IT WAS JUNE 2024 at the sold-out Stade des Alpes in Grenoble. The sun was beaming down. The locals’ hearts were in their mouths. They didn’t dare to believe, but they kept on hoping.
Pro D2 outfit Grenoble had endured a miserable start to their Top 14 access match against Montpellier, who had got off to a flyer with two converted tries in the opening 15 minutes.
But the dogged Grenoblois fought back and held an 18-17 lead with just five minutes to go. Montpellier were on the brink of relegation from to the Pro D2 after more than 20 years at the top table.
It was almost unthinkable for a club who had won the Top 14 just two years before in 2022. And yet here they were, staring down the barrel in the shadow of the French Alps.
Bernard Laporte, the director of rugby, couldn’t even watch. Canal+ showed him pacing in the changing room, checking his phone for updates.
And then, all of a sudden, Cameroonian wing Gabriel N’Gandebe made a thrust up the right and into the Grenoble 22. Out-half Louis Carbonel then darted at the line, making a half-break. Grenoble hauled him down metres out, but they failed to roll away.
Penalty Montpellier. Just to the left of the posts. The boos rang out from Grenoble fans. Carbonel dusted himself off. He lined up his kick. And he planted it between the posts.
Montpellier survived three more fraught minutes until the final whistle, when they exploded in a mixture of delight and nerve-drenched relief.
Having escaped narrowly, Montpellier vowed not to get into that situation again.
Club president Mohed Altrad had already taken decisive action during the season, with Richard Cockerill sacked in November 2023 after a concerning start to the campaign. Cockerill had only just a few months before, but Altrad wasn’t ready to show patience.
Altrad made the controversial decision to hire Laporte – who won two Grand Slams with France and three Heineken Cups with Toulon – as Montpellier’s new director of rugby.
There was no doubting Laporte’s rugby credentials, but it was an eye-raising decision because it came less than a year after he had stepped down from his positions as president of the Fédération Française de Rugby and vice-chairman of World Rugby following a conviction of corruption in a French court.
Laporte received a two-year suspended prison sentence after the court found he had shown favouritism in awarding a shirt sponsorship contract for the French national team to… Mohed Altrad.
So here they were, less than a year later, back in business together.
Montpellier head coach Joan Caudullo. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Experienced French coach Patrice Collazo joined Montpellier at the same time with the title of sporting manager to essentially run the rugby coaching programme as Laporte took on a bigger-picture role off the pitch.
Collazo had only been sacked by Pro D2 side Brive a couple of weeks earlier. He didn’t last too long at Montpellier, being shown the door just 24 hours after the narrow access match win against Grenoble.
Altrad, to be fair, did thank Collazo and outgoing assistant coaches for achieving their mission of “saving the club,” but he wanted to usher in a new era.
Laporte maintained his position, and Altrad made the surprise decision to appoint the relatively unknown Joan Caudullo as the new head coach.
Caudullo came through the Montpellier system as a player, making more than 150 appearances at hooker for the club. He finished his playing days at Mont-de-Marsan but returned to Montpellier to take up a position in the club’s academy.
Caudullo was soon in charge of the academy and Montpellier’s espoirs team, while he briefly stepped up to be the Top 14 club’s senior forwards coach during the 2022/23 season.
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The appointment was met with some scepticism in the French media. Caudullo had extremely limited experience in professional coaching and virtually no public profile. Montpellier’s list of previous bosses was Cockerill, Philippe Saint-André, Xavier Garbajosa, Vern Cotter, Jake White, and Fabien Galthié.
But Caudullo knew the club inside out. He brought in recently retired Montpellier men Benoît Paillaugue and Geoffrey Doumayrou as the new attack coach and defence coach, respectively. These were two men Caudullo had played with and trusted.
Laporte provided experienced guidance and direction from above, while former Montpellier players Didier Bès [scrum], Antoine Battut [forwards], and Jérémy Valls [skills] continued in their coaching roles.
New Zealander Benson Stanley shifted from defence coach to a role focusing on contact skills, while another ex-Montpellier player, Jesse Mogg, joined in an interesting new position that involves helping espoirs players to better integrate into the first team.
It wasn’t headline-grabbing stuff but it was clear that Altrad and Laporte wanted Montpellier to shift in a different direction, with a much stronger foundation to their game and squad.
