Mehdi Tlili

Mehdi Tlili played twelve professional matches for Massy before he turned nineteen, three of them starts, and left for the top division in the same year. That is a fast start, and the three seasons since have been slower.

Flanker at Pau, 1.93m and 100kg, and 22 years old.

He found the game at Meaux, north-east of Paris, and came through the Massy academy, which has supplied a steady line of forwards to the French professional game without ever being able to keep them.

The move south came at eighteen, in 2023, into the academy first. He scored on the final day of that league season against Montpellier, having played two league matches and two in Europe.

The following season brought six appearances, four of them starts, split evenly between the Top 14 and the Challenge Cup, for a total of 233 minutes. A shoulder injury in January 2025 ended it.

The club extended him to 2027 that June, which is the length of commitment a squad makes to a player it expects to develop rather than one it needs now.

What has held him up is not form but the shape of the squad he joined. Pau have carried a New Zealand Test No 8, a Georgia captain and a Wales-qualified carrier in the same back row across those seasons, and a nineteen-year-old academy flanker was never going to displace any of them.

At 1.93m and 100kg he has the frame of a lineout-jumping blindside and needs the weight that goes with it. Two hundred and thirty-three minutes across a season is not enough rugby to judge a back-rower on, and the next two years are the ones that will supply the evidence.