Suresnes

Suresnes go into this season in the Nationale, third tier of French rugby, a level the club reached after being invited into its inaugural edition in 2020-21 on the back of a third-place finish in its Fédérale 1 pool the previous year. Getting there mattered more than the invitation itself: in April 2018 the club had renamed itself Rugby Club Suresnes Hauts-de-Seine and set up a professional sports company, a structural bet on climbing further than a suburban side from the Hauts-de-Seine usually does.

The rugby at Suresnes goes back to 1908, when a section formed inside the White Harriers, a local multi-sports club. It took until 1973 for that lineage to merge with a rugby school founded by Léon Dussert and become Rugby Club Suresnois, the name the team carried until the 2018 rebrand. Green and black, the colours still worn today, came across from the White Harriers rather than from anything chosen for the modern club.

Silverware has mostly come from developing players rather than winning senior titles: the Coupe Jules-Balandrade, France's under-18 championship, in 2011, and regional titles in 2019 and 2025. That developmental bent fits the club's role as a partner and feeder side for Racing 92 — a relationship that has sent players through Suresnes and on to the top flight, among them the hooker Camille Chat and the fly-half Antoine Gibert.

Home games are played at the Stade Jean-Moulin, formerly named Stade Salvador-Allende, where the club has been based since 1975. It holds around 1,500, a size that keeps Suresnes' rugby close to the town rather than apart from it.