For several days now the spotlight has been back on Stade Toulousain, not for anything they have done on the pitch, but for a thorny question of image rights. According to an investigation published by L’Équipe on 9 February 2026, two of the side’s leading players, and not the least of them – Antoine Dupont, the France captain, and Anthony Jelonch, an international back-rower himself – are at the heart of image and advertising contracts that the sports daily judges “suspect“.

3S-Alyzia, a partner of the Toulouse club specialising in airport services, is said to have paid more than €1.5 million to Dupont and around €170,000 to Jelonch under image-rights deals signed through their personal companies. Those contracts, supposedly allowing the company to use their image for internal and external communications, do not appear to have produced anything visible in return. In other words, no advertising campaign, no published content, no display of any kind linking the brand to the players, our colleagues note.

The salary cap circumvented?

The heart of the problem goes beyond marketing curiosity and touches on the strict framework of the salary cap in force in the Top 14. That mechanism, brought in to guarantee sporting fairness by limiting clubs’ wage bills, includes in its calculation the money paid to players under individual contracts when it comes from club partners. Yet in this case it appears that certain sums received, in particular a consultancy fee paid to Dupont by the sponsor Fiducial, were not included in the salary cap.

To back up its questions, L’Équipe sets out the structure of the agreements. The contract linking Dupont to 3S-Alyzia through his company AD 9 Conseils has been running for close to ten years, with regular payments for “internal and external communications“, without any tangible proof that those rights have been used publicly. The model is similar for Jelonch, whose actual appearances for the company are said (in his own words) to be limited to “two one-off evenings“, a long way from the commitments that would justify such a sum.

The club has yet to offer any detailed public response, while French rugby’s authorities (notably the Ligue nationale de rugby’s salary-cap manager) are declining to comment for the time being, citing the confidentiality of proceedings. The question is a simple one, but potentially heavy with consequences: were these contracts used to disguise part of the players’ pay, allowing Stade Toulousain to get around the limits imposed by the salary cap by the back door?

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The row comes at an already delicate time for the Haute-Garonne club, recently in the sights of the courts over other financial irregularities, and it highlights the fragility of a system trying to balance commercial appeal with sporting fairness. As the debate opens up on transparency and the policing of image rights in professional rugby, Toulouse find themselves, once again, at the centre of a controversy that could well redraw the rules of the game off the pitch.