The Top 14 (French pronunciation: [tɔp katɔʁz]) is a professional rugby union club competition that is played in France.

The league is one of the three major professional leagues in Europe (along with the English Premiership and the United Rugby Championship, which brings together top clubs from Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Italy and South Africa), from which the most successful teams go forward to compete in the European Rugby Champions Cup, the championship which replaced the Heineken Cup after the 2013–14 season.

The first ever final took place in 1892, between two Paris-based sides, Stade Français and Racing Club de France, which were the only teams playing the competition that year, with the latter becoming the inaugural champions.

At the same time, rugby was also introduced via the port of Bordeaux to south-western France, and quickly merged with popular local traditions of ball games.

The championship, now truly on a national scale, saw the emergence of the first true dynasty of French rugby, with the domination of Stade Bordelais, who played 12 of the 13 finals between 1899 and 1911, winning seven of them.

The normal competition returned for the 1920 season, and Stadoceste Tarbais became the first post-war champions, defeating the Racing Club de France in the final.

During the 1920s Stade Toulousain initiated its now famous rugby history, winning five Championships during the decade (Stade's first feat took place in 1912 when they were crowned champions without losing a single game throughout the season: the team was nicknamed "la Vierge Rouge" — the Red Virgin, a reference to the club shirt color).

The most stunning example of brown amateurism was the Union Sportive Quillan, a club of a village of 3,000 residents who managed to advance to three finals and win one of them, because Jean Bourrel, the owner of the village hat factory, offered paid positions in his factory to rugby players; he wanted to use the club as an advertisement for his product.

In 1942, the rugby union league was reinstated, with Jean Dauger's Bayonne, Puig-Aubert's USA Perpignan and Albert Ferrasse and Guy Basquet's Agen among the big team.

The 1940s saw the appearance of the Tarn department on the French rugby map, with double by Castres and a victory by US Carmaux, but above all the emergence of a new dynasty.

With a core group of eight international players - Antoine Labazuy, Jean and Maurice Prat, Thomas Mantérola, Louis Guinle and Roger Martine - FC Lourdes contested 10 finals between 1945 and 1960, winning 7 titles.

Lourdes were declared champions because they had scored two tries to Toulon's none and also because there was no time to schedule a third final as the France national team were about to leave on a tour to New Zealand and South Africa.

In the mid-1970s, after being held in Toulouse, Lyon and Bordeaux, the final was fixed on a permanent basis to the newly reconstructed Parc des Princes in Paris.

A former number eight of the club in the 60's, and a high school and university teacher, Daniel Herrero was named as head coach of RC Toulon in 1983.

The club's main opponent was the resurgent Stade Toulousain, with a generation nicknamed "the gymnastics professor team", because of the job held by eight of them.

Biarritz won in 2002 its first title since 1939, then two others in 2005 and 2006, with a core of players like Marc and Thomas Lièvremont, Joe Roff and Dimitri Yachvili.

After experiencing success at the beginning of the sport, this club had long been stuck in the lower divisions of French rugby.

Bought by Max Guazzini, the owner of the successful radio station NRJ, the club came back with a core of young and exciting players coached by Bernard Laporte to claim five titles between 1998 and 2007.

Encouraged by the Stade Français experience, other wealthy individuals invested in Top 14 : Mohed Altrad in Montpellier, Mourad Boudjellal in Toulon, assembled teams of star to compete for the title.

[6] Stade Français players soon voted almost unanimously to go on strike over the proposed merger,[7] and within days LNR held an emergency meeting to discuss the Paris clubs' plans.

[9] The 1993 French Rugby Union Championship was won by Castres, who beat Grenoble 14–11 in the final, a match decided by an irregular try.

[12] Jacques Fouroux, then coach of Grenoble, came into conflict with the French Rugby Federation after claiming the match had been fixed.

Aided by high attendance, large television rights contracts,[16] public subsidies and the rise of the euro exchange rate,[17] Top 14 clubs have seen their overall spending budget increase significantly.

This law had allowed all member clubs in French professional sports organisations to treat 30% of each player's salary as image rights.

For example, although the Armitage brothers (Delon, Steffon and Guy) all represented England internationally, they qualified as JIFF because of their tenure in Nice's youth setup.

[30] By the 2012–13 season, the internationalization of the Top 14 had reached such a state that Irish rugby journalist Ian Moriarty, who has had considerable experience covering the French game, asked the rhetorical question, "Has there ever been such a large disconnect between France's club teams and the international side they are supposed to serve?"

He cited the following statistics from that season to make his point:[31] While the JIFF policy worked on one level—the number of foreign players recruited into the Top 14 went from 61 for 2011–12 to 34 for 2014–15—clubs quickly found a way around the rules.

Many clubs dispatched scouts to identify top teenage prospects in other countries, and then enrolled them in their academies to start the JIFF qualification process.

In turn, this means that most young French players are technically well behind their counterparts in many other countries, most notably Commonwealth members and Ireland.

The now defunct European Shield, a repechage tournament for clubs knocked out in the first round of the Challenge Cup that was played for three seasons in 2003–05, was won by a French team each time.