Limoges CSP

Limoges is a city better known for porcelain than for basketball, yet for the past four decades it is the arena at Beaublanc that has carried the name furthest. What began in 1929 as a Catholic parish side out of Saint-Pierre-du-Queyroix grew into the most successful French club European basketball has produced, and the city's identity abroad still leans on that fact more than on any kiln.

The peak came on 4 April 1993 in Athens, when Limoges CSP beat Benetton Treviso 59–55 to win the EuroLeague — the only French side to have done so. Richard Dacoury, a local player who spent eighteen seasons at the club and wore the captain's armband that night, remains the man Limoges measures itself against; Michael Young top-scored in the final and, like Dacoury, went into the Hall of Fame for it. The domestic game followed the same pattern through the 1980s and 90s: eleven French league titles, six French Cups, and a run of continental cups — the Korać Cup three times, the Saporta Cup once — that no other club in the country can match.

What that era built, financial mismanagement then took apart. Bankruptcy dropped the club as far as the amateur National 3 division in 2004, and it took a rebuild under president Frédéric Forte, himself a former player, to bring Limoges back into contention, culminating in league titles again in 2014 and 2015. The Classico against Pau-Orthez, the two clubs between them holding eighteen league titles, carried much of that revival's edge, alongside a Poitiers derby known locally as the "derby of hell".

The crisis returned in 2024, when fair-play violations again put Limoges on course for National 3, and only a takeover by Lionel Peluhet in early 2025 kept the club at its own level. A EuroLeague trophy from 1993 still sits in the cabinet; a second one does not, and thirty years on, Limoges has yet to get back to that stage.