Images)
The club from the Channel port city were beset by serious financial problems, but after felling second-tier Lille and Cannes and top-flight Strasbourg, they found themselves facing off against reigning French champions Bordeaux in a sold-out semi-final at Lens’ Stade Felix-Bollaert. Following 90 goalless minutes, midfielder Cedric Jandau gave Calais a shock 99th-minute lead by sweeping a glorious first-time effort into Ulrich Rame’s top-right corner. Although Bordeaux promptly equalised through France international Lilian Laslandes, the underdogs scored twice in the closing stages of extra time to complete a historic 3-1 victory.
“The return to Calais was incredible,” Calais captain Reginald Becque tells The Athletic. “We’d played at nine o’clock and it had gone to extra time, so we didn’t get back until two or three o’clock in the morning. We arrived in Calais and it was like the Champs-Elysees. The streets were so rammed with people that the bus could barely move. We’d already picked up on it, but that was when we really saw our popularity and felt the joy and the pleasure that we’d given to people. It was phenomenal. Incredible.”
The three weeks leading up to the final against Nantes brought a whirlwind of publicity — game show invitations, multiple TV interviews, a feature in upmarket lifestyle magazine Paris Match — and local shops decked themselves out in the club’s red and yellow colours. Becque remembers “a kind of euphoria in the town”. The players prepared for the game at Clairefontaine, French football’s national headquarters, and received a stirring address from former France coach Aime Jacquet, who had plotted Les Bleus’ triumph at the 1998 World Cup between the same walls less than two years previously.
In the final at the Stade de France, Calais took a first-half lead thanks to a scrappy effort from Jerome Dutitre, only for a second-half double by Antoine Sibierski — the second coming via a hotly disputed 90th-minute penalty — to deny Ladislas Lozano’s men the ultimate Hollywood ending. “We were disappointed, but what was important was that we’d given a good account of ourselves and we’d risen to the occasion,” reflects Becque. “President (Jacques) Chirac came to congratulate us afterwards. He said there were two winners: one on the pitch and one in people’s hearts.”
The post-match presentation ceremony entered Coupe de France folklore after Nantes’ 20-year-old goalkeeper-captain Mickael Landreau invited his beaten counterpart, Becque, to lift the trophy alongside him. Winner and loser, professional and amateur, side by side in sporting solidarity, it is an image that endures to this day as an embodiment of the principles that define the competition.
Landreau of Nantes and Becque of Calais lift the cup together in 2000 (Jamie McDonald/Getty Images)
Of course, the Coupe de France isn’t just the underdogs. It is also Jean-Michel Larque’s sublime 20-yard volley to seal victory for the great Saint-Etienne team of the mid-1970s over Lens in the 1975 final. It is also the impossibly dainty extra-time lob that Alain Giresse scored to give Bordeaux victory in the 1986 final against Marseille, weeks before leaving Les Girondins for OM in a transfer that shook French football to its core.
It is Jean-Pierre Papin’s superb match-winning hat-trick against Arsene Wenger’s Monaco in the 1989 final — a feat he celebrated by mischievously daring to kiss President Francois Mitterrand on both cheeks as he collected the trophy. It is Stephane Noro’s spectacular 30-yard equaliser for second-tier Sedan against Auxerre in the 2005 final and Sidney Govou’s dramatic extra-time winner for Lyon against PSG in 2008.
And it is the remarkable goal scored by Jose Toure for Nantes against PSG in the 1983 decider, probably the most celebrated in the tournament’s history, when the gifted Frenchman known as ‘Le Bresilien’ controlled a lofted pass on his chest, juggled the ball into space and then crashed a left-foot volley into the net from an acute angle.
The competition has been touched by tragedy, too. In 1992, a hastily constructed temporary stand collapsed at Bastia’s Stade de Furiani prior to a semi-final against Marseille, leaving 19 people dead and over 2,300 injured. After years of campaigning by victims’ families, the French Senate ruled in October 2021 that no professional football matches could be played in France on the anniversary of the disaster, May 5. As the competition approaches its final stages, thoughts of those whose lives were lost on that fateful Corsican afternoon will not be far away.
Back in Saint-Brieuc, general manager Labbe is getting into her car for the hour’s drive to watch the team’s final game before their gala match against PSG. In a Friday night league fixture moved to a synthetic pitch in nearby Lannion due to the poor state of the turf at Stade Briochin’s home ground, this season’s Coupe de France’s darlings will end up running out comfortable 6-2 winners against Granville.
Although things are unlikely to be quite so straightforward on Wednesday evening, Stade Briochin are quietly daring to dream.
“I’m not mad,” says Labbe. “In their last (Champions League) match, PSG beat Brest 7-0, which is crazy. But they won’t play their strongest team against us. And we have a team who are mentally very strong. So you think, ‘Maybe we could take them to penalties…’. And a penalty shootout is a 50-50 chance. So that chance exists. It’s miniscule. But it exists.
“Every year in the Coupe de France, there’s a beautiful story — a little club that goes further than everyone expected. And we find ourselves saying to each other, ‘What if, this season, that beautiful story is us?’”
(Top photo: Francois Lo Presti/Getty Images)