Watching on anxiously as Montpellier maintained their Top 14 status would have been their big-name recruits for the summer of 2024, a couple of whom caused more controversy.
Only a few months before joining the French club and having come out of retirement to do so, Scottish fullback Stuart Hogg was arrested at his estranged wife’s home “for acting in a threatening or abusive manner.”
Soon after joining Montpellier, he pleaded guilty to domestic abuse and was sentenced to a five-year non-harassment order, as well as a community payback order with one year of supervision. Hogg has had some major injury troubles in the last two seasons.
French international tighthead prop Mohamed Haouas re-joined Montpellier in the summer of 2024, having spent a season with Biarritz.
In 2022, he was given an 18-month suspended sentence for his involvement in a series of burglaries of tobacco merchants back in 2014.
In 2023, Haouas was handed a one-year prison sentence for hitting his wife in public. The 127kg prop told the court he lost control when he saw his wife smoking at the shopping centre where she worked, having told him she had given up.
“I said to myself that if she can lie about the cigarette, she could lie about other things,” he told the court in Montpellier.
A month after that conviction, Haouas was given an 18-month term — nine of them suspended — for aggravated assault, relating to brawl he became involved in with a nightclub owner outside a bakery in 2014
Haouas had been due to join Clermont ahead of the 2023/24 but they moved to cancel the deal, and he ended up signing for Biarritz instead.
It raised eyebrows when Montpellier brought Haouas back on board on a one-year deal.
“We want to support him, help him, put him on the right path, even more than in the past,” said Altrad when the move was criticised. “And from a sporting perspective, we need it.”
Laporte added that “justice has been done, and he has the right to get his act together.”
A few months later, having just signed a two-year contract extension with Montpellier, Haouas was reportedly arrested again, this time for drink driving. He was reportedly stopped with a bottle of vodka sitting on the front seat of his car.
One of Montpellier’s other summer recruits had a run-in with the law soon before joining the club. English number eight Billy Vunipola was arrested and fined by Spanish police after an incident at a nightclub in Mallorca in April 2024. Vunipola has gone on to become a key player for the French side.
Montpellier is clearly a club willing to give players a chance, then.
Mobtpellier celebrate their Challenge Cup semi-final win against the Dragons. Manuel Blondeau / INPHO
Manuel Blondeau / INPHO / INPHO
He wasn’t involved in the recruitment, but there were some other important signings ahead of Caudullo’s first season as head coach, with experienced tighthead prop Wilfrid Hounkpatin, Wallabies hooker Jordan Uelese, Argentinian out-half Domingo Miotti, and French scrum-half Alexis Bernadet joining.
They were indicative of Montpellier’s desire to be a more solid team than had been the case.
Indeed, that was Caudullo’s project in his first season: making Montpellier harder to beat. They went from 13th place and near-relegation to finishing ninth in the 2024/25 season, only five match points off Champions Cup qualification.
The big focus was on being more defensively robust, with Montpellier going from conceding 79 tries in 2023/24 to 64 after Caudullo took over. They also started kicking the ball more often and focusing on their set-piece, trying to pile pressure onto their opponents. In many ways, Montpellier have harked back to the days when Jake White was in charge.
Caudullo’s men have maintained their defensive quality in the Top 14 this season. As things stand, no one has conceded fewer points than Montpellier.
And an increased focus on developing their attack has borne fruit, even if Montpellier are not an all-court attacking team. Their maul is a huge weapon, as underlined again when they beat Connacht in their Challenge Cup quarter-final.
Another batch of recruits last summer have fed into how Montpellier want to play the game, with Australian fullback Tom Banks, Welsh second row Adam Beard, and Scottish scrum-half Ali Price well suited to Montpellier’s plan.
Those were strong additions but Caudello’s side have framed themselves as “outsiders,” in the words of Vunipola.
This is a muscular, low-error, smart Montpellier team who have suffocated plenty of their opponents this season. A 23-21 win away to Bordeaux’s frontline team late last month was among their finest so far. Montpellier did what so many teams struggle to do, and stifled Bordeaux.
Montpellier sit second in the Top 14, although there isn’t much breathing room with Pau, Stade Français, Clermont, and Bordeaux not far behind with three regular-season rounds left to go, two of which involve away games for Caudullo’s team.
