Racing 92

Former logo, when the team was known as "Racing Métro 92".

In France, early organised sport was a matter for rich people. Racing Club became the epitome of the exclusive athletics club, located in the heart of the Bois de Boulogne in the affluent western district of Paris. As the club's name, Racing, indicates, it was modelled after fashionable English sports organisations, whose ideal of mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body) appealed very much to its members. Many of them were actually aristocrats, and four nobles took part in the first championship final. Although fewer aristocrats belong to the club now, it is still very complicated to join it, and the identity and image is one of exclusivity.

Racing Club has also always defended the amateur spirit of the game and of sports in general. The creation of the Challenge Yves du Manoir responded to this ideal in a period (late 1920s–early 1930s) where French rugby was marred by violence and undergoing creeping professionalism. Yves du Manoir symbolised the romantic side of rugby, its carefree dimension, le jeu pour le jeu (playing for the fun of playing).

In a very different vein, much later, in the 1980s, a talented generation of players revived the club's spirit. They carried it back to the top of French rugby thanks to their performances on the pitch, but they also wanted to bring the fun back into the game, to take rugby out of its Parisian anonymity. They did so through a combination of serious football, humour and self-mockery. Their famous antics were invented by the club's backs (including France flyhalf Franck Mesnel and France wing Jean-Baptiste Lafond) who once played a game in Bayonne with berets on their heads as a tribute to the tradition of attacking play of the Basque club Aviron Bayonnais (11 Jan 1987). As members of a gang which they called le show bizz, they played other matches with black make-up on (10 April 1988 at Stade Toulousain), hair dyed yellow, bald caps (26 Feb 1989 against Béziers), wigs and even dressed up as pelote players (white shirts, black jackets and berets, again) in March 1990 at Biarritz Olympique. In April 1989, they wore long red and white striped shorts to celebrate the sans-culotte who took the Bastille on 14 July 1789. They wore long white trousers to look like players of old in the French championship semi-final on 26 April 1987—and won. Their best prank was in the next game though: they played the 1987 final against Toulon with a pink bow tie (2 May). Just before kick-off, Lafond presented French president François Mitterrand, who always attended the national final, with one of those bow ties. They lost that match but went on to play the 1990 final with the same bow ties. At half-time, they had a drink of champagne on the pitch to recover from the efforts of the first half—and won what proved to be the club's last top-flight title for a quarter-century.

They were also famous for their love of nightlife, which attracted a lot of criticism, especially because so many of them had international duties with France. All this contributed to the image of Racing Club as an eccentric institution, but these players have also been seen as trail blazers for Stade Français's president Max Guazzini, who a few years later, took up the provocative (such as the use of the pink colour) and imaginative spirit to boost his club's image and shake off the conservative traditionalism of French rugby.

As the club hit the front pages, five players capitalised on the success and went on to start a sportswear clothing business called Eden Park (after the famous Auckland stadium) in late 1987. Their development was boosted when the French Federation chose them as official suppliers of France's formal wear in 1998. The company has 270 outlets throughout the world. One of them is in Richmond as Eden Park developed a partnership with Harlequins. Others are to be found in Northampton, Leeds, Belfast, Dublin and Cardiff. In 2003, Eden Park became the official supplier of the Welsh Rugby Union's formal wear for the World Cup in Australia. Eden Park is also directly involved in the Racing 92 club since one of its founders, Eric Blanc—who happens to be Franck Mesnel's brother-in-law, is the club's vice-president.

This particular period ended in the early 1990s when those players left the club. Racing then spent several years in the second division, but retained plenty of ambition. In 2007–08, Racing finished second on the ladder to equally ambitious Toulon, but fell short of promotion with an extra-time loss to Mont-de-Marsan in the Pro D2 promotion playoff final. The following year saw Racing's ambitions realised with a romp to the Pro D2 crown, clinching promotion with four rounds to spare.

In their return to the top flight in 2009–10, Racing finished sixth on the regular-season table, two spots ahead of their Parisian rivals, securing the final spot in the newly expanded playoffs—despite actually being outscored by their opponents on the season. This finish also gave Racing a place in the 2010–11 Heineken Cup. Their season ended with a 21–17 first-round loss at eventual champions Clermont. The 2010–11 season saw Racing emphatically, though only temporarily, reestablish themselves as the top club in Paris, finishing second on the regular-season table to Stade Français' 11th.[5]

Lorenzetti's model for success has been to combine young French talent with big-name imports. More significantly, while he largely bankrolled the team during the first years of his tenure as president, he is committed to making the club self-supporting. To that end, he financed the construction of a new 32,000-seat stadium for the club in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, near La Défense. The new ground, known at its October 2017 opening as U Arena and renamed Paris La Défense Arena in June 2018, has been Racing's home since December 2017. It is also designed to host major concerts, potentially providing Racing with substantial non-match revenue.

Racing made headlines in December 2014, announcing that it had signed All Blacks fly-half Dan Carter, the all-time leading points scorer in international rugby, to a three-year deal effective after the 2015 Rugby World Cup. The contract reportedly made Carter the first player in rugby history to make £1 million (€1.3 million at late-2014 exchange rates) a season,[6] with reports of his annual salary as high as £1.3 million (€1.7 million).[7] When the signing was announced, Lorenzetti said, "Carter will be the best-paid player at Racing but also the least expensive because of the economic benefits."[7] Carter filled the void at fly-half left by the return of Jonathan Sexton to Leinster Rugby at the end of the 2014–15 season.[7]

Still more recently, Racing became the first Top 14 side to establish a satellite club in the United States, signing a partnership agreement in 2016 with Austin Huns, a club from Austin, Texas that planned to turn fully professional. The partnership includes youth player development, player exchanges, Racing 92 exhibitions in Austin, and marketing.[8]