In Brittany, rugby is galloping along (+5000 registered players in five years), but the facilities are dragging their feet. Out of a stock of 2000 full-size pitches monopolised by football, only 137 can host rugby posts. An imbalance that irritates Fabrice Quénéhervé. The league president is going on the offensive to demand genuine shared use of sports facilities.

The “post plant”: a cultural battle

At the Breton rugby convention last December, you revealed that out of 2000 full-size outdoor pitches, only 137 are suitable for installing rugby posts!

Fabrice Quénéhervé: Yes, it’s a real issue. Some years ago now I came up with a slogan inspired by Les Bronzés font du ski: the post plant. The image stuck to the point where Florian Grill uses it regularly, because it isn’t a problem limited to Brittany alone: the Hauts-de-France, Normandy, the East… they all suffer from it too.

Where does the problem come from?

The fact is that the utterly dominant sport, the mass-participation sport, is football, and we absolutely do not question that. Frankly, we don’t care about the state of the grass or how well the ball rolls. When our ball hits the ground, we have no idea how it’s going to bounce, so a flat surface matters little to us.

The reality is that all these existing football pitches are barely shareable and barely shared. A pitch costs between 800,000 and 1.1 million euros, whether it’s grass or artificial. But in the current climate, investment by local authorities is difficult. Converting a pitch, simply sinking the sockets, is technically easy and financially very affordable. But in the end we come up against psychological blocks, the feeling that the moment rugby players set foot on the pitch they’ll wreck the lot and it’ll be ruined for football. We still have a lot of educating to do. The big message of the Olympics was promoting sport through shared use of facilities on full-size playing areas; we are very, very, very far from that.

“Up goes the barbed wire”: football’s dogma

One gets the feeling that a huge number of football pitches are under-used…

Yes, they’re protected, in fact. I’m not blaming anyone, because I’m fully aware of how difficult it is: there’s the cost of building them, then the cost of maintaining them, because going pesticide-free, however laudable it may be ecologically, pushes up the bill for a local council.

As a result we have councils that are far more particular, more watchful than in the past, and that will very quickly issue an order banning use, not because the pitch has been damaged but precisely as a precaution. And we went through three or four months during which clubs could no longer train or play. What we would like is a network of artificial pitches, back-up pitches, at least to protect the academy festivals and certain age-group competitions, because the calendars are extremely tight. We don’t have enough fallback dates and when we have no playing area, we very quickly switch to a system of averaged results. Players don’t want to read their result in the paper, they want to play!

Do you know how many playing surfaces are needed per 100 registered players?

I’ll admit I don’t have the figures, I haven’t gone in for that kind of equation. Half of our registered players are in the academies. 15% of them are in the U14 and U15 girls’ age groups, and they need a pitch with posts. For the vast majority of the others, a playing field, a patch of grass is enough. We don’t need a full-size competition pitch, and even less so posts, for the U6s, U8s, U10s and U12s.

So out of our registered players, I reckon 35 to 40% need a pitch with posts. When we ask for access to a football pitch, we’re told it’s not possible even though there are slots free, but it’s simply “we don’t want to”. In Brittany it’s dogmatic, it’s football and football. And on principle, when people hear “rugby”, up goes the barbed wire. And that raises the question of council investment, in other words public money: it is in a sense being privatised… That’s true in the regions north of the Loire; it’s different in regions where rugby is the majority sport.

Foot-dragging local politicians and the Plouay example

Do you have an example in mind?

This won’t necessarily go down well with the council: Plouay (Morbihan). I need to get the debate going again there… There’s a rugby club, an academy, a social section. There’s the senior football first-team pitch, the football reserve pitch, the under-18 football first-team pitch, the under-16 football first-team pitch. And at the bottom of the field there’s a rugby pitch, with no posts.

What’s the problem? Foot-dragging by local politicians? Mindsets?

I’m an optimist by nature, thankfully; volunteering isn’t for pessimists. It will take time. What I regularly tell our friends in the regional daily press: they keep filling their pages with the results of the under-8s from Nowheresville as if it were of interest to the whole department or to Brittany as a whole, and meanwhile rugby gets an extremely small share.

In four months’ time, Brest will host the FFR congress. A communication lever for you?

I have a strategy. We’re planning an initiative aimed at elected officials, whether newly elected or re-elected, and mayors and sports portfolio holders in particular, to tighten the existing links with their rugby clubs or to create them, to spark them. To show rugby France just how much energy Breton rugby has, how dynamic it is and how much it wants to keep growing and shining. And on the other hand, to show Brittany just how well Breton rugby is doing, given that the federation decided to hold its congress here, not on Brittany’s doorstep but at its westernmost tip in Finistère.