Girondins de Bordeaux: professional players break the silence in the face of uncertainty

The silence finally broke. The professional players of the Girondins de Bordeaux, supported by the UNFP, published a press release to recount their situation and demand answers, while the club is going through the darkest period in its history. Without collective training, without a clear sporting project, and now deprived of any national perspective, the players say they can no longer wait in limbo.

The Bordelais express “the feeling of being abandoned” and demand “clear, immediate answers on what will happen next for each” of them, in a press release released Tuesday by the UNFP, the professional players’ union.

“We, professional players of the Girondins de Bordeaux, supported by the UNFP, kept silence and hope for many weeks. We are obliged to speak out about our situation, which continues to deteriorate week after week.

Each day that passes reduces our possibilities to pursue our careers

Girondins de Bordeaux players.

The context further darkened last Thursday, when the FFF Comex refused to reopen the Bordeaux case and reinstate the Girondins in National 2. Leaving the club in Regional 1 (at best), and bringing the specter of judicial liquidation even closer. The Federation considered that it did not have, in the current texts, a way to re-examine the file. The sale of the club to Sparta Capital, a potential buyer for a symbolic euro paid at the beginning of August to Gerard Lopez, who arrived in 2021 when the Girondins were in Ligue 1, should be canceled, the fund having always agreed that remaining in the regional division would lead to the end of its takeover project and therefore the liquidation of the Girondins.

A final bottle at sea

Bordeaux, for its part, virulently contested this decision, asserting in particular that the Comex had neither deliberated nor voted on its request. Unless a very unlikely buyer comes forward in the coming hours, the continuation plan will fall through and the commercial company will be liquidated immediately, putting an end to nearly 145 years of existence. In the middle of this standoff, the players find themselves without certainty about their future: “But what we are experiencing today has changed in nature. We no longer have any visibility: no more collective training, no more sports projects, and the feeling of being abandoned.” The observation is all the more brutal as time is now working against them. “All championships have now resumed, including Regional 1. We missed sporting opportunities because we still believed in the impossible.”

“We can no longer wait indefinitely for clarification that does not come. Each additional day of silence deprives us a little more of the opportunity to bounce back, and now affects our professional future as much as that of the club. We demand clear, immediate answers on what will happen next for each of us,” they insist.

On the field, the club must begin its season on Saturday in the Coupe de France in Saintes (departmental 2) for the third round of the Coupe de France, after seeing the postponement of its first two Regional 1 matches.