The sports rooster: taken up by a Franco-Swiss businessman

The offer brought by the Franco-Swiss businessman Dan Mamane was retained on Friday to take over the equipment supplier in difficulty, the sports rooster, at the expense of a consortium supported by Xavier Niel and Teddy Riner whose lawyers had denounced a “vitiated process”.

The sportsman’s rooster, which equipped the French delegation at the Paris Olympic Games last summer and had 359 employees at the end of 2024, including 310 in France, was placed in receivership last November.

In a judgment consulted by AFP, the Paris Economic Activities Tribunal (former distributive of Commerce) indicates “to arrest the recovery plan presented by the judicial administrators and based on the Dan Mamane project”.

“Various difficulties” have led the supplier to “cumulative losses over the last four years reaching an amount of around 80 million euros for the company LCSI”, the main operational company which holds the brands of the group, details the court which reports “an extremely precarious cash situation” and “an impasse of cash flow which was looming in December”.

The chosen offer provides that Made 2 Design, the personal holding company of Dan Mamane, in particular known to have bought and then sold Conforama Switzerland, would hold just over 50% of the sports rooster. Mr. Mamane is supported by several investors, including Alexandre Fauvet, former director general of the Fusalp ski clothing brand.

This project provides “the refocusing of the group around the product with a segmentation of the offer, a overhaul of the distribution network around new partners and the closure of non -profitable stores, the development of the women’s range as well as international sales”, thanks in particular to “new contributions at the level of the group up to 70 million euros, of which 16 million euros were paid during the observation period”.

At the social level, it is planned “a social restructuring which would allow the maintenance of 201 posts by implementing between 89 and 94 positions of posts, including 81 to 86 CDI after creation of 14 new positions”, according to judgment.

The “Le Coq Sportif” brand for a period of 4 years “is also planned” the inalienability of the “Sports Coq Sportif”.

Two offers were initially in the running to take over the equipment supplier: Dan Mamane and a consortium bringing together the French billionaire Xavier Niel, the Judoka Teddy Riner, the investment company Neopar, the American group Iconix (Lee Cooper, Umbro) as well as Marc-Henri Beausire, the current boss of Airesis, mother house of the sport coq, and the brand family.

At the end of June, the consortium lawyers had affirmed in a five -page letter addressed to the president of the court as well as to the prosecutor of the Republic of Paris that their recovery plan had been “deliberately hampered, weakened, then ousted from the examination process” and had been the subject of “methodical obstruction of judicial administrators”.

The Cabinet of Business Lawyers August Debouzy indicated “to request the reopening of the debates within the framework of the examination of the recovery plan projects, in that the process followed to this day has been, in multiple respects, vitiated by breaches of the fundamental principles which govern the collective procedure”.

He also considered that “the plan presented by the consortium (had not been ruled out because of its economic or legal characteristics, but because the judicial administrators, from the first weeks of the procedure, decided to make the plan supported by Mr. Mamane their own plan”.