The camera flies over the Palace of Versailles, its gardens, its statues, against a backdrop of grandiloquent music. This opens the documentary series The Club, broadcast on Canal+. For six episodes, it goes behind the scenes of the life of a football club, with access to training sessions, the locker rooms, even the managers’ offices, a promise of total transparency.
Each episode is carefully scripted, with its dose of emotion, “on camera” interviews, characters whose contours we discover little by little; the punchlines are boosted by tense editing, omnipresent music and additions of clamor and applause to electrify everything. Building on the success of the first season and quality production, a second season is already being filmed.
This is not the first time that a documentary series has been devoted to a club. From Manchester City to Boca Juniors via Juventus, international football institutions have joined the game; without forgetting Sunderland, a very popular club from the north of England, which was entitled to its hour of television glory on Netflix. The Club has a much more modest record and CV, since it plays in National (the third French division) and light years away in terms of popularity: FC Versailles.
A “political” eviction of the family group
It is precisely to counterbalance these weaknesses and the team’s meager results that its owner, Alexandre Mulliez, 39 years old, former manager of Auchan France and grandson of the founder of the supermarket chain, decided to focus everything on storytelling, social networks and communication. The pitch that this 2.0 boss sold to producers was enticing: “A son of a billionaire and a son of farmers will do everything to revive a club on the verge of bankruptcy in the city of the Sun King. » The series has found its audience, but the sporting performances are struggling to come. The club won its stay in the National in May 2025. At the start of 2026, it is in an honorable sixth place in the ranking (out of 17), and retains a small hope of moving up to Ligue 2 at the end of the season.
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