In 1920, it replaced the Champ de Manœuvres and Stade des Casernes, the first soccer stadiums in the Languedoc port.

In the late 1990s, the Stade Louis-Michel was built just a few yards away, and the city's flagship club decided to leave its historic stadium.

From then on, the town's second club, Pointe-Courte de Sète, played in the Georges-Bayrou stadium.

To underline this double dimension, journalists of the time called it "the Mecca of soccer".

But a few years after the municipal elections of 1983, the new mayor Yves Marchand, who had conquered the town's historic Communist stronghold, wanted to leave his mark on the history of Sétois soccer.