When Dan Carter signed for Racing Métro last year, in a deal reportedly worth more than £1m a year that would make him the highest paid player in rugby union, the club’s owner and chairman, Jacky Lorenzetti, said that he expected the New Zealand fly-half to quickly repay the investment by helping swell the sale of tickets and merchandise.
He anticipated that Carter would make the same impact as Jonny Wilkinson did when the England fly-half joined Toulon. Twelve months on, though, as Carter prepares to make his debut for the renamed Racing 92 against Northampton – partnered at half-back by another veteran, Mike Phillips – in the Champions Cup on Saturday, the outlook has changed. The arrival of the 33-year-old World Cup winner has not prompted a surge in sales and the Stade Yves-du-Manoir in Colombes, in the Parisian suburbs, will not be sold out for his first match in Racing’s light blue and white colours, six years after injury brought to a premature end his sabbatical in Perpignan.
Carter is, though, still seen as an investment by Lorenzetti who took over the club and resolved to make it the most successful in Europe in 2006 having made a £550m fortune through his property business. His funding helped Racing earn promotion to the Top 14 and become a fixture in the European Cup, but nothing to rival the success at Toulon.
Home for Carter, who is renting a house in Paris, will be a crumbling stadium that for many years, as the Stade de Colombes, played host to the French national team, until the opening of the modern Parc des Princes in 1972. While Lorenzetti has tried to tempt spectators with a number of big name signings, the lack of facilities at the ground and its lack of atmosphere have worked against him. And so in the summer of 2017, when Carter will enter the final year of his contract, Racing will move to a new ground a few miles east, Arena Stadium Nanterre – La Defense.
It will be a state-of-the-art facility, the first of its kind in European rugby. It will be an indoor stadium built with a non-retractable roof that will house 32,000 spectators for Racing’s matches and between 10,000 and 45,000 for concerts. It will also provide an office for the local council and substantially increase the club’s revenue from non-matchday activities and reduce its dependence on Lorenzetti. The hope is that by the time it opens, Carter will have helped raise Racing’s profile to the extent that there will be a number of bidders for the naming rights to the arena as well as a waiting list for season tickets.
“It is not just a player that Racing has bought in Carter but credibility,” said Lionel Maltese, a lecturer and expert in the economics of sport, in an interview with Le Monde. “He will give them legitimacy, a World Cup winner and the leading points scorer in the history of international rugby. He will be a catalyst, and I think they will find it easier with him in their team to sell the naming rights to the new ground. They will be mindful of what Wilkinson did at Toulon: a big star can have a multiplier effect, but just as Wilkinson arrived from Newcastle with a poor injury record, so Carter has missed a lot of rugby in the last three years and the signing has an element of risk.”
Carter has not been made available to the media this week, focusing instead on getting to know his new team-mates, who include his fellow All Blacks Joe Rokocoko, Chris Masoe and Casey Laulala, as Lorenzetti looks to New Zealand for inspiration on the field, and getting to grips with a new language. He has French lessons every Monday with Ian Borthwick, the club’s former media manager who is now an adviser to Lorenzetti, and has worked not just on the words he will be using when calling moves but their pronunciation.
Carter will be 36 when his contract with Racing ends. Just as a succession of long lay-offs helped Wilkinson prolong his career, so the club hopes the New Zealander’s second stint in French rugby will be considerably longer than the first. Lorenzetti says Carter, despite his high salary, did not come to Paris for the money, adding: “He had even higher offers in Japan.”
Carter, in his last media appearance, said his ambition matched that of his new club. “It is not for me to turn up and try to change everything,” he said. “I have to fit in with the structures and my team-mates, learn as much as possible and then add something after a few months.
“There are some amazing players and great attacking ability here. What we need to find is consistency of performance instead of being amazing one week and not so the next. What we have is a desire to be there at the end of the league and European competitions and I am excited to be a part of it.”
