Léo Carbonneau

Léo Carbonneau started a top-flight match two weeks after his eighteenth birthday, against Stade Français, because Brive had no fit scrum-half left. He played well in a defeat and has been a professional ever since.

Scrum-half at Racing 92, 1.69m and 79kg, and 21 years old.

His father Philippe played for France at the same position, and his uncle Olivier played too. Léo followed him around: to Bizanos, where Philippe coached the backs, and then to Brive in 2013, when his father took over the club he had won a European Cup with in 1997.

The players he says he watches are his father, Antoine Dupont, Aaron Smith and Teddy Iribaren, the last of whom he saw training at Brive as a boy.

The 2023 season was the one that made his name. He scored his first league try in his second start, against the club he now plays for. He played four rounds of the under-20 Six Nations, scored against Scotland in a 54-12 win, kicked four conversions against Wales, and finished second in the tournament behind England.

That June he was a junior world champion, coming on late in a 50-14 win over Ireland in the final.

Brive were relegated and he stayed two more seasons in the second division, scoring regularly, before joining the Top 14 squad in the Paris suburbs in 2025.

The move to Paris is the hard part of the story rather than the reward. He arrives behind an established international at the position, having spent two seasons as a first-choice nine in the second division, and the step is a considerable one.

A small, quick nine with a kicking game, a world junior medal and a surname that has been in French rugby for thirty years.