Guingamp is the only village in Europe with a football team playing in the top flight of a major league and also in European competition.
With a population of 7,200, the Breton side who play in France’s Ligue 1 qualified for the Europa League after winning the 2014 French Cup.
Their average crowd in their 18,000-seat stadium is 15,000, making them the only town in Europe to enjoy crowds higher than the population of where they play.
While many villagers walk to games past grey brick Breton houses unchanged in a century, the team who play on the westernmost peninsula of northwest France also attract loyal supporters from the surrounding towns and villages.
They sing Breton songs in one of the few French stadiums where insults are rare and opponents are applauded for their skill, and where locals are proud to be called farmers and fishermen.
When Guingamp reached the cup final this year, a fleet of more than 500 tractors made the 350-kilometre journey to Paris to see their team beat Breton rivals Stade Rennais.
Four of France’s 20 Ligue 1 clubs hail from Brittany which has just 4.4 million people – six per cent of the country’s 66 million population.
Without a rich benefactor and surviving only from the energy of a sizeable supporter base, club volunteers and sponsorship from local businesses, Guingamp, who were promoted for the third time in 2013, have struggled to stay in the top flight and compete with giants from Paris, Marseille, Lille and Lyon.
Founded in 1912, the club, which scouts well and gave Didier Drogba and Florent Malouda a springboard for their careers, played in regional leagues for most of its existence until rising in the 1970s under president Noel Le Graet.
He had played for the club in the 1940s, became club president at 29 and left 20 years later to become president of the French league.
Guingamp only turned professional in 1984 and became just the second team from outside the first division to win the Coupe de France in 2009. They beat Rennes, from a city of 640,000, in the cup final that year, too.
With the dual distraction of European football this year, life is tough for the team who are in the relegation spot with four wins from their 14 league games.
In the Europa League, they are second in the group headed by Fiorentina who beat them home and away, the second a 2-1 victory in Brittany on Thursday night featuring players such as Micah Richards and Juan Cuadrado.
Guingamp are tied on seven points with PAOK Salonika, who they beat 2-0 at home. They play them away in two weeks needing a draw to go through to the knock out stages.
“We’re doing well in Europe,” said their Danish goalkeeper Jonas Lossl, 25.
Most people in France had not heard of Guingamp until their football team won the two French Cups and Lossl had not heard of the club before joining in the summer, but he was immediately impressed.
“The president met me and told me that he’d like to welcome me into the family of the club,” he said.
“That’s genuine. The players live locally among the fans and you receive support on the streets wherever you go. I get recognised far more than I do when I’m in Denmark.
“We lost a game 7-2 to Nice recently. What happened? The fans applauded us off the pitch. I couldn’t believe it, but we need that support to stay at the level we’re at.”
With that, he produced a photo on his phone showing fans crowded on a bridge close to the stadium before a game to cheer the team on.
Against Fiorentina, the vocal fans in the Kop Rouge created a din that would be the envy of far bigger clubs, but their team lost, which set up that key PAOK tie in Greece.
“Allez Guingamp,” sang a group of the kids outside the main stand in the late November chill. Their team may have just lost but their support for a modern day Asterix will always win through.
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