But they are back where Altrad wants the club to be, competing at the top level of French rugby. They will be back in the Champions Cup next season, surely determined to make up for lost time there.
In the meantime, they look into next weekend’s Challenge Cup final against Ulster, eager to claim silverware in the latest illustration of their resurgence.
Montpellier didn’t prioritise the competition last season, getting hammered 40-17 at home by Ulster in the quarter-finals when they rested key players, but this campaign has been different.
Not all of their frontliners were always involved, but Montpellier were thoroughly engaged and have won all seven of their games so far. The key men did return for the quarter-final win against Ulster, although Caudullo rotated for the 18-12 semi-final win over Dragons that was much tighter than expected.
Caudullo has become a man in demand, with Toulon reportedly making an approach for him to take over next season, but it seems that he will be staying with his home club as Altrad and Laporte oversee Montpellier’s rise.
Altrad is an intriguing figure. He doesn’t know exactly how old he is, as reported by Forbes. His estimated net worth of close to €6 billion has been amassed through Altrad Group, one of the world’s leading scaffolding companies.
Born in Syria, he was only four when his teenage mother passed away. He was raised instead by his grandmother, who was part of a roaming tribe that tended to goats and camels. Altrad used to sneak to school, such was his appetite to learn, and he eventually earned a scholarship to study in France in 1969.
He quickly learned the French language, eventually qualifying as an engineer and marrying a French woman. His business acumen has made him a billionaire and it was 2011 when Altrad became the majority shareholder of Montpellier Hérault Rugby.
He hadn’t been a rugby man but had become a proud citizen of Montpellier, and the rugby club had been going through a tumultuous time.
Only months after Altrad took control, Montpellier reached the Top 14 final and narrowly lost to Toulouse. With Galthié in charge, it was a team including homegrown players like Caudullo, Fulgence Ouedraogo, François Trinh-Duc, and Julien Tomas, as well as imported favourites such as Timoci Nagusa and Mamuka Gorgodze.
Altrad was smitten by it all, and he has been ever-present in the day-to-day life of the club, as well as a consistent, visible presence at games.
He has sunk lots of his own money into the club. Now in his late 70s, he wants more trophies.
The billionaire, court cases, and an unknown coach - Montpellier's resurgence
IT WAS JUNE 2024 at the sold-out Stade des Alpes in Grenoble. The sun was beaming down. The locals’ hearts were in their mouths. They didn’t dare to believe, but they kept on hoping.
Pro D2 outfit Grenoble had endured a miserable start to their Top 14 access match against Montpellier, who had got off to a flyer with two converted tries in the opening 15 minutes.
But the dogged Grenoblois fought back and held an 18-17 lead with just five minutes to go. Montpellier were on the brink of relegation from to the Pro D2 after more than 20 years at the top table.
It was almost unthinkable for a club who had won the Top 14 just two years before in 2022. And yet here they were, staring down the barrel in the shadow of the French Alps.
Bernard Laporte, the director of rugby, couldn’t even watch. Canal+ showed him pacing in the changing room, checking his phone for updates.
And then, all of a sudden, Cameroonian wing Gabriel N’Gandebe made a thrust up the right and into the Grenoble 22. Out-half Louis Carbonel then darted at the line, making a half-break. Grenoble hauled him down metres out, but they failed to roll away.
Penalty Montpellier. Just to the left of the posts. The boos rang out from Grenoble fans. Carbonel dusted himself off. He lined up his kick. And he planted it between the posts.
Montpellier survived three more fraught minutes until the final whistle, when they exploded in a mixture of delight and nerve-drenched relief.
Having escaped narrowly, Montpellier vowed not to get into that situation again.
Club president Mohed Altrad had already taken decisive action during the season, with Richard Cockerill sacked in November 2023 after a concerning start to the campaign. Cockerill had only just a few months before, but Altrad wasn’t ready to show patience.
Altrad made the controversial decision to hire Laporte – who won two Grand Slams with France and three Heineken Cups with Toulon – as Montpellier’s new director of rugby.
There was no doubting Laporte’s rugby credentials, but it was an eye-raising decision because it came less than a year after he had stepped down from his positions as president of the Fédération Française de Rugby and vice-chairman of World Rugby following a conviction of corruption in a French court.
