Stade Toulousain: continuity as the battle plan for a fifth straight title

Four-time reigning French champions, Stade Toulousain have matched the golden generation of the 1990s. To go past it, the club made a clear choice this summer: change almost nothing. That call reads in every line of their transfer window.

A transfer window cut back to the essentials

Tommaso Menoncello is the only outside signing in the senior squad. The Italy international centre arrives from Treviso, where he played ten URC matches last season, every one of them as a starter, on top of five starts for Italy in the last Six Nations. The other two new faces are familiar ones: Malachi Hawkes, back from a loan at Provence Rugby in the front row, and Valentin Delpy, back from Colomiers at fly-half after a full season in Pro D2 (20 matches, 18 starts, 203 points). In the academy, only fly-half Bixintxo Daguerre (Bayonne) joins the pathway.

Departures that weigh more than they look

The volume is modest, seven senior departures, but the game time given up is real. Paul Costes, now at Racing 92, started twelve of his fourteen Top 14 appearances last season. Dimitri Delibes, now at Montpellier, scored six tries in twelve matches. Naoto Saito, Antoine Dupont’s understudy at scrum-half, played fourteen games before going home to Japan with Tokyo Sungoliath. The Guillaume Cramont case raises more questions: loaned to Bayonne, the hooker was coming off a season of fifteen matches and seven tries. The loans of Luciano Richardis (Agen) and Lucas Vignères (Colomiers) follow a different logic, that of game time for the coming generation, while Thomas Alary (a single appearance) joins Grenoble.

Thirteen extensions to lock in the core

This is the real marker of Toulouse’s off-season: thirteen senior players have extended. Antoine Dupont, who scored five tries in ten league matches in his comeback season, is the headline name, alongside Thibaud Flament, the most used lock in the squad with sixteen matches, Joshua Brennan, Rodrigue Neti, Paul Mallez, Léo Banos, Matthis Lebel and Juan Cruz Mallía. The extension handed to Romeo Martin-Bonnard, a U20 World Cup finalist this summer, also says something about the faith placed in the academy.

The real unknown lies ahead

The job waiting for the board is elsewhere: Thomas Ramos, Cyril Baille, Dorian Aldegheri and François Cros, all senior figures, with fifteen matches or more last season for the first three, come to the end of their contracts in June 2027, with a World Cup in Australia in between.

In the academy the cut is sharper: twelve departures and nineteen contracts expiring. The season now opening will say whether continuity is enough to write what neither the Toulouse side of 1994-1997 nor the great Béziers teams ever managed: a fifth Brennus in a row.