Baptiste Tilloles

Baptiste Tilloles has won the Under-20 Six Nations twice, both as Grand Slams, in 2025 and 2026. He also reached a junior world championship final. He turns twenty in November, and he has already played Champions Cup rugby.

Scrum-half at Bayonne, 1.78m and 81kg, and the son of Julien Tilloles, who played the game professionally.

He followed his father into it at six, at Arcangues, and joined Bayonne in 2018. He studies for a sports commerce and marketing degree in Biarritz alongside playing.

His first professional minutes came in the Challenge Cup in 2024-25. He started in the Top 14 for the first time against Pau in October 2025, and made his Champions Cup debut against the Stormers two months later, after both Maxime Machenaud and Baptiste Germain were injured.

In January he got hurt against Castres, in Bayonne’s first home defeat in eighteen months. The same month he extended to 2029 and was given the Midi Olympique Oscar espoir, the paper’s young player of the year. In February he went back to the France Under-20s for another Six Nations.

The Champions Cup debut is the detail that matters. A club does not hand a nineteen-year-old a European away trip unless it has run out of alternatives or genuinely rates him, and in this case both were true at once.

Two senior nines left this club in one summer. A nineteen-year-old with a contract to 2029 and two Grand Slams is not a coincidence — it is a club deciding who the next one is.