One club no longer exists, another are facing oblivion and a former champion crashed down with them into the sixth tier: the man who led three traditional clubs into ruin

The name Girondins Bordeaux still brings to mind a club steeped in tradition and romance, one that once sat among the biggest and most successful sides in France. It brings back memories of Zinedine Zidane, who became a France international at Bordeaux in the 1990s, lost the 1996 UEFA Cup final with Girondins to Bayern Munich and then moved to Juventus.

Then there was the last title-winning team in 2009, built around the brilliant playmaker Yoann Gourcuff, briefly hailed as Zidane's heir. Under defensive icon Laurent Blanc, Gourcuff drove Girondins to their sixth French league title and, for what looks set to be a very, very long time, their last. Bordeaux even reached the Champions League quarter-finals the following season.

That was only a little over a decade and a half ago. In 2026, Girondins Bordeaux are living a very different reality: regional football instead of elite European nights. The proud club from the major city in south-west France have fallen as far as the sixth tier, or rather, Bordeaux want to play in Regional 1, the country's sixth-highest division, comparable to the Verbandsliga.

When did Gerard Lopez take over Girondins Bordeaux?

First, though, to one of the main figures behind the collapse. It would not be fair to pin the six-time champions' unprecedented decline solely on Gerard Lopez. But Bordeaux's bleak downward spiral really did begin with the arrival of the Luxembourgish-Spanish businessman in the summer of 2021, when the club were still in the top flight. More worrying still, Lopez's name is also tied directly to the decline of two other traditional clubs. Belgium's Royal Excel Mouscron no longer exist at all. At Boavista Porto, Portuguese champions in 2001, no football is currently being played either after a catastrophic سقوط into the fifth tier.

By comparison, OSC Lille can almost count themselves lucky. The French club are effectively the only side to have come through a Gerard Lopez takeover without lasting damage and still remain where they were before. Lille became the first club in which the businessman bought a stake at the start of 2017. Yet even if his spell at LOSC did not end anywhere near as disastrously as his three later projects, Lopez was hardly a healthy addition there either.

"He has the ideal profile to be successful with Lille," said Michel Seydoux, who had been club president for almost 15 years, full of hope after the sale to Lopez. After arriving, Lopez took out a €225 million loan from the American investment company Elliott Managements, which he later failed to repay in time. He had to leave at the end of 2020 and left Lille with a huge mountain of debt, which the French side managed to clear through expensive sales of stars such as Nicolas Pepe (to Arsenal for €80 million), Victor Osimhen (to Napoli for €78.9 million) and Gabriel (to Arsenal for €26 million).

How did Gerard Lopez become rich?

Lopez was once involved in the billion-euro sale of Skype. He also owned the former Formula One team Lotus between 2010 and 2015, and that venture also ended in financial trouble before he sold up. In football, he turned to his next project in the summer of 2020, when failure at Lille was already looming, and bought into Royal Excel Mouscron. Officially, Lopez still spoke about establishing the struggling Belgian top-flight club as a partner side for nearby Lille. But the focus was explicitly on Mouscron itself, and in the medium term he wanted the club from the city on the Belgian-French border to compete among the national elite.

Instead, Royal Excel went down to the second tier just one year after Lopez's arrival. In his second season, complete chaos followed. Wages were not paid on time, and in January 2022 the players went on strike and refused to train. "The president tells us to trust Lopez, that he always keeps his promises. But we must stop deceiving ourselves. We have lost trust in the club's management," raged Mouscron captain at the time Christophe Lepoint weeks earlier on Notele . A few months later, Mouscron's board declared the club bankrupt, and since the summer of 2022 the club has simply no longer existed.

Now another club in Lopez's portfolio from hell faces a similar fate: Boavista Porto. The businessman joined the traditional Portuguese club in October 2020 and then served as club owner from the summer of 2021 until the end of June this year.

What feat did Boavista Porto pull off in 2001?

Boavista are a proud club from the football-mad city in the north of the country and, with their sensational title in 2001, pulled off the feat of becoming the only Portuguese champions of the past 80 years not called Benfica, Sporting or Porto. As at Lille and Mouscron, Lopez arrived at Boavista amid financial strain and billed himself as a potential saviour. Instead, he became a central figure in the final collapse.

The problems only kept getting worse, and for a long time the players could no longer count on receiving their wages. American right-back Reggie Cannon, now at Colorado Rapids in MLS, played for Boavista from 2020 to 2023 and is said to have been paid on time only once in 29 months. The club were later ordered to pay Cannon €400,000 in compensation. FIFA also hit Boavista with a transfer ban in 2023 covering five transfer windows because of the unpaid wages, making the sporting situation even harder.

Relegation from the top flight followed at the end of the 2024/25 season. A few weeks earlier, the situation had deteriorated to the point that the electricity at the stadium was cut off because bills had not been paid. Then the club leadership around Lopez failed to prove Boavista's economic viability to the Portuguese football federation, and the club dropped all the way into the fifth tier in the summer of 2025 after several licences were denied. District football replaced professional football.

Where do Boavista Porto currently stand?

More than 103 years into their history, Boavista now stand on the brink of absolute nothingness. The insolvent club failed to deposit in time the monthly fee needed to extend the insolvency proceedings. Boavista have therefore been excluded from competition since the end of July, so no football is being played there at all right now. Those who care deeply about the club are trying to save it, including through the proceeds from sales of a special shirt. The outcome remains unclear.

