Nancy Lorraine may be a club that seems irrelevant in the present day, but used to be a club in a similar position to what Lens are in today, a mid-table sort of club who occasionally fight for Europe. Plenty of these sorts of teams have fell from grace in the history of the game, but why specify this one? Well, football history, as well as Juventus and Arsenal history, would never be the same without it.
While the club’s official founding date is 1967, The club’s first specks started to appear in 1901, with FC Nancy. The club achieved very little in its 64-year time, with its greatest achievements being 2 Coupe de France final losses and folded in 1965. Another club under the name Union Sportive Frontiere, was founded in 1910 the name was changed to AS Lorraine in 1928, where it stayed until 1967 when AS Lorraine merged with FC Nancy, and created a new club called AS Nancy Lorraine, or as known to most of its fans, Nancy. This is where our story begins.
Nancy’s first few seasons were spent in Ligue 2, until 1969, when they were promoted to Ligue 1. While being a mid-table team, in 1972 they added a standout youth prospect to their ranks, a relatively unknown young midfielder by the name of Michel Platini. The following year he would make his debut in senior football against Nîmes Olympique.
In the 1973-74 season, Platini would take on a bigger role at Nancy, but an arm fracture saw a weakened Nancy side suffer their first relegation in club history. They would bounce right back up however with a 19-year-old Platini scoring 17 league goals in Ligue 2 and finally staying fit for a season. In the same season, Nancy had their best win yet after 2 Michel Platini free kicks saw them knock out defending Ligue 1 champions Saint-Étienne in the Coupe de France.
With Nancy back in Ligue 1, they started to cement some solid Ligue 1 finishes, even finishing 4th in the 1976-77 season, their second back in the French Top Flight. However, back then, only the top 3 clubs in Ligue 1 qualified for Europe. However, they even finished above Saint-Étienne in the league that season, a club that 3 years earlier, won the league as Nancy were relegated and whose loss against Nancy in the Coupe de France 2 years earlier was seen as a freak occasion.
Even though they couldn’t build on their league finish in the 1977-78 season, finishing 6th, that season is still seen as a success for the club as they won the best piece of silverware they’ve ever won. Nancy beat FC Martigues, Valenciennes, Sochaux, and Nice on their way to winning the 1978 Coupe de France. The only goal in the final? You guessed it, Michel Platini, who at 23 was showing himself as one of France’s best talents. This also got them in the 1978-79 Cup Winners’ Cup. However, they lost in the second round to Swiss side Servette FC 4-3 on aggregate.
After the 1978-79 season, Michel Platini left the club for Saint-Étienne, bringing to an end the club’s greatest period. After mixed success, in 1984, Nancy brought into their ranks a 35-year-old who hadn’t dabbled into management before, just data analytics in Ligue 2. He went by the name of Arsène Wenger.
Arsène Wenger was manager of Nancy for just 3 seasons, and while in his first season he did follow up a 16th-place finish the season before with an 11th place finish, unlike people like Pep Guardiola, Wenger wasn’t a success as soon as he stepped into management, and after the 11th place, he finished 13th and 19th, overseeing the club’s first relegation in 13 years, then left for Monaco. Despite his failure to keep Nancy up, he implemented some revolutionary strategies when it came to running the team, such as healthy eating in the cafeteria and high altitude training.
For about the next decade, Nancy was a yo-yo club, before manager Pablo Correa’s takeover in 2002. Correa took them from 15th in Ligue 2 to promotion in just 3 seasons, and he kept going. After two midtable finishes, a squad featuring Marc-Antoine Fortune, Pascal Berenguer, and Sebastien Puygrenier finished 4th, taking them to the UEFA Cup.
In their UEFA Cup run, Nancy easily dispatched Motherwell 3-0 in the first round, while sadly failing to get out of the group stage, finishing a point behind Lech Poznan, who qualified.
This was the start of Nancy’s downfall, who had a revolving door of players in the late 2000s with their impressive Ligue 1 performances and in 2011 would even lose Pablo Correa. While they consistently had big players leave for good sums of money, they couldn’t reinvest all that money into the squad, so their squad got worse, and in May 2013 inevitably got relegated.
A wild Pablo Correa has appeared and is ready to steer the ship once again. While the club couldn’t sign big names, they had a good youth setup, with players such as Tobias Badilla and Ibrahim Amadou being called up and getting minutes, while the best players to come up from the youth setup were players such as Marvellous Nakamba and Clement Lenglet, and they also could sell them for a profit once they became good enough. They had 3 good seasons under Correa and won Ligue 2 in 2015-16, for another season in Ligue 1.
They went down. 19th. Straight back down. And Pablo Correa left the club again, this time, he hasn’t yet returned. After the relegation, Nancy became a mid-table side in Ligue 2, before being taken over by Chien Lee in 2020, who’s taken over 8 European clubs. However, this has only worsened the side. The first full season of Lee’s time in charge saw his manager being sacked less than 2 months into the season after winning none of his first 10 games. They finished 20th, and were relegated to the Championnat National for the first time ever.
Nancy can’t even make money off their youth talents anymore, with them losing promising academy talents Christopher Wooh and Warren Bondo for nothing, and while in no danger of relegation this season, they’re only 7 points off relegation to the 4th tier this season with 5 games left.
That’s all. I’m glad I could share this story to you, I hope this historic club can reach the heights of Ligue 1 again, but I’m not sure. They’re in a really tough spot, but I hope they can rebound. I’m Jim James, until next time.