The Boulieu-lès-Annonay sports star made do with the means at hand to get by after the floods of October 17 which ravaged the synthetic football field. Teams from four departments help the club with training and a prize pool has been launched.
It is one of the biggest football clubs in Ardèche which risks disappearing and which is calling for help: the sporting star Boulieu-les-Annonay has no longer had a field since the floods of October 17. The brand new synthetic pitch, inaugurated in January, was literally ravaged by the waters of the Deume, which burst its banks. “There were tree trunks that were dragged, so it tore up the synthetic” says the club president, Yvan Chazalet. “It also entered part of the buildings, then even the parking lot was flooded. We were able to access the facilities only two days later. The town hall brought back the company that had posed. For her, there's not much to recover“The problem is that outdoor grounds like that cannot be insured and it is unthinkable for the town hall to pay for a brand new stadium.
Training spread across 4 departments
Thanks to exceptional solidarity, the 350 licensees still manage to train elsewhere. On the grounds of the Annonay football and rugby clubs, but also in Davézieux, Roiffieux, Bourg-Argental in the Loire, at the Beausemblant stadium in the Drôme noprd, in Chanas in Isère, 4 departments in total are mobilized. It works in the short term, but the president of Boulieu is more worried about the future: “the question that arose was what we were going to become. So we knew that with this principle of exchanging ground, we could hold out until the end of the season. But the concern we had was from September 2025, that is to say next season. So we started from the principle of trying to renovate our pitch to be able to tell our licensees from next year, in September, we will be able to have you play on the pitch again.”.
Renovate or rebuild land, but with what money?
Originally, the stadium cost 1.1 million excluding taxes. What proportion is salvageable or not? At any rate, the club opened a kitty by linking a video with player testimonials. So far, less than 10,000 euros have been collected. The first cleaning and clearance work is carried out by club volunteers and Yvan Chazalet regrets that apart from the football district, no one reacts. “We don't have the authority that tells us, well, you are 350 licensees, you are a big club, we are going to help you, we are going to do this, we are going to do that. No, we have to fend for ourselves“explains the manager.”That's what's crazy, I mean. When we have millions involved in football and we have a small club, we don't need millions, we need a few thousand, even a hundred thousand euros to be able to rebuild our field and get our licensees playing again“. The prize pool was shared by professional players, notably the former Saint-Etienne goalkeeper, Jessy Moulin.
