From Futuna to Havelock North to captain of France: the Manaé Feleu story

When the Black Ferns run out at FMG Stadium in Hamilton on Saturday, the player France will miss most is the one who knows this country best. Manaé Feleu, the France captain, is not on the tour. She is in Grenoble, sitting the entrance exams for her medical residency. And ten years ago she was a boarder in Havelock North, learning English and learning fifteens at the same time.

The question Kiwi fans ask when they see a Pacific Island name on a French team sheet is a fair one: how does that happen? With Feleu, the answer is simpler than people expect, and the real story is better than the one they imagine.

There is no loophole

Feleu did not qualify for France through a residency rule or a grandparent. She is French by birth. She was born in Mâcon, in Burgundy, on 3 February 2000, to a Burgundian mother and a Futunan father, and when she was two the family moved to her father's island.

Futuna is one half of Wallis and Futuna, a French overseas territory in the Pacific between Fiji and Samoa, home to about 11,000 people. It has been French since 1888 and a full territory since 1961, and its people are French citizens, exactly as a child born in Nouméa or Papeete is. That is also why Yoram Moefana and Sipili Falatea, both from Futuna, play for Les Bleus. France's Pacific territories are part of France, and their rugby runs through the French federation.

So the only unusual thing about a Futunan girl wearing blue is that she grew up on an island of 3,000 people, 16,000 kilometres from Paris, where there was no rugby at all until her parents arrived.

Her father did not play for a French club. He built a game instead

Readers who assume Feleu's father must have been a professional in France are wrong, and he says so himself. Nisie Feleu was a decathlete who played second-division volleyball and came to rugby late, picking it up after the 1991 World Cup and playing openside for a couple of seasons. "I was never much of a rugby man," he told Midi Olympique in 2022.

What he and his wife Valérie, a heptathlete he met at sports college in Dijon, did do was more important. They were the only two physical education teachers on Futuna. They put rugby into the island's secondary school, and in 1993, with the help of Samoan clergy who were on the island, Nisie founded its first club, Afili Rugby Futuna. Because one club has nobody to play, he founded two more so there could be matches, passed his French coaching diploma, and took teams to New Caledonia and New Zealand to see what real competition looked like.

That club is now a production line. Moefana and Falatea came through it before Feleu did. Her older brother Niue and younger sister Teani joined first. Manaé, who was doing athletics, volleyball and karate, followed them at eleven because she felt left out. What she loved, her father said, was tackling. She left the attacking to the boys who did not want to defend.

Numbers were small, so they played sevens, with tournaments on Saturdays and two trips a year to Wallis for the big one. At under-11 level she won it playing halfback, with a young Moefana at first five-eighth outside her.

The Hawke's Bay years

Her brother went to New Zealand first, on a school exchange to Havelock North. When Manaé visited him she wanted the same: sport every day, boarding houses, a uniform, and the chance to become bilingual. In 2014, aged 14, she arrived at Woodford House in Havelock North as an international student with basic English.

By 2016 she had passed NCEA Level 2 with an Excellence endorsement, including in English, and was deputy head girl. Somewhere in between, rugby changed shape. It was in Hawke's Bay that she first played fifteens, at centre and then at fullback because she could defend open spaces. She played for the Havelock North club and was part of a Hawke's Bay secondary schools championship-winning side alongside a future Black Fern, Awhina Tangen-Wainohu. A ruptured cruciate ligament in her final year ended her school rugby, and she took a year away from the game to concentrate on study.

Teani followed the same road at 14, played for the Clive club and, in 2019, a Farah Palmer Cup match for Hawke's Bay. The family's New Zealand chapter runs deep enough that when France faced the Black Ferns in the 2022 World Cup semi-final at Eden Park, Feleu found herself playing against a schoolmate.

Medicine first, France second

Back in France from 2017, Feleu enrolled in medicine in Dijon, her mother's home town. She had to repeat her first year. She played Fédérale 1 for the Dijon Gazelles, home games only so she could revise, and was still good enough to be picked up by the French federation's pathway and a season in the national academy. In 2020 she and Teani moved to Grenoble together, to the Amazones in the top division and to a shared flat, Manaé in medicine and Teani in sports studies.

Her France debut came on 14 November 2020 against England, at her own club's Stade des Alpes. Two years later she was in New Zealand for the World Cup, where France lost that semi-final 25-24 and beat Canada for third. In October 2023, aged 23 and with nine caps, she was named France captain for the inaugural WXV, also in New Zealand. She has had the armband, alone or shared with Marine Ménager, ever since.

Her record since is one of near-misses against England: a Grand Slam decider lost in Bordeaux in 2024, a 43-42 defeat at Twickenham in 2025, and this year's championship decider lost 