Earvin Ngapeth is preparing to close his enchanted break in Poitiers

Three months after his arrival in Poitiers, Earvin Ngapeth will play his last match with his favorite club on Friday: an epilogue to the enchanted parenthesis of a world volleyball star, in a country where this sport remains confidential, despite the success of the Blues.

Crowned with a second consecutive crown of Olympic champion with the Blues at the Paris Games, the 33-year-old receiver-attacker signed to everyone's surprise in mid-September with Stade Poitevin, keeping the possibility of leaving his new club early January in case of an interesting offer. She came from Fenerbahçe and, after a final match against Tours, her first professional training, Ngapeth will resume at the beginning of January in Turkey the course of a career contested in the biggest European championships since 2011.

Due to a lack of sufficiently interesting offers abroad after the Olympics, Ngapeth jumped at the chance to join Poitiers: the club in his town, where his mother still lives and where he performed his first smashes in the wake of his father Éric. , coach of the SPVB during its first championship title in 1999. “It was also the right time to give a good boost to my club, to my city”had confided at the time of his signing the one who had never worn the jersey of the Poitevin club.

It's as if Mbappé had signed.

Cedric Enard

Beyond that, Ngapeth came to offer a big spotlight to a French volleyball championship still lacking notoriety, mainly because very few French internationals play there. Nicolas Le Goff (Montpellier) is preparing to once again become the only Olympic gold medalist to play in France, League A clubs having much lower financial resources than their Italian, Polish or Turkish counterparts. Even outside of volleyball, rarely in the history of French sport has a star of this ilk, named MVP of the Games in Paris and far from retirement despite his 33 years, returned to the French fields.

“It’s as if Mbappé had signed”Cédric Énard, the Poitevin sports director and architect of this arrival, was enthusiastic at the end of September. From Ngapeth's first match against Narbonne on September 28, Poitiers plunged into euphoria: the 2,422 available seats in the Lawson-Body hall went like hotcakes and jersey sales reached the equivalent of the last two years in a week.

Full rooms

Since then, Poitiers has packed every home game and is preparing to play in front of nearly 5,000 people at the Futuroscope Arena for the last of its star. But attendances also skyrocketed in all the rooms where Ngapeth visited. During the second day in Chaumont, the ticket office was “stormed for a few minutes, so it was difficult to connect”told the Haut-Marne club. Result: an attendance increase of 33% during Chaumont-Poitiers and even 180% during the Poitevins' trip to Montpellier, detailed the National Volleyball League, specifying that the rooms were more full wherever Poitiers went.

Faced with the enthusiasm, BeIn Sport, which broadcasts one League A match per day, has adapted its programming to offer five of the first 14 Poitiers matches, before the one against Tours on Friday which will also be broadcast. But beyond the popular and economic impact, the arrival of the double Olympic champion will also have borne fruit on the field. Only 11th in the last regular season and absent from the play-offs since 2021, the SPVB is in fourth place after 14 days, with a view to the final phases which will concern the first eight. It remains to be seen whether the Ngapeth effect will continue on and around the field despite his departure, in a club which has been chasing a French championship title since 2011.