Racing 92

Racing 92 arrive in this Top 14 season carrying the uncertainty of a club whose coaching staff has just changed again, following Stuart Lancaster's departure in 2025. It is not the first time the club has had to steady itself after upheaval: relegation loomed in the 1990s, and a proposed merger with Stade Français collapsed in 2017 before it could reshape Parisian rugby.

What Racing 92 has instead is a title from 2016, won 29-21 against Toulon, the campaign most associated with Jacky Lorenzetti, the president who took over the club in 2006 and pushed through its move to a new home. That same season they reached the final of the European Rugby Champions Cup, losing to Saracens, and they would fall short there twice more, against Leinster and then Exeter Chiefs. Three finals without a European title sits alongside six French championships, the earliest dating back to 1892 and 1900.

That form came together in 2001, when the rugby section merged with US Métro and took the name Racing 92 only in 2015. On the pitch, Henry Chavancy has made more appearances than anyone else, 415 of them, while Juan Imhoff has outscored every other player in tries. Dan Carter and Jonathan Sexton both wore the shirt in the years either side of the 2016 title, part of a period when the club could attract players of that stature to Nanterre.

Against Stade Français, the Derby de Paris still carries the old rivalry between the capital's two clubs. It traces back to a rugby section formed in 1890 inside the wider Racing Club de France, itself founded in the 1880s as a multi-sport organisation.