Alliance Nîmes/Montpellier TT reach Final 4 after hard-fought run

Alliance Nîmes/Montpellier TT arrived at the HYLO ETTU Champions League Men Final 4 with the kind of scar tissue that can decide a title run. They had already survived the early rounds, then handled KS Dekorglass Działdowo 3-1 at home and 3-1 away in the quarter-finals, a double victory that made them look less like a surprise package and more like a side built for pressure.

That matters in Düsseldorf’s path to the semi-finals. Borussia Düsseldorf are seven-time Champions League Men winners and had already beaten Alliance in January 2025 to reach last season’s Final 4, so the matchup in Saarbrücken carried more than ranking points or pedigree. It carried memory. Alliance were set to meet Borussia on May 15-16 in the city that staged the first Final 4 in 2024 and then crowned FC Saarbrücken TT as champions in 2025, when they beat Düsseldorf in the final at Saarlandhalle Saarbrücken.

Alliance’s run to this stage began at Stage 1, where they built momentum by beating ASD TT Santa Tecla Nulvi, SF SKK El Nino Praha and Roskilde Bordtennis BTK 61 before knocking out SolexConsult TTC Wiener Neustadt in the Round of 16. By the time Dekorglass arrived, the French champions had already shown they could handle long ties, different styles and the weight of expectation. They did not just scrape through against the Poles, either. The 3-1 home win was repeated in the away leg, and the decisive point on foreign soil came when Alexis Lebrun beat Yingchao Hou before Félix Lebrun finished the job by defeating Hou again.

The Lebrun brothers remained the center of everything. Félix Lebrun and Alexis Lebrun were ranked No. 2 and No. 3 in Europe, and the line-up around them, with Manav Thakkar, Esteban Dorr and Brian Afanador, gave Alliance depth that extended beyond star power. Félix Lebrun also brought fresh confidence from London, where France reached bronze at the World Championships after a 3-1 semifinal loss to China on May 9, 2026. His 3-0 win over world No. 1 Lin Shidong was one of the tournament’s headline results and underlined why Alliance believed they could trouble Borussia.

That belief was backed by results at home, where Alliance had almost no margin for error in a near-flawless domestic campaign after rising from Pro B only two years earlier. With Félix Lebrun listed by the French federation as world No. 6 and national champion in 2025, Alliance entered Saarbrücken as more than a club on a run. They arrived as a team that had already proven it could absorb pressure, and in a Final 4 built on narrow margins, that may have been the most dangerous credential of all.