L'Équipe

What is L'Équipe?

L'Équipe is a French sports newspaper published every day and distributed nationally. The Alliance pour les chiffres de la presse et des médias (ACPM), the body that audits French circulation and digital traffic, records the title under the family presse quotidienne nationale, gives its periodicity as quotidien, and lists its publishing address as 40-42 Quai du Point du Jour, Boulogne-Billancourt.^[2] In the ACPM certified ranking of national dailies for 2025-2026 it stands third by paid French circulation, at 254,954 copies, behind Le Monde at 564,586 and Le Figaro at 397,194.^[1]

The title sits inside a group that also edits television services. Arcom, the French audiovisual and digital regulator, publishes an annual obligations report headed « Obligations du service de télévision L'Equipe édité par le groupe Amaury », which names the company L'Équipe 24/24 as the editor of the channel and records that « la chaîne L'Equipe a été lancée sur le réseau hertzien terrestre en décembre 2012 », on channel 21, succeeding L'Équipe TV, a service conventioned in 1998.^[6] By a decision adopted on 26 October 2022 and published on 8 December 2022, Arcom conventioned two further services edited by the same company, L'Équipe Live 1 and L'Équipe Live 2, « destinés à être diffusés ou distribués par les réseaux n'utilisant pas des fréquences assignées par l'Autorité ».^[7]

A weekly, L'Équipe Le Magazine, is audited separately by the ACPM from the same Boulogne-Billancourt address.^[9] On the digital side the ACPM certifies both a unified website, lequipe.fr, and a unified application under the same title.^[4]

What does L'Équipe cover?

The perimeter that can be documented from audited and regulatory records is a sports title published across five certified surfaces: the daily newspaper, the weekly magazine, the website lequipe.fr, a unified mobile application, and the television channel on channel 21, with two further online channels conventioned by Arcom in 2022.^{[2][4][6][7][9]} The ACPM classification is of a national daily, not of a specialist single-sport title, and the regulator treats the television service as a sports service subject to its own obligations.^[6]

The founding subject matter is recorded by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which notes that the paper carried the sub-title « le stade, l'air, la route » at its launch — stadium sport, air sport and road racing.^[5] The ACPM records aggregate the print and digital surfaces under a single brand rather than by discipline, so no certified split of the title's output between football, cycling, rugby union, tennis and the rest could be retrieved.^[3]

How large is L'Équipe's audience?

Print. The ACPM certified figure for 2025-2026 is 254,954 copies of diffusion France payée, third among the national dailies it audits.^[1] The same body's monthly declaration for July 2026 gives 280,322 copies of diffusion France payée, and its audience measurement for the first half of 2026 gives 2,807,000 readers aged 15 and over.^[2] For the weekly, the ACPM records 247,807 copies of paid French circulation for 2025 and 262,080 for the single month of March 2026.^[9]

Digital. In the ACPM classement des marques numériques for August 2026 the L'Équipe brand recorded 166,000,579 total visits, placing fifth in that month's ranking behind Snapchat, Leboncoin, Ouest-France and Franceinfo.^[3] Broken down, the certified unified site lequipe.fr recorded 73,352,903 visits and 294,345,869 pages viewed in August 2026.^[4]

Television. For April 2026 the trade title Sport Business Club, reporting Médiamétrie data published on 4 May 2026, gave la chaîne L'Équipe an average audience share of 1.4 per cent, down 0.4 of a point on March, with 31.6 million unique viewers over the month, a fall of 3.1 per cent; that television figure rests on a single trade source rather than on a measurement published directly by Médiamétrie.^[8]

Since when has L'Équipe existed?

The Bibliothèque nationale de France dates the first issue to 28 February 1946.^[5] On the BnF's account the paper followed L'Auto, the sports daily that had launched the Tour de France, which was banned at the Liberation for collaboration; the new title could use neither L'Auto's « papier jaune et le lettrage gothique caractéristiques du titre » nor articles signed by its owner Jacques Goddet, and it drew on the support and participation of members of the Resistance in its newsroom.^[5] These are two separate titles rather than one renamed: the BnF describes a successor paper constrained from carrying the visual identity and the by-line of the one it followed.

The BnF records that the paper appeared three times a week at first and became daily in 1948, after a merger with Élans and the disappearance of a competing title, Sports.^[5]

The broadcast arm has its own dates, which are not the newspaper's. Arcom records a service called L'Équipe TV conventioned in 1998, and the terrestrial channel launched in December 2012; the regulator noted in the same document that a renewal procedure for the channel's authorisation, conducted without a call for candidatures, was under way.^[6] The two online services L'Équipe Live 1 and L'Équipe Live 2 were conventioned by decision of 26 October 2022.^[7]

Why does L'Équipe matter in France's sport?

Measured against the audited record, the title is the only sports publication among the national dailies the ACPM ranks, and it is third in that ranking for 2025-2026 on paid French circulation.^[1] Its digital brand placed fifth in the ACPM ranking of digital brands by visits for August 2026, in a list otherwise led by a messaging platform, a classified-advertising site and two general news brands.^[3] Both positions come from the same certifying body; they are figures for circulation and traffic, and they do not by themselves establish influence over the events reported.

The group's second position is in broadcasting. The channel on the terrestrial network is carried free to air, is regulated by Arcom as a television service with published obligations, and in April 2026 was measured at a 1.4 per cent audience share.^[6][8] That places a sports-only free-to-air channel inside a French television market whose pay operators hold most of the domestic rights described under broadcast rights; the channel's access to live competition is accordingly narrower than that of the pay broadcasters.

For a reader assessing a French sporting record, the title's relevance is that its print and digital coverage is audited by an independent body and dated, which is not true of most sports publishing anywhere. Where a claim rests on the paper's own account of its history, as most of the 1946 narrative does, it is reported here as the account given by the Bibliothèque nationale de France rather than as the paper's own.^[5]