Always Someone Worse Off Than Yourself? Duchere Reborn

While we wait for news on Holden’s successor – and if it is to be Appleton he is going to have a massive job on his hands to win over supporters, while the new owners and those actually running the club are coming out of this smelling of something and it isn’t roses – the phrase ‘there’s always someone worse off than yourself’ comes to mind (usually along with Basil Fawlty’s retort ‘well I’d like to meet him, I could do with a laugh’). For anyone seeking comfort of this nature I can offer up a candidate, my previously adopted French team Lyon Duchere – or Lyon-la-Duchere as they are now called (having changed again having been spuriously renamed Sporting Club de Lyon in 2020).

It is a tale of hard-won success and over-achievement feeding into over-ambition and implosion. Not unique in football for sure – and with echoes along the way of the fate of a certain other club, one located in SE7. Just how and why things were done I have no real insight into. I can only relate the way I saw things through the years and where things stand now. But to grab while I can another cliché, ‘tomorrow is another day’ and like football fans everywhere hope springs eternal. It has to. Even when expectations for the campaign are turned on their head just five games in, there’s always ‘if only …’ or ‘there’s always next season’.

Now many moons ago, when I was starting to spend weekends in Lyon as a result of romance, I thought of taking in a game or two of French football. At that time Olympique Lyonnais were the dominant force in the league, regularly winning the championship and competing in the Champions League. I did go to a game. But just down the road from where my partner lived played Lyon Duchere, an amateur outfit playing in National 3 (regional groups below a similar structure for National 2, itself below National, the French third division), on a Friday night, in front usually of a couple of hundred locals. It was really no contest.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Duchere had in place a good manager. And he started to deliver results. The club won promotion, to National 2, and the upward trajectory was to continue as the 2015/16 season ended with La Duch securing a second promotion, to National. Now Duchere found itself slugging it out against teams with far greater resources (and much higher attendances). No matter, the team stayed up, strengthening the idea that Lyon might after all have a second football team, if not to challenge OL then to offer an alternative.

And that’s probably where the problems began. Under an ambitious president we started to notice changes. An area in the ‘stand’ was roped off, for VIPs (you can guess who they were). The manager who had ushered Duchere from National 2 to National in a short space of time was dispensed with, and money is spent on a flood of new players. Now to be fair, despite getting into the third division crowds at Balmont Stadium never really took off. Duchere is perched on a hill in the north-west of Lyon; it’s a bit like Norwich, nobody travels through it to go anywhere, so attracting support from outside the immediate locale was not easy. And you can’t gloss over the possible racist element in some quarters; Duchere was an area created for the pied noirs and the population now is predominantly of North African descent. In the early 1990s Duchere won promotion to the then second division – only to be immediately demoted for ‘administrative purposes’ (which did lead to the club going into liquidation in 1996).

As it happens OL around this time moved to a brand new stadium. Their old one becoming vacant, Lyon’s rugby club, Lou Rugby, saw the opportunity to move in. That in turn meant Lou’s old stadium became available. Duchere’s ambitious president saw the possibility to turn the club clearly into Lyon’s second football team and to transport it to the other side of the city. As part of the process, supporters were ‘invited’ to vote on a name change. In fact they were offered four alternatives, none of which mentioned ‘Duchere’. Accordingly, and with spurious claims that the new name had been selected by fans, Lyon Duchere AS became ‘Sporting Club de Lyon’.

At that point I stopped going, a small protest against an owner with a big ego destroying a club. And then the problems mounted. ‘Sporting Club’ were having a tough time in National, despite the new players, then along came Covid. The season was suspended, then effectively terminated. When it came to the start of a new one, it was unilaterally decided by the French football authorities that Sporting would be considered to have finished bottom of the league and would be relegated; them alone. A protest was lodged but nobody in Paris bothered responding.

Sporting had to accept their fate, but the ambitions of the president were falling apart and he did a runner. The planned move across Lyon was abandoned. And the name change was effectively reversed, the club now called Lyon-la-Duchere.

The club competed back in National 2 for the 2021/22 season and just about managed to stave off a further relegation. And with 2022/23 things seemed to be looking up again. Duchere was in the mix for promotion through the season, finally missing out, finishing fifth.

I thought the other day I’d check to see how they had started 2023/24, but couldn’t find the club listed under any of the National 2 groups (there are four of them). So I did a little checking on the club site. Now says Duchere competes in National 3 (in one of 12 groups). It seems that Duchere has been ‘administratively demoted’ (for the second time) in order to avoid a bankruptcy filing, commenting that dropping down to N3 is the best option to ‘save the club’ and that the budget for the team would be ‘limited and regulated’.

There we have it, back where it all started. But before anyone despairs, there is hope. The club’s website is hailing the return of Karim Bounouara as coach, alongside Ludovic Assemoassa, while there is the embracing of a more community-focused approach with as much focus on developing youth as the first team. The club site talks of having “the right combination to allow La Duchere to shine in the National 3 championship and to progress towards higher horizons” and that “the stakes are higher than ever for the Lions of La Duchere”. The club may be back where it was when I came along, but perhaps it has rediscovered its soul.

So, I may spend more of my time these days in Givry than in Lyon, but I hope to be taking in a game or two before long, the boycott most definitely over. Might even buy the shirt. But in one sense the parallels with Charlton come to an end as in the first two games of the new season Duchere have secured a win and a draw, to stand fifth out of 14, without conceding a goal. If only.