“We go from 11,000 to 3,500 members”, what becomes of the Sociochaux association, savior of the FCSM?

Sociochaux, an association of FC Sochaux-Montbéliard supporters founded in 2018, participated in the rescue of the club in the summer of 2023 by raising funds. Today, she continues to carry out projects serving the club. We tell you.

“In the summer of 2023, we brought together 11,000 people who had participated in the rescue by raising 770,000 euros”, remembers Mathieu Triclot, president of the Sociochaux association, with emotion.

As 2025 begins, the organization has approximately 3,500 members. “It may not seem like much when we go from 11,000 to 3,500 members, but when we look at Bastia or Guingamp, in the second year, they only retained 10% of their members. There, we are at more than 10 %”, he puts it into perspective.

As a reminder, Sociochaux was born in 2018 to help the club in case it collapsed due to poor management by its owners. “This disaster scenario came true and that’s when we activated the club’s promise,” says the president of the association. Abandoned by Chinese shareholders, the historic Doubs club moved from League 2 to the National Championship in the summer of 2023.

READ ALSO: FCSM: fundraising by the “Sociochaux” association exceeds 50,000 euros collected in less than two days

Thanks to the funds that the organization managed to raise, Sociochaux returned to the capital of the club and to the governance of the club. “Which is quite unique”, he notes. For the first year, the 11,000 people who participated financially in saving the club were automatically registered as members of the association. The second year, the annual contribution amounted to 12 euros.

The transition between the first and second year went very well. “It went beyond our expectations”. Mathieu Triclot is aware of the difficulty of finding members: “We know the efforts that need to be made to reach people and convert that into commitment and that is a very good signal”.

I hope that all the activity we do for the club is seen and that it touches people.

According to him, the secret of this success is to be found in one of the first actions that the association carried out. “We made an original jersey with the names of the 11,000 donors and many bought it. I think that when you start to wear it, it does something. It played an important role in the fact that people ‘appropriate the association’, he notes.

ALSO READ: REVIEW. “Sochaux will live”: our magazine at the heart of the rebirth of the FCSM

The president of the Sociochaux association also notes with joy that the members are proactive. “They want to bring ideas to the club, they are inventive. They have ideas that we would not have had”. Members of the association offered to travel to matches by bus, create a comic strip and a magazine about the club.

What is at the center of the association’s project is to bring out ideas from our members.

The comic book on the history of the Sochaux club should be released in June 2025 and the bus journeys continue this year. “There is the ecological dimension and then the dimension of conviviality, traveling together as supporters. The idea is not only to take a bus, but to offer quizzes and games to do during the journey,” explains Mathieu Triclot.

This year, 56 ideas were submitted. “It’s considerable and it seems a good sign. It means that we have successfully made the transition between the year of rescue and now, that we continue to develop and bring interesting things,” he thinks. A mini-series project and a board game about FC Sochaux are being considered.

Mathieu Triclot is satisfied with the evolution of Sociochaux: “I think we made a huge effort to structure things. We went from 60 people to 11,000 and we did a lot of behind-the-scenes work”.

Those responsible have put in place rules of ethics to frame the association in relation to the club: “The idea is that the association is at the service of the club, so we try to support it by all means possible. When we can, we make a financial contribution for the training center in particular”.

READ ALSO: “A global SCIC would have slowed down the development of FC Sochaux”: Sociochaux reacts to the new governance of the FCSM

A Sociochaux match is scheduled for March 7, 2025 in Bonal between FCSM and Nîmes. Last year’s match was a great success: “It was around the jersey, the emotion was crazy. For once, the players wore the names of the supporters and not just their name or that of the sponsors”.

There were wonderful stories. It turns out that some players had their name on the jersey twice, both as a player and a supporter.

The president of the association wishes to renew the operation “to remind you that FC Sochaux is not a club like any other, it belongs to its supporters”. But this year, the meaning of this match will nevertheless change a little.

“Last year, we were in the commemoration, but this emotion will erode, so this match is the moment to experiment with things: activities at the stadium, projects around the stadium that we could do differently and that we produce with the club”. For now, the actions are being kept secret. “And the ticket office will be open as soon as possible”.