It starts with 30 seconds of deliberate applause and then the flags at the front of the Tribune Ouest are waved for the first time. Everyone in the stand raises their scarves, as one, and then the chanting and bouncing comes en masse for the first time – a call to arms.
It is an entirely normal continental football scene, of course, bar one small detail: RC Strasbourg’s latest match is already 15 minutes old.
This is nothing new. Ever since Strasbourg were taken over by BlueCo in 2023, the club’s ultras have remained silent for the first 15 minutes of every match as a mark of protest against what they perceive to be the degradation of their football club and its identity.
A few minutes before they began to make noise on Thursday evening, a simple banner was held across the ultras section: “Against modern football”. With 10 minutes left in the game, their second banner is larger and easily translated: “No to repression! We are open to dialogue… and you?”
The ultras say that promises from the club’s owners to meet with them have been broken.
Strasbourg have made a winning start to their European campaign (Photo: Getty)
Just about everything is going well at Strasbourg. The occasion of my visit is their first European home game proper in 20 years and they are the third favourites to win the Conference League.
They are four points off the top of Ligue 1 having played four of the teams above them. They have the league’s top scorer and drew away at Paris Saint-Germain last week.
In Liam Rosenior, they have a young, forward-thinking coach of a team that plays attractive, attacking football. At the game I attend, they draw against Jagiellonia Bialystok despite being utterly dominant, but the main aesthetic is pass-and-go fun.
Four of the starting XI play with their socks rolled down and Strasbourg score an overhead kick, which is absolutely what somebody who has travelled hundreds of miles wants to see.
Off the pitch, no less acceleration. Opposite me is the new Tribune Nord, which will soon be open to supporters and increase the capacity of the Stade de la Meinau to 32,000.
This summer, the only Ligue 1 clubs with a higher net spend than Strasbourg were PSG, the league’s dominant force, and Paris FC, the new capital disruptors.
Strasbourg's British head coach Liam Rosenior discusses with supporters at the end of the French L1 football match between RC Strasbourg Alsace and Le Havre at the Stade de la Meinau in Strasbourg, eastern France, on September 14, 2025. Strasbourg wins 1 - 0 against Le Havre. (Photo by SEBASTIEN BOZON / AFP) (Photo by SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP via Getty Images)
Liam Rosenior was appointed Strasbourg head coach in July 2024 (Photo: Getty)
But what stands out most at Strasbourg is the age of the playing staff.
For this Conference League game, the oldest player in the 21-strong matchday squad is just 23. Across Europe’s top five major leagues, Strasbourg don’t just have the youngest average age (20.9), but they beat second on that list by more than two full years.
According to a recent study by CIES Football Observatory, the only club in the 69 highest-ranked world leagues with a younger team are FK Metta, bottom of the Latvian Virsliga. Strasbourg are an extraordinary outlier.
Here is the thing: Chelsea have the third youngest average age in Europe’s top five leagues and that is not coincidental. BlueCo’s principle strategy is to invest heavily in youth, which is developed and sold at a profit or used to fuel the pursuit of trophies.
Three of the first-team regulars (Mike Penders and Mamadou Sarr – 20, Kendry Paez – 18) are Chelsea loanees. To an extent, this is a football nursery.
The connections within this multi-club operation are not hidden – since BlueCo’s takeover in 2023, 11 different players have moved between Chelsea and Strasbourg. The natural order isn’t hidden either.
In October, Strasbourg’s star attacking player Emanuel Emegha was pictured at Cobham holding up a Chelsea shirt before a move next summer.
It is fair to say the Strasbourg ultras were less than pleased – isn’t he still our player? What does “our player” even mean anymore?
Emanuel Emegha will join Chelsea at the end of the season (Photo: Getty)
The club’s explanation of their multi-club ownership (MCO) model is pretty clear. Marc Keller, the former Premier League player and long-time club president here, had a dream to take Strasbourg back into Europe.
For that they needed far greater investment and greater revenue: bigger stadium, bigger budgets.
Keller believed that BlueCo was the right option to enable both and they have certainly funded the project since.
There are clubs in Europe where being part of an MCO network causes no negativity – Union Saint-Gilloise (under Brighton’s guise) in Belgium are a fine example – because it allows them to compete at a level above they ever could before.
