FC Perpignan
The Football Club Perpignan or FC Perpignan for short is a French football club from Perpignan in Northern Catalonia . After a merger, he now appears as FC Canet Roussillon .
The club colors are sky blue and the Catalan yellow-red. Nowadays, the men's team competes in the Stade Saint-Michel in neighboring Canet-en-Roussillon , which has a capacity of almost 3,500 spectators.
history
The club was founded in 1934 as Club Olympique Perpignanais . Until around 1950 he was only number 2 in the city behind the footballers of the Union Sportive Arlequins , known mainly for their rugby division , who even competed in the professional second division in the mid-1940s . The CO, however, was only once in the national main round of the cup competition in 1944 , but did not appear there for his game in Grenoble . After a three-year interlude as Stade Olympique Perpignanais (1949-1952), the name was changed to FC Perpignan in 1952. This was followed by the club's successful sporting years (see section below) , in which the footballers shared the 13,000-seat urban Stade Jean-Laffon with the rugby players of the USAP. However, when the French Football Association "surprisingly withdrew the professional license" from the FC after the end of the 1958/59 season , the club - and with it higher-class football in almost the entire region - disappeared for more than a quarter of a century in the lowlands of the lower amateur leagues at the departmental level .
It was only in the second half of the 1980s that FC Perpignan began to return to national league operations; In 1986 he rose to the third division and in 1991 to the second division, in which he was represented for five of the following six years. At the end of the 1996/97 season he had to undergo judicial bankruptcy and was dissolved. Although the FC was not relegated, as in 1959, the next season in the fourth division began for its immediately re-established successor, Sporting Perpignan Roussillon , and its path went even deeper in the early 21st century. Renamed Perpignan Football Catalan in 2001 , the club merged with FC Canet 66 in 2002; the resulting Perpignan Canet FC has not yet returned to nationwide amateur gaming (CFA or at least CFA 2) until 2013 .
League affiliation and achievements
FC Perpignan had professional status from 1952 to 1959 and from 1994 to 1997; He has never played in the top French league before, but during these ten years - and from 1991 to 1993 - he was part of the second division. His best placements were eighth in 1954 and 1996, when the D2 played in a group of 20 and 22 teams, respectively, and rank 7 in 1991/92 (D2 in two groups with 18 participants each). In the 1995/96 season , for example, up to 10,000 visitors filled the Stade Jean-Laffon for games against particularly attractive opponents such as Olympique Marseille or FC Toulouse . In 2013/14, the successor PCFC joins the sixth division d'Honneur .
In the cup competition for the Coupe de France , after 1944 - at that time still as CO Perpignan - the FCP had ten more main round participations, the last one in 1996 to the present (2013) . He succeeded in doing this essentially in the 1950s and 1990s, the time when the club played in Division 2 . In three events, the Catalans made it to the sixteenth finals (1954, 1955 and 1959), and in the 1956/57 season they even made it to the top 16 teams in the country (eighth finals). FC Perpignan succeeded in the round of 16 against Olympique Marseille in Sète - cup games were generally played on a neutral pitch in those years - a 2-1 success, and in the following round they kept up against Girondins Bordeaux for a long time at 0-1. Two years later , this time in Carcassonne , Perpignan knocked Marseille out of the competition again, and again the final result was 2-1.
Well-known former players and coaches
- Jean Avellaneda , coach 1950–1956
- Robert Dewilder , coach 1996/97
- Lassina Diabaté , Ivorian national player, 1994–1997 with FCP
- Roman Jakóbczak , Polish national player, 1979/80 with FCP
- César Rodríguez , player 1955–1957
- Jules Sbroglia , coach and sports director from the mid-1980s
- Pierre Sinibaldi , coach 1956-1959
literature
- Thierry Berthou / Collectif: Dictionnaire historique des clubs de football français. Pages de Foot, Créteil 1999, Volume 2, ISBN 2-913146-02-3
- L'Équipe / Gérard Ejnès: Coupe de France. La folle épopée. L'Équipe, Issy-les-Moulineaux 2007, ISBN 978-2-915-53562-4