Le Havre Athletic Club: France’s Oldest Football Club

This is the story of how a port on France’s Normandy coast was the first to sample both Association and rugby codes of football, almost two decades before a football culture emerged in Paris. Meet Le Havre Athletic Club.

Here’s a pub quiz question for you. What’s the oldest football club in continental Europe? There are arguments for KB (now FC København) in Denmark, founded in 1876, or a football club of British students in Lausanne in the 1860s, although it’s not clear what code they were playing as it was before the Association rulebook was finalised in 1863. However, one team playing ‘football’ as early as the early 1870s and still going strong is based in Le Havre, Normandy. 

The year is 1872. France is smarting from defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, while Claude Monet visits his hometown of Le Havre on the north-west coast to paint one of his most famous works Impression, Soleil Levant (Impression, Sunrise). It depicts the busy Le Havre harbour at dawn. Meanwhile, at the same time in the same port, a group of English Protestants living in Le Havre set up the ‘Havre Football Club’. It was the first of its kind in France and, coming just nine years after the Association rulebook was first published and a year after the foundation of the Rugby Football Union (RFU), the English – and some locals, too – appeared to play a ‘combination’ of the two sports. 

The first ‘international’ club match

The English in Le Havre also played cricket. This brought them into correspondence with a club from a fellow port city across the Channel, Southampton. Following an invitation to play cricket from a Hampshire cricket club, Portswood Park, a football match was arranged between the two sides at the Antelope Cricket Ground in Southampton in February 1873. This was before any British side had played outside Britain: Queen’s Park of Glasgow had played English clubs in the FA Cup, albeit on the same island, and would play exhibitions in Belfast in the late 1870s. So, for a France-based club to visit England to play was probably the first ‘international club match’.

Demonstrating the different scoring rules of the time, the Hampshire side won handsomely by one goal, 11 touch downs and 11 rouges to Havre’s one rouge (a ‘rouge’ was similar to a try in rugby and were counted up if goals scored were level). Havre Football Club’s president was the Reverend George Washington. At the after-match dinner, he said he was ‘battu, mais content’ (beaten, but happy), according to local press.

Sky and navy blue

As it adopted new sports, the club changed its name to Havre Athletic Club (HAC) and by 1891 the club had switched its plain white blouses for a proper kit. As a compromise between many of the players’ alma mater of Cambridge (light blue) and Oxford (dark blue) universities, the club opted for light and dark blue halves – ‘Le Ciel et Marine‘ (sky and navy blue) – which is retains to this day. 

In Paris, the short-lived Paris Football Club (1879) lasted seven years but it was not until the 1890s that a football culture emerged in the French capital. Again, led by the British community, the clubs of Standard Athletic Club (1890 – still going), White Rovers, and the International Athletic Club, among others, led to the creation of the first French Football Championship, held over April and May 1894. Standard Athletic Club won the first title. In 1899, HAC became the first club outside Paris to win the title, retaining it a year later.

Post-war HAC

The town of Le Havre was bombed heavily during World War II and the club’s stadium did not escape unscathed. Le Havre was rebuilt along the futuristic designs of Auguste Perret between 1945 and 1964. During this period, in 1959, HAC won a double of the Ligue 2 title and the Coupe de France for the first time.

The club has also developed one of the leading training academies in Europe, producing talent including Paul Pogba, Dimitri Payet, Riyad Mahrez and Ibrahim Ba. The club’s Stade Océane was finished in 2012 and was a venue for the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

The club’s anthem pays homage to the club’s Oxbridge roots. Set to the tune of ‘God Save the Queen’, the club song refers to the ‘Fils d’Oxford et Cambridge’ (Sons of Oxford and Cambridge).

Beyond Le Havre, the French played a key role in internationalising football and giving the sport structure. For the 1900 Olympics in Paris, led by Pierre de Coubertin, football appeared for the first time. Only three amateur sides – a French team made mostly from the Racing Club, a team of Belgian students, and Upton Park FC from East London representing Great Britain – took part. Upton Park won gold for GB. 

Four year later, journalist Robert Guérin founded FIFA, while Jules Rimet – founder of Red Star FC in Paris – went on to create the FIFA World Cup alongside compatriot Henri Delaunay. In the 1950s, sports journal L’Equipe went on donate the first European Cup trophy.

While France itself had to wait until 1984 to win its first piece of silverware, without French men of vision many of the tournaments we appreciate today would not exist.

For more on the roots of football in France and the rest of the world, please read my book Origin Stories: The Pioneers Who Took Football to the World.