In Paris, Red Star FC are going for automatic promotion. FC Thun are top of the Swiss league. Hearts of Midlothian are top of the Scottish Premiership. All seem comfortable with their place in MCOs.
It is history – recent and more ancient – that makes Strasbourg a little different.
They are the only professional club in Alsace, an area that borders Germany and Switzerland and has a unique, proud identity. They are one of only six clubs to have won all three major French trophies, including three this century.
Todd Boehly bought a majority stake in Strasbourg in June 2023 (Photo: Getty)
More pertinently, Strasbourg almost went out of business 14 years ago, having been relegated to the third tier, forced into bankruptcy, demoted two more divisions and returned to amateur status.
It was Keller who saved the club and oversaw an astonishing recovery: four promotions in six years and Strasbourg rising all the way to sixth in Ligue 1 in 2022.
That rebuild, on their own terms, is a point of great pride to the ultras. They made up a quarter of the home attendances in the fifth tier. They understood the need for greater investment.
But they also see the MCO model as a threat to the future of a club that almost died because it is BlueCo’s money, not the club’s. They say that they feel like a fast food franchise or a footballer farm more than a football club. What was the point in fighting for their existence just to give up their identity?
The ultras are not wholly negative: they celebrate when Strasbourg score and they still lead the chants and the noise after the first 15 minutes.
But they have also fallen out with the club over their matchday protests and with Rosenior over criticism of the Emegha deal and the player’s retention of the club captaincy.
“We do not claim to represent the majority of fans and nobody – including the club – can do that,” says Alexandre, who has become a spokesperson for the four organisations (with more than 1,500 total members).
“We represent the organized fringe of the fan scene and the club knows that very well since they were very willing to cooperate with us for a dozen years and took a lot of inspiration from us for their marketing.”
Strasbourg president Mark Keller played for the club for five years (Photo: Getty)
That is an important detail. The supporters that I speak to in the Tribune Sud range from those who understand the ultras’ concerns but prefer to focus on their team doing well to those who think that any worries about the MCO relationship are unfounded. In democratic terms, it is a definite minority who are leading protests.
The salient question, I suppose, is whose opinion merits more weight. Keller has put in so much time and effort into the Strasbourg rebirth that he earned the right to make the call.
The ultra fan groups may be a minority, but they are also the grassroots movement of the club who typically contain the most loyal supporters by any reasonable measure.
They are not causing a scene for pure notoriety; this is about protecting the club’s future.
The answer to that question is there is no answer. On a personal level, I am uncomfortable with multi-club ownership groups. I share Alexandre’s concerns that if BlueCo decide that Strasbourg are no longer right for their organisation, what will be left but uncertainty and doubt at a club that has already suffered enough of that for one lifetime?
But then what are the options here? French football is broken. Ligue 1’s broadcasting deal is reportedly worth 20 per cent of its previous iteration after the collapse of the Dazn relationship.
One club is uber-dominant because it is state-owned and ludicrously rich. Private wealth may be viewed as safer, but then see John Textor and Lyon for how that can go south. Bordeaux almost went extinct last year.
The choice has been made to tie themselves to an operation with a Premier League club at its head, which makes financial sense given the economic dominance of that division.
Strasbourg would say that they have used the intricacies – unpleasant as they may be – of European football in 2025 to their competitive advantage. They are providing exciting football to a fanbase and building revenue for improving fasciitis and qualifying for Europe. Was this not the dream?
Their ultras say that their club has merely become beholden to the whims of a corporation that sees them as a tool, not a historic football club.
Some of the end results may be enjoyable, but they do not justify the means. Do Strasbourg have control of their own future? Who knows.
I ask Alexandre if he can take any enjoyment from the results on the pitch.
“That is a very personal question and you will get as many answers as fans you interview,” he says.
“I personally see the results with some distance. Other people will have different answers and many manage to both enjoy the football and stay critical of the whole. That is all fine and we respect every position on that topic.”
I can’t think of any answer that better epitomises Strasbourg or any other football club in this situation. There are a hundred different answers because there is no answer at all.
Strasbourg are either an upstart capable of breathing rarefied air, or a groundbreaking team with impossibly young and exciting players, or a cog in a machine in which their future is defined by the success of others.
Or perhaps they are all three. The closer you go towards the heart of the club, the harder it is to tell.