From filing for bankruptcy to dissolution, there is only one step, which the management of ASJ Soyaux has taken. “It is with deep emotion that we announce today the disappearance of the club”, she wrote in a press release, Thursday July 27, three weeks after the decision on appeal of the national direction of management control ( DNCG), the financial policeman of French football, to exclude the Charente club from all national competition.
Relegated to the second division at the end of the 2022-2023 financial year, ASJ Soyaux failed to present a budget for next season to the DNCG, which sanctioned it. The club will however continue. “There will be a team in Regional 1 [the fourth division] next year”, wrote the association on its Instagram account, to specify that only the commercial company, led by Benoît Letapissier, will disappear.
The leader had made it his mission to professionalize this pioneering club in the history of women’s football. Founded in 1968, Soyaux spent thirty-five years (between 1975 and 2010) continuously in the elite, and even won the French championship in 1984. The former club of ex-coach Corinne Deacon, who played before coaching there, between 1988 and 2013, however has encountered great difficulties in recent years to stay in the first division, after two relegations in 2010 and 2012.
In a two-speed D1, where many clubs are supported by the male sections, the exclusively female ASJ Soyaux failed to keep pace, both sporting and financial. “The too timid commitment of local authorities, combined with the desire of the French Football Federation to remove amateur clubs from the landscape of the first division, as well as the abusive decisions of the DNCG, have seriously weakened ASJ Soyaux” , wrote the management, bitter, in its press release.
The appeal for donations launched by the club on June 21 has not changed anything: for a long time the poster child for women’s football, Soyaux will continue its adventure away from the professional level.