Auguste Cadot

He started a European final in May 2026 and was in a France squad by July, having come out of a part of the country that produces almost no professionals.

Auguste Cadot started the Challenge Cup final on 22 May 2026 and won it. Two months later he was named in a France squad for the Nations Championship, still without a cap. He did not play in any of the three matches, but the call itself was the point.

Centre at Montpellier, 1.81m and 91kg, and 25 years old.

Beaune, in the Côte-d’Or, is where he is from, and it is not a place that sends players into the professional game. He picked the sport up at six at RC Chagny and moved to the club in his own town after that. There is no academy route out of Burgundy, so the decisive move was simply leaving it: Biarritz signed him in 2019, at eighteen.

The wait after that was long. His first Top 14 appearance did not come until June 2022, against Stade Toulousain, almost three years after he arrived on the coast.

Montpellier came in at the end of the 2022-23 season and signed him for three years. That deal has been the making of him. The European final start in 2026 came in a side that also reached the French championship final and lost it, and he spent the season in a midfield rotation rather than watching one.

What the record shows is a player whose progress has been slow and then sudden. Nothing between 2019 and 2022, very little until 2024, and then a European medal and an international squad inside eight weeks. He is 25, which in a centre is early rather than late.