Gerard Lopez, at least, is no longer involved. That takes us to Bordeaux, the third and probably most prominent example of a club that fell apart under Lopez's stewardship. Of course, the former Zidane club had been wrestling with financial problems for a long time before that. The American fund Kings Street came in during 2018, but the investment was anything but sustainable, and in the spring of 2021 Kings Street announced that it no longer wanted to "support the club or finance its current and future needs".

Results on the pitch had also been sliding steadily since 2018. Bordeaux went from regular European hopefuls, with the occasional surge towards the top, to a dull mid-table side increasingly worried about slipping towards the bottom. Gerard Lopez was supposed to spark a turnaround when he took over in the summer of 2021. That plan quickly unravelled. In 2022, Girondins finished bottom and were relegated to Ligue 2, becoming a second-tier club again for the first time in 30 years.

What mistakes did Gerard Lopez make at Girondins Bordeaux?

Judging by comments from Jean-Marc Mickeler, head of the French football financial watchdog DNCG, Lopez seems to have handled the situation rather naively. "Too much debt, too little equity and overly optimistic forecasts regarding qualification for the Champions League and the sale of regular first-team players," Mickeler told L'Equipe when listing the causes of Bordeaux's huge dilemma. He added tellingly: "We warned about it from the very beginning."

Bordeaux did keep bringing in money through player sales, including some from their renowned academy. They sold Sekou Mara, now at Racing Strasbourg, to Southampton for €11.5 million in 2022, and Dilane Bakwa, now at OSC Lille on loan from Nottingham Forest, to Strasbourg for €10 million in 2023. It was nowhere near enough.

At the same time, falling revenue in the second division added to the debt, and Bordeaux only narrowly missed direct promotion in 2023. A second year in Ligue 2 hurt badly, and the team also declined sharply on the pitch before finishing only 12th in 2023/24. The damage was so severe that they had to be forcibly relegated to the fourth tier. With debts of around €100 million, that nightmare became unavoidable.

Which former Bayern boss was interested in investing in Girondins Bordeaux?

During the past two years, as Bordeaux unsuccessfully pushed for promotion from the fourth tier, their desperate financial situation scared off more than one potential investor. In the spring of 2025, former Bayern boss Oliver Kahn was interested in investing, but in the end he walked away: "After reviewing the financial, operational and legal information that was finally made available to us at the end of last week, we have decided not to invest the planned approximately €50 million to bring FCGB back to where they belong - Ligue 1," Kahn explained on LinkedIn in June 2025.

Club icons such as Bixente Lizarazu also made no attempt to hide their anger at what had happened to their former club, and Lopez was in the firing line. "I am disgusted, like everyone who loves this club. But what is happening here is unfortunately the consequence of catastrophically bad sporting and financial management for many years," fumed 1998 World Cup winner Lizarazu, who made almost 300 appearances for Bordeaux in total. "Since Gerard Lopez's arrival, it has become incomprehensible and stubborn," the former Bayern player continued.

Then 2026 brought another collapse: the next forced relegation was confirmed. Lopez could not prove the financial backing needed to complete the 2026/27 season, and a €9 million hole remains in the budget. Bordeaux were therefore expelled from the national football pyramid, which covers the top five divisions. In practical terms, that means a restart in Regional 1, the sixth tier. If they get there at all.

Why have Girondins Bordeaux not yet been allowed to play in the sixth tier?

So far, Girondins have not been able to play a single match in the sixth tier. The reason is that while Lopez had not found a buyer and the club was even facing liquidation, the football association of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region refused Bordeaux entry into the competition.

There is, however, some light at the end of the tunnel. As announced on Wednesday, British investment fund Park Bench has agreed to buy the club from Lopez for the symbolic price of one euro. Park Bench are taking on Girondins' huge debts and, in the best-case scenario, Bordeaux could enter the Regional 1, Pool B season on matchday five in mid-October. Their opponents then would be Aviron Bayonnais FC II, the second team of a fourth-tier side.

Bordeaux have already been allowed to play in the Coupe de France this season, or more precisely in a kind of qualifying round for the French equivalent of the DFB Cup, and a fourth-tier side exposed the gap. Angouleme Charente FC won 5-1 after 90 minutes. Girondins had taken the lead in the fifth minute, but Angouleme hit back straight away and were already 3-1 up before a quarter of an hour had even passed. "They are more experienced than us," Bordeaux midfielder El Hadji Mboup admitted on Scap FM after the heavy defeat, acknowledging a clear difference in class, though amid all the bad news he also tried to offer some hope: "In Regional 1 (sixth tier, ed.) we can achieve something with this team. Of course I really want to help take the club back up."

If Bordeaux are finally allowed to play in Regional 1 now, that may be the only positive left. After all, things can hardly get much worse. In the five years since Gerard Lopez arrived, Girondins Bordeaux have gone from a crisis-hit top-flight club to a sixth-tier side that even faced complete extinction. Royal Excel Mouscron did disappear with Gerard Lopez's name attached to the story, and the same could yet happen to Boavista Porto. If it does not, the former surprise champions now belong only in the depths of Portuguese amateur football.