Nice's Relegation Battle: From Champions League Hopes to Playoff Peril
The final whistle had barely died when the anger finally spilled over. From the second tier of the Allianz Riviera, Nice’s ultras poured down towards the pitch, a furious tide in red and black. Players sprinted for the tunnel. Staff followed. Security lost control.
For Ineos, it was the perfect – and damning – snapshot of a project in ruins.
From Champions League dreams to the brink
This was supposed to be the season Nice stepped up. They began it in the Champions League qualifiers. They could end it in Ligue 2.
A goalless home draw against already-relegated Metz on the final day condemned Nice to a two-legged relegation playoff against Saint-Étienne later this month. Lose that, and a club bought for €100m in 2019 with the stated aim of challenging PSG’s dominance will crash into the second tier.
The timing could hardly be worse for Ineos. With their attention drifting towards Manchester United and talks ongoing with potential buyers, Nice have been left to drift. Now the bill has arrived.
A simple task, horribly botched
All Nice had to do was win a league game at home. One. They had not managed it since 29 October.
The opponent could hardly have been more accommodating. Metz were already down. They had won just three league matches all season, none of them under Benoît Tavenot, who took over in January. His personal record across Metz and Bastia this season reads like a sporting horror story: no wins, nine draws, 18 defeats, two relegations. He finished the campaign without tasting victory once.
Nice still made it look like a mountain.
“Get your arses into gear,” came the chant from the home end before kick-off. The mood was a strange cocktail: anger, a hint of celebration, and nervous anticipation. One banner declared “Everyone to Paris,” a nod to Friday’s Coupe de France final against Lens at the Stade de France. A huge tifo honoured club captain Dante, who had hoped this would be his farewell at the Allianz Riviera before retiring at 42.
Any sense of celebration evaporated quickly. The anger stayed.
Cup final in the shadow of survival
Those two legs against Saint-Étienne now tower over everything. Even the cup final.
“It is no longer a priority at all,” admitted co-president Jean-Pierre Rivère. Nice will walk out at the Stade de France with their minds elsewhere, just as Reims did last season. They lost to PSG in the cup final, then collapsed against Metz in the relegation playoff.
Yehvann Diouf lived all three of those matches for Reims before joining Nice in the summer. He knows exactly how quickly a season can disintegrate. He will be desperate not to relive it.
No one really expected it to come to this. The club’s objectives last summer were deliberately vague – a return to European competition, but no one dared say which one. The ambition blurred as the money slowed. With Ineos tightening the tap, important players such as Evann Guessand and Marcin Bulka were sold. Their replacements did not match the level. Kevin Carlos, signed to fill Guessand’s role, has not scored a league goal. Targets looked elsewhere: Mahdi Camara chose Rennes over Nice.
Franck Haise saw the storm building before anyone else. In the autumn he complained he did not have the players to fight for Europe. Then he went further: he said he simply could not “create a group” from this squad.
A club turning on itself
The fans listened. Their anger grew, and it did not stop at the dressing room door. Players took most of the heat, but sporting director Florian Maurice felt it too. So did Fabrice Bocquet, who briefly replaced Rivère as president.
The season’s lowest point, before Sunday, came in November. Terem Moffi and Jérémie Boga were attacked by their own supporters as they stepped off the team bus at the training ground after a defeat at Lorient. Both would leave the club. Bocquet soon followed. Haise was gone by the end of the year.
Rivère’s decision to bring back Claude Puel as manager has only deepened the crisis. Convinced Haise had lost his fight, the club agreed a mutual parting in December and turned to a familiar face. The results have been catastrophic: just two league wins in 18 games under Puel.
His tactics and selections have been savaged by supporters and pundits alike. But on Sunday night, as boos rained down almost without pause over a lifeless 0-0, it was impossible to tell who the crowd blamed most. The players? The coach? The board? Ineos? It felt like everyone was in the firing line.
At half-time, the ultras left their usual perch high in the second tier and moved down towards the front. Nobody thought they wanted a better view.
When the final whistle went, the dam broke. They surged onto the pitch. Chaos followed, not just inside the stadium but around it, long into the night. Staff, guests and journalists were kept inside the Allianz Riviera until after midnight for their own safety.
Puel tried to understand it. Their “disappointment is legitimate,” he said. Rivère called for “unity”. The words floated away on the boos.
The fracture at Nice is now so deep it feels structural. No one inside the club looks capable of repairing it. And with Ineos edging towards the exit, that might soon be someone else’s problem. If they sell this summer, they will leave behind a scorched landscape.
Elsewhere in France: fury, farewell and a strange title party
Nice’s ultras at least waited until full-time. In Nantes, the anger exploded far earlier.
Already relegated, Nantes hosted Toulouse on the final day, but the match lasted just 22 minutes. The club’s owners had stayed away, citing safety fears. They were right. Ultras hurled ominous black flares and then flooded the pitch in huge numbers.
Players, officials and staff sprinted for the tunnel. One man stayed.
Vahid Halilhodžić, the Nantes manager, stood his ground, facing supporters in balaclavas and pleading with them before finally turning away himself, anguish and sadness carved into his features. “In the 40 years of my career as a player and then a manager, I have never experienced that. It will be deeply engraved in my memory,” he said.
It will also be his final memory in football. He confirmed his retirement. An extraordinary, unsettling way to bow out. Happy retirement, “Coach Vahid”.
On a night of violent images, Paris provided something very different: farce.
PSG had already secured the Ligue 1 title in midweek by beating Lens, but the trophy presentation had been delayed. The plan was to lift it after Sunday’s Paris derby away to Paris FC. There was one problem. The hosts had their own post-match ceremony planned, having secured their top-flight status, and had little interest in turning their ground into a PSG party.
So the champions improvised. A small stand was hastily erected in front of the away end before kick-off, a makeshift stage for a subdued coronation. It felt oddly fitting for a club whose domestic dominance is now treated as background noise, their season judged almost entirely by what happens in Europe.
Luis Enrique has already made it clear: his eyes are on the Champions League final against Arsenal. His players looked like they were thinking the same thing. PSG slipped to a 2-1 defeat to Paris FC that meant nothing and looked like it.
Nice, by contrast, are staring at two matches that will define everything. For a club that started the season chasing the Champions League and now fights for its life, what happens against Saint-Étienne will decide whether this year is remembered as a warning – or a collapse from which they never truly recover.
