Standard Athletic Club: France’s first football champions now enjoying an amateur existence
This is an extended version of the piece shortlisted for the Football Writers’ Association’s Hugh McIlvanney Student Football Writer of the Year 2024 award.
Life is quite different for Paris Saint-Germain, France’s reigning domestic champions, and Standard Athletic Club (SAC), who became the first club to hold that title in 1894.
While PSG epitomise the modern superclub, SAC’s is a more humble existence, though one enriched by a trailblazing history.
Their answer to the Parc des Princes lies in the forests of Meudon, a municipality in the southwest suburbs of Paris. But this hallowed turf, acquired during the 1920s, now stages friendly matches not first division football.
World Cup winner Kylian Mbappé led PSG’s scoring charts this season while Madiouma Konte took that title for SAC
For all their differences at present, a remarkable history seats SAC and PSG at the same illustrious table of French football champions.
And that prestigious past continues to infuse the club today, according to current president and goalkeeper Richard Parkin, who joined the club in 2013.
“You can’t buy history, right? There’s something that is very distinctive about the place, even though we’re not a ‘great’ football club now,” he explains.
We’ve begun ours with PSG, but SAC’s story begins with another Parisian giant: the Eiffel Tower. Visitors flocked to the tower during the 1899 Exposition Universelle for which it was built, but the monument had also attracted a group of British workers earlier in the year.
These workers, employed in the tower’s construction and other exhibition projects, would remain in Paris afterwards, where they soon took an unwitting step into the annals of French football history.
In 1890, they established SAC as a British-only sporting club. Four years later, the club became one of six to contest the inaugural French football championship, sponsored by James Gordon Bennett Jr, director of the New York Herald.
They won this championship and three of the following four before the competition was opened to clubs beyond Paris in 1899. Despite this, a further triumph came in 1901, allowing the red-and-black-striped kits of today to adorn five stars.
“France have two for their two World Cups, but we have five, for our five titles,” Richard laughs.
“I think the kids like that. They’ve got something that’s basically code for the fact their team has won the French league five times.”
Though 123 years have passed since SAC last reached the summit of French football, their imprint on not just French, but European football, remains.
Standard Liège, who have won the Belgian first division ten times since being established in 1898, are said to have named themselves after Standard Athletic Club, who then ranked amongst Europe’s finest sides.
“It’s not that surprising [to have that reputation] given that we’d won the league four times and had actually been presented the [Gordon Bennett] trophy permanently,” Richard says.
Standard Liège won the Belgian cup in 2018
Even more surprisingly, the red and black stripes synonymous with seven-time European champions AC Milan may be the red and black of SAC. British expatriates founded AC Milan as they did SAC, and the Italian club operated on a British-only basis in its early years too.
But the ties may go deeper than that. It is rumoured that one of the founding members of what was then known as Milan football and cricket club hailed from SAC.
“One of them went from Paris to Milan and said, okay, we don’t have a club here so let’s start one. When they started it they used the same kit,” Richard explains.
Is this the ‘Rossoneri’ of SAC?
Much has changed for SAC since. Their name is no longer known, let alone copied, across Europe.
SAC members voted to leave the French first division in 1928 after France Football ordered that all top-flight players held French residency, posing obvious complications for a British only club.
They have not returned to that level in nearly a century since, and they are absent from France’s amateur leagues let alone its premier division today.
Even so, SAC members still carry an added sense of pride as they take the field for friendly fixtures.
“I think everyone at the club is very proud of the history. Everyone picks it up through their own lens and focuses in on the parts that they most identify with,” Richard says.
For some of SAC’s youngest footballers, that history is a powerful source of inspiration.
“While not everyone is aware of all the details of the club’s history, the fact that it is steeped in it is hard to miss,” says Emma Barker, former head of junior football at the club.
“Young footballers are reminded that the SAC team were the first winners of the French football cup, that their distinctive red and black kit probably inspired that of AC Milan.
“The awareness of history is inspiring, it is a way to help the young players – whatever their nationality – bond and feel privileged to wear the kit, to be part of something bigger, something special and extraordinary.”
Though their reputation has faded, SAC’s international reach has been extended in other senses.
Once a British-only club, SAC now casts itself in a more international mould, counting 1,000 members from 65 different nationalities across its eight sports.
“Today’s members are part of an eclectic and invigorating mix of parentage, nationalities, languages and outlooks,” says Barker.
Other early French champions like Le Havre, who won the 1899 championship, remain in France’s top-flight today.
But SAC are hardly concerned with what could have been. Their humble existence is a happy one.
