After obtaining permission to play this season in National, Sochaux, which came close to bankruptcy during the summer, formalized the arrival of seven players on Monday and is trying to make up for lost time before its first match on Friday.
Goalkeeper Baptiste Valette, defenders Julien Dacosta and Thomas Fontaine, midfielders Mouhamadou Drammeh, Diego Michel and Kévin Hoggas as well as striker N’Dri Koffi have joined the FC Sochaux-Montbéliard squad, the club announced on its website. Internet. Six of these seven players were free of any contract, said the Doubs club.
These reinforcements are intended to compensate for the haemorrhage suffered by the Sochaux workforce. Twenty-four players from last season left in a few weeks, while FC Sochaux spent the summer without knowing where they would play this year.
Ninth in Ligue 2 last season, the almost century-old club had been abandoned by its owner, the Chinese real estate group Nenking, in great financial difficulty.
In July, a project led by Romain Peugeot, great-grandson of the club’s founder, was then born to try to keep the Cubs in Ligue 2. In vain, the file did not convince the executive committee of the FFF, the French National Olympic and Sports Committee (CNOSF) and the administrative court of Paris.
It was then the club’s former president Jean-Claude Plessis, at the helm from 1999 to 2008, and Pierre Wantiez, who had returned expressly from Le Havre AC, who took up the torch, initially managing to find a sales agreement with Nenking before convincing the DNCG with their FCSM 2028 project.
The club now lists 16 players in its first-team squad on its website and will likely have to include youngsters in its squad for its trip to Red Star on Friday at 7:30 p.m.