Clermont Foot 63On 1 February 1997 Clermont Foot 63, then a modest club from the lower divisions, eliminated Paris Saint-Germain from the Coupe de France in the round of 16. The Parisians had led 4–1, but Clermont came back to draw 4–4 after extra time and won the penalty shoot-out 4–3. It remains the club's best-known match and the only official meeting with PSG before Clermont reached Ligue 1, a result that the Parisian club itself still recalls as a painful memory.
The club's roots go back to 1911 and Stade Clermontois. In 1984 Stade Clermontois merged with AS Montferrand to form Clermont-Ferrand Football Club, which was renamed Clermont Foot Auvergne in 1990 and, in 2013, Clermont Foot 63, the number referring to the department of Puy-de-Dôme. Clermont-Ferrand, in the Massif Central, is known above all as a rugby city, and the football club has had to rise in its shadow, to the point that it shares its youth training centre with the city's more famous rugby team. The supporters are called the Lancers, and the emblem recalls Vercingétorix, the Gaulish leader who defeated Julius Caesar at Gergovia in 52 BC. In 2020–21 the club introduced a mascot named Torix in his honour.
The climb was slow. Clermont won its first promotion to Ligue 2 in 2002, dropped back into the third division in 2006, and returned immediately. From 2007 it remained in the second division, and for years the team was neither seriously threatened by relegation nor close to promotion. In 2014 the club tried a new approach and appointed Helena Costa as the first woman to coach a men's professional team in France, but she left before the season began. Her replacement was another woman, the former French international Corinne Diacre, who stayed three years and took the team to 12th, 7th and 13th places before leaving to coach the French women's national team. Pascal Gastien took over in 2017.
Under Gastien, on a small budget, Clermont became a top-half side and finished just three points short of promotion in 2019–20. A year later it finished second behind Troyes, and in 2021, in the 110th year of its history, it reached Ligue 1 for the first time. The striker Mohamed Bayo was the top scorer of the second division with 22 goals. In its first top-flight season, 2021–22, the club finished 17th and stayed up, and in 2022–23 it finished eighth with 59 points, the best total for a second-year club in the top flight since Montpellier in 1987–88. In 2023–24, while bottom of the table, it held PSG to two draws, the second a 1–1 with a goal by Habib Keita, and then returned to Ligue 2.
The home ground, the Stade Gabriel-Montpied, opened in 1995 and holds about 12,000 spectators. It is named after Gabriel Montpied, a member of the Resistance and a former mayor of Clermont-Ferrand. For the club's president, Ahmet Schaefer, the key to the success has been hard work and a good deal of humility. Clermont has never won a major trophy, but its record of promotion on a small budget, its pioneering appointments of women coaches and the night against PSG in 1997 give it a distinct place in French football.