Third-tier Quevilly folded in 1978 but a remarkable giant-killing run in the cup sees them take on Lyon in Saturday's final
US Quevilly have been upstarts since birth. The amateur team who will compete in the French Cup final on Saturday against aristocratic Lyon were created in 1902 by Amable Lozai and Jules Manneville as a breakaway from Cercle Pédestre Quevillais, whose management refused to grant the players' request to buy a ball to help them train.
The new club, Union Sportive Quevillaise, grew quickly and continued being a pain to the powers that be, never more so than in 1927, when Gaston Doumergue became the first French president to attend a cup final and spent most of the match being jostled in the VIP box by the excitable Lozai who, by then, was the chairman of Quevilly and could not contain himself as his team were beaten 3-0 by Marseille.
That final marked the beginning of an extraordinary relationship between Quevilly and the cup, even if Saturday is the first time that the amateurs have been back to the final since then.
They have knocked 10 top-flight teams out of the competition over the years – including Marseille and Rennes this season to reach the showpiece at the Stade de France. That surpassed their feat of two years ago, when they made it to the semi-final before being eliminated 1-0 by Paris St-Germain.
Some of their best players were headhunted after that but most remained and were augmented by newcomers such as Pierrick Cappelle, who arrived with the seemingly naive expectation of embarking on similar adventures. "He signed last summer because he saw us on TV," the full-back Cédric Vanoukia told France Football magazine after the victory over Rennes. "New guys have been coming for the last two years to have another cup run. They were like kids; they didn't realise that there was only a one in a million chance of that happening again."
Quevilly are currently struggling in the lower half of France's third tier, their cup results at odds with so-so league form. But getting that high in the pyramid has also been an enormous achievement.
When their Normandy neighbours Le Havre and Rouen opted to turn professional in the 1930s, Quevilly stayed defiantly amateur until 1970, when the French authorities introduced a scheme to help the country's top amateur clubs to join the national league and move towards professionalism. Quevilly muddled around the third and fourth tiers for a few years before the burden became too big and with no money left, the club folded in 1978. They re-emerged the following year at the lowest level of the Normandy district league. And began working their way back up.
Now Quevilly's amateur status is something of a misnomer as 17 of their squad are paid, albeit piffling sums in football terms and in several cases through contracts that entail doing more than just play. The captain, Grégory Beaugrard, for instance, gets a salary for being theUnder-19 coach.
"I don't have the hatred that some [semi-professionals] have for pros," said the 31-year-old. "They have a great life but I'm not complaining about mine, although I would obviously be stupid to say I prefer living off €2,000 a month than €100,000."
Beaugrard is one of the few members of the team who has never been on the books of a professional club – most of the others having been in academies as teenagers before being told they were not good enough. The success of those academies is one of the reasons that the gulf in quality between top clubs and lower league is not as big as the gulf in wages and helps explain why many lower-league clubs have done well in the French Cup in recent times, most notably when Calais, from the fourth tier, were runners-up in 2000.
The side Lyon beat in this year's semi-finals were GFCO Ajaccio, who are in the same league as Quevilly. "The difference between the guys who get a professional contract at the end of their stint in the academies and the guys who don't is not as big as people believe," said the former France manager Michel Hidalgo, whose twin brother, Serge, played for Quevilly in the early 1950s.
Zanké Diarra is one of the Quevilly players who did not get a professional contract after his time in an academy and he too has a famous brother: the France international Alou Diarra. The pair came up against each other in the quarter-final, when Alou's Marseille lost 3-2 in extra time. What was striking about that match, and the semi-final, when Queviully came from behind to beat Rennes 2-1, was that the underdogs deserved to win as they were physically, technically and tactically better.
"Marseille tried to make the fitness of professionals pay off by getting stuck in hard from the start but we overcame that," the Quevilly chairman, Michel Mallet, told France 3 news. "Then Rennes tried a different approach, thinking they would wear us down by passing the ball around and keeping possession. But we overcame that, too."
The only remaining question is can they overcome Lyon, second only to the Qatar-backed PSG as the richest club in France and with an annual budget of €139m, almost 80 times more than Quevilly's. "This is exceptional," said Zanké Diarra after the semi-final. "I live quite close to the Stade de France and every time I've passed there over the years I've run a little movie in my head with my playing there – now I'm going to play there in real life."
But will Quevilly finally get their Hollywood ending? Read More
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