RED Star FC 93

The club has spent long stretches outside the top flight.

That history began in a bistro in the 7th arrondissement, on 21 February 1897, when a handful of men including Jules Rimet sat down and started a club called Red Star Club Français. Rimet went on to run FIFA and put his name to the World Cup itself; Red Star kept his early imprint in ways more modest but persistent, changing name after name — through mergers with Olympique de Paris, a spell as Stade Français-Red Star, the long AS Red Star 93 years — before settling back, in 2010, on the name it had carried at the start.

The cup wins came early and thickly: four Coupes de France in the 1920s alone, finals won against Olympique de Paris, Stade Rennais, Cette and CA Paris, then a fifth in 1942, played in Lyon because the occupation had pushed the final out of Paris. Since then the club has had to settle for smaller, harder-won things — the Ligue 2 title in 2018, eighty-four years after the last one.

Stade Bauer has stayed with them through all of it, a ground so tight that Red Star had to play a season at Jean-Bouin in 2016-17 just to meet Ligue 2's safety rules, before coming home. Rebuilt stands reopened in 2024 brought capacity to 5,600, with plans to nearly double that by 2027. Of everyone who passed through the club, it is Rimet whose name still travels furthest — a founder who left Saint-Ouen behind for the presidency of world football, and never quite left it behind either.