L'Équipe (pronounced[lekip], French for "the team") is a French nationwide dailynewspaper devoted tosport, owned byÉditions Philippe Amaury. The paper is noted for coverage ofassociation football,rugby,motorsport, andcycling. Its predecessor,L'Auto, was founded by wealthy conservative industrialists to undermineLe Vélo, which they found too progressive. It was a general sports paper that also covered the auto racing which was gaining popularity at the turn of the twentieth century.

L'Équipe

The front page ofL'Équipe on 4 July 2011
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Tabloid
Owner(s)	Groupe Amaury
Editor-in-chief	Fabrice Jouhaud
Editor	François Morinière
Founded	1946
Language	French
Headquarters	Boulogne-Billancourt
ISSN	0153-1069
Website	www.lequipe.fr

L'Auto launched theTour de Franceroad cycling stage race in 1903 as a circulation booster. The race leader's yellow jersey (French:maillot jaune) was instituted in 1919, reflecting the distinctive yellownewsprint on whichL'Auto was published.

TheEuropean Champion Clubs' Cup, the competition that would later be rebranded as theUEFA Champions League, was also the brainchild of aL'Équipe journalist,Gabriel Hanot. The participating clubs in thefirst season were selected byL'Équipe on the basis that they were representative and prestigious clubs in Europe.^[1]

L'Auto traces its origins to opposition toLe Vélo, a sports newspaper which began publishing in 1892. In addition to covering cycling, the paper also organized cycling races.Le Vélo took a Dreyfusard position on theDreyfus affair which boosted the paper's sales.^[2]

As the scandal developed, French society and media became increasingly polarized. Divisions withinLe Vélo on whether Dreyfus was guilty lead to its dissolution.Le Vélo began to adopt a pro-Dreyfus stance and allied with Dreyfusards.^[3] Its editor,Pierre Giffard, believed Dreyfus innocent and said so, leading to acrid disagreement with his conservative main advertisers. These included the automobile-makerComte de Dion and industrialistsAdolphe Clément andÉdouard Michelin.

Frustrated at Giffard's politics, they planned a rival paper,L'Auto-Vélo which began publishing in 1900. The editor was a prominent racing cyclist,Henri Desgrange, who had published a book of cycling tactics and training and was working as a publicity writer for Clément. Desgrange was a strong character but lacked confidence, so much doubting the Tour de France founded in his name that he stayed away from the pioneering race in 1903 until it looked like being a success.

Three years after the foundation ofL'Auto-Vélo in 1900, a court in Paris decided that the title was too close to its main competitor, Giffard'sLe Vélo. Thus reference to 'Vélo' was dropped and the new paper became simplyL'Auto. It was printed on yellow paper because Giffard used green.

Circulation was sluggish, however, and only a crisis meeting called "to nail Giffard's beak shut", as Desgrange phrased it, came to its rescue. Then, on the first floor of the paper's offices in the rue du Faubourg-Montmartre in Paris, a 26-year-old cycling and rugby writer calledGéo Lefèvre suggested a race round France, bigger than any other paper could rival and akin to six-day races on the track.

TheTour de France proved a success for the newspaper; circulation leapt from 25,000 before the 1903 Tour to 65,000 after it; in 1908 the race boosted circulation past a quarter of a million, and during the 1923 Tour it was selling 500,000 copies a day. The record circulation claimed by Desgrange was 854,000, achieved during the 1933 Tour.

Desgrange died in 1940 and ownership passed to a consortium of Germans.^[4] The paper began printing comments favourable to the occupying Nazis. When the Germans were finally defeated in 1945, the provisional French government forcibly dissolved the paper alongside other publications that printed pro-Nazi propaganda during the occupation.^[5]

In 1940Jacques Goddet (1905–2000) succeeded Desgrange as editor and nominal organiser of the Tour de France (although he refused German requests to run it during the war, seeTour de France during the Second World War). Jacques Goddet was the son ofL'Auto's first financial director, Victor Goddet. Goddet defended his paper's role in a court case brought by the French government but was never wholly cleared in the public mind of being close to the Germans or to the Head of the French State,Philippe Pétain (1856–1951).^[5]

Goddet could point, however, to clandestine printing of Resistance newspapers and pamphlets in theL'Auto print room^[4] and so was allowed to publish a successor paper calledL'Équipe. It occupied premises across the road from whereL'Auto had been, in a building that had actually been owned byL'Auto, although the original paper's assets had been sequestrated by the state. One condition of publication imposed by the state was thatL'Équipe was to use white paper rather than yellow, which was too closely attached toL'Auto.^[4]

The new paper published three times a week from 28 February 1946.^[6] Since 1948 it has been published daily. The paper benefited from the demise of its competitors,L'Élan, andLe Sport. Its coverage of car racing hints at the paper's ancestry by printing the wordsL'Auto at the head of the page in the gothic print used in the main title of the prewar paper.

L'Équipe is published intabloid format.^[7]

In 1968L'Équipe was bought byÉmilien Amaury (1909–1977), founder of the Amaury publishing empire. AmongL'Équipe's most respected writers have beenPierre Chany (1922–1996),Antoine Blondin (1922–1991) and Gabriel Hanot (1899–1968).^{[citation needed]}

The death of Émilien Amaury in 1977 led to a six-year legal battle over inheritance between his son and daughter. This was eventually settled amicably withPhilippe Amaury owning the dailies while his sister owned magazines such asMarie-France andPoint de Vue. Philippe then foundedÉditions Philippe Amaury (EPA), which includedL'Équipe,Le Parisien andAujourd'hui. At Philippe's death in 2006, the group passed to his widow, Marie-Odile, and their children.^{[citation needed]}

• In 1980L'Équipe began publishing a magazine with its Saturday edition.
• On 31 August 1998,L'Équipe TV was formed.
• In 2005 aSports et Style supplement was added to the Saturday edition.
• In 2006L'Équipe Féminine was first published.
• In 2006L'Équipe bought the monthly,Le Journal du Golf.
• In early 2007L'Équipe supplemented its main website withL'équipe junior, dedicated to youth.

The newspaper's biggest-selling issue is that of 13 July 1998, the day after theFrance national football team won theWorld Cup for the first time after beatingBrazil 3–0 at theStade de France. Containing the banner headlinePour L'Éternité (For Eternity),^[8] it sold 1,645,907 copies. The second best was published on 3 July 2000 after France wonUEFA Euro 2000, when the paper sold 1,255,633 copies.

In 2020, the circulation of L'Equipe was 219,032 copies.^[9]

• 1946–1984:Jacques Goddet
• 1984–1993:Jean-Pierre Courcol
• 1993–2002: Paul Roussel
• 2003–2008:Christophe Chenut
• 2008–present: François Morinière

• 1946–1954: Marcel Oger
• 1954–1970: Gaston Meyer
• 1970–1980: Édouard Seidler
• 1980–1987: Robert Parienté
• 1987–1989: Henri Garcia
• 1989–1990: Noel Couëdel
• 1990–1992: Gérard Ernault
• 1993–2003: Jérôme Bureau
• 2003–: Claude Droussent and Michel Dalloni

• L'Équipe Champion of Champions
• France Football

• Official website(in English and French)