Baptiste Couilloud

Baptiste Couilloud has been the Top 14‘s leading try-scorer twice — eleven in 2022 and seventeen in 2024. Wings do that. Scrum-halves almost never do.

He plays for Lyon, is 1.76m and 82kg, and has never played for anyone else.

He was born in Lyon and started at the club’s rugby school at six. His father Hervé played third-division football for Saint-Priest and Vaulx-en-Velin; his brother Barnabé played at Lyon, then Biarritz, then Grenoble. Baptiste was a fly-half until the Crabos, and was moved to nine when Julien Hervouët arrived from Aix.

He took a science baccalauréat with distinction in 2015 and a civil engineering diploma at Lyon 1, and joined the club’s academy the same year, then the Pôle France at Marcoussis.

Pierre Mignoni had him in the professional squad by 2016-17. He won Pro D2 with the club in 2016 and the Challenge Cup in 2022, and was a losing Challenge Cup finalist in 2025.

France capped him against Italy on 23 February 2018 in the Six Nations, and he has seventeen caps and four tries. He won a European Under-18 title in 2015, at both fifteens and sevens, and played two junior world championships.

The Nuit du Rugby named him revelation of the season in 2018, and he has since become the most consistently dangerous attacking nine in the French league.

A sniping nine who scores from close range and plays at high tempo. The two golden boots are the number that matters, and no other scrum-half in the league is close to them.