Vannes

The Brittany Derby against Rennes still gives Vannes its sharpest fixture. There was once a fiercer one, against Saint-Nazaire.

Rugby Club Vannes has spent much of its recent history pushing at the door of the Top 14 and being pushed back out again. The breakthrough came in 2024, when the club won the Pro D2 final against Grenoble to reach the top flight for the first time since forming in 1950. Relegated in 2025, Vannes went straight back to work and beat Provence Rugby in the following year's Pro D2 final to secure an immediate return. Before that run, three Pro D2 semi-final exits in 2019, 2021 and 2023 had marked the club as a side capable of getting close without getting through.

Jean-Noël Spitzer has coached the team since 2005, long enough to have overseen the 2016 restructuring that split the professional side, now competing as Rugby Club Vannes Sud Bretagne, from the amateur Rugby Club Vannetais that keeps the original name alive. Anthony Bouthier played for the club between 2014 and 2019 and came back in 2025.

The club never has managed to win the Coupe de France, and its closest brush with it belongs to 1953, when a semi-final place was lost by forfeit after players were called up to fight in Indochina.

Home games are played in front of blue and white, colours meant to stand for the Breton sea and sky, at the Stade de la Rabine, known locally as Stade Jo Courtel, where 11,303 people can fill the stands in Vannes.