Laporte received a two-year suspended prison sentence after the court found he had shown favouritism in awarding a shirt sponsorship contract for the French national team to… Mohed Altrad.
So here they were, less than a year later, back in business together.
Experienced French coach Patrice Collazo joined Montpellier at the same time with the title of sporting manager to essentially run the rugby coaching programme as Laporte took on a bigger-picture role off the pitch.
Collazo had only been sacked by Pro D2 side Brive a couple of weeks earlier. He didn’t last too long at Montpellier, being shown the door just 24 hours after the narrow access match win against Grenoble.
Altrad, to be fair, did thank Collazo and outgoing assistant coaches for achieving their mission of “saving the club,” but he wanted to usher in a new era.
Laporte maintained his position, and Altrad made the surprise decision to appoint the relatively unknown Joan Caudullo as the new head coach.
Caudullo came through the Montpellier system as a player, making more than 150 appearances at hooker for the club. He finished his playing days at Mont-de-Marsan but returned to Montpellier to take up a position in the club’s academy.
Caudullo was soon in charge of the academy and Montpellier’s espoirs team, while he briefly stepped up to be the Top 14 club’s senior forwards coach during the 2022/23 season.
The appointment was met with some scepticism in the French media. Caudullo had extremely limited experience in professional coaching and virtually no public profile. Montpellier’s list of previous bosses was Cockerill, Philippe Saint-André, Xavier Garbajosa, Vern Cotter, Jake White, and Fabien Galthié.
But Caudullo knew the club inside out. He brought in recently retired Montpellier men Benoît Paillaugue and Geoffrey Doumayrou as the new attack coach and defence coach, respectively. These were two men Caudullo had played with and trusted.
Laporte provided experienced guidance and direction from above, while former Montpellier players Didier Bès [scrum], Antoine Battut [forwards], and Jérémy Valls [skills] continued in their coaching roles.
New Zealander Benson Stanley shifted from defence coach to a role focusing on contact skills, while another ex-Montpellier player, Jesse Mogg, joined in an interesting new position that involves helping espoirs players to better integrate into the first team.
It wasn’t headline-grabbing stuff but it was clear that Altrad and Laporte wanted Montpellier to shift in a different direction, with a much stronger foundation to their game and squad.
Watching on anxiously as Montpellier maintained their Top 14 status would have been their big-name recruits for the summer of 2024, a couple of whom caused more controversy.
Only a few months before joining the French club and having come out of retirement to do so, Scottish fullback Stuart Hogg was arrested at his estranged wife’s home “for acting in a threatening or abusive manner.”
Soon after joining Montpellier, he pleaded guilty to domestic abuse and was sentenced to a five-year non-harassment order, as well as a community payback order with one year of supervision. Hogg has had some major injury troubles in the last two seasons.
French international tighthead prop Mohamed Haouas re-joined Montpellier in the summer of 2024, having spent a season with Biarritz.
In 2022, he was given an 18-month suspended sentence for his involvement in a series of burglaries of tobacco merchants back in 2014.
In 2023, Haouas was handed a one-year prison sentence for hitting his wife in public. The 127kg prop told the court he lost control when he saw his wife smoking at the shopping centre where she worked, having told him she had given up.
“I said to myself that if she can lie about the cigarette, she could lie about other things,” he told the court in Montpellier.
A month after that conviction, Haouas was given an 18-month term — nine of them suspended — for aggravated assault, relating to brawl he became involved in with a nightclub owner outside a bakery in 2014
Haouas had been due to join Clermont ahead of the 2023/24 but they moved to cancel the deal, and he ended up signing for Biarritz instead.
It raised eyebrows when Montpellier brought Haouas back on board on a one-year deal.
“We want to support him, help him, put him on the right path, even more than in the past,” said Altrad when the move was criticised. “And from a sporting perspective, we need it.”
Laporte added that “justice has been done, and he has the right to get his act together.”
A few months later, having just signed a two-year contract extension with Montpellier, Haouas was reportedly arrested again, this time for drink driving. He was reportedly stopped with a bottle of vodka sitting on the front seat of his car.
One of Montpellier’s other summer recruits had a run-in with the law soon before joining the club. English number eight Billy Vunipola was arrested and fined by Spanish police after an incident at a nightclub in Mallorca in April 2024. Vunipola has gone on to become a key player for the French side.
Montpellier is clearly a club willing to give players a chance, then.
He wasn’t involved in the recruitment, but there were some other important signings ahead of Caudullo’s first season as head coach, with experienced tighthead prop Wilfrid Hounkpatin, Wallabies hooker Jordan Uelese, Argentinian out-half Domingo Miotti, and French scrum-half Alexis Bernadet joining.
They were indicative of Montpellier’s desire to be a more solid team than had been the case.
Indeed, that was Caudullo’s project in his first season: making Montpellier harder to beat. They went from 13th place and near-relegation to finishing ninth in the 2024/25 season, only five match points off Champions Cup qualification.
The big focus was on being more defensively robust, with Montpellier going from conceding 79 tries in 2023/24 to 64 after Caudullo took over. They also started kicking the ball more often and focusing on their set-piece, trying to pile pressure onto their opponents. In many ways, Montpellier have harked back to the days when Jake White was in charge.
Caudullo’s men have maintained their defensive quality in the Top 14 this season. As things stand, no one has conceded fewer points than Montpellier.
And an increased focus on developing their attack has borne fruit, even if Montpellier are not an all-court attacking team. Their maul is a huge weapon, as underlined again when they beat Connacht in their Challenge Cup quarter-final.
Another batch of recruits last summer have fed into how Montpellier want to play the game, with Australian fullback Tom Banks, Welsh second row Adam Beard, and Scottish scrum-half Ali Price well suited to Montpellier’s plan.
Those were strong additions but Caudello’s side have framed themselves as “outsiders,” in the words of Vunipola.
This is a muscular, low-error, smart Montpellier team who have suffocated plenty of their opponents this season. A 23-21 win away to Bordeaux’s frontline team late last month was among their finest so far. Montpellier did what so many teams struggle to do, and stifled Bordeaux.
Montpellier sit second in the Top 14, although there isn’t much breathing room with Pau, Stade Français, Clermont, and Bordeaux not far behind with three regular-season rounds left to go, two of which involve away games for Caudullo’s team.
But they are back where Altrad wants the club to be, competing at the top level of French rugby. They will be back in the Champions Cup next season, surely determined to make up for lost time there.
In the meantime, they look into next weekend’s Challenge Cup final against Ulster, eager to claim silverware in the latest illustration of their resurgence.
Montpellier didn’t prioritise the competition last season, getting hammered 40-17 at home by Ulster in the quarter-finals when they rested key players, but this campaign has been different.
Not all of their frontliners were always involved, but Montpellier were thoroughly engaged and have won all seven of their games so far. The key men did return for the quarter-final win against Ulster, although Caudullo rotated for the 18-12 semi-final win over Dragons that was much tighter than expected.
Caudullo has become a man in demand, with Toulon reportedly making an approach for him to take over next season, but it seems that he will be staying with his home club as Altrad and Laporte oversee Montpellier’s rise.
Altrad is an intriguing figure. He doesn’t know exactly how old he is, as reported by Forbes. His estimated net worth of close to €6 billion has been amassed through Altrad Group, one of the world’s leading scaffolding companies.
Born in Syria, he was only four when his teenage mother passed away. He was raised instead by his grandmother, who was part of a roaming tribe that tended to goats and camels. Altrad used to sneak to school, such was his appetite to learn, and he eventually earned a scholarship to study in France in 1969.
He quickly learned the French language, eventually qualifying as an engineer and marrying a French woman. His business acumen has made him a billionaire and it was 2011 when Altrad became the majority shareholder of Montpellier Hérault Rugby.
He hadn’t been a rugby man but had become a proud citizen of Montpellier, and the rugby club had been going through a tumultuous time.
Only months after Altrad took control, Montpellier reached the Top 14 final and narrowly lost to Toulouse. With Galthié in charge, it was a team including homegrown players like Caudullo, Fulgence Ouedraogo, François Trinh-Duc, and Julien Tomas, as well as imported favourites such as Timoci Nagusa and Mamuka Gorgodze.
Altrad was smitten by it all, and he has been ever-present in the day-to-day life of the club, as well as a consistent, visible presence at games.
He has sunk lots of his own money into the club. Now in his late 70s, he wants more trophies.
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Les Cistes Mohed Altrad Stuart Hogg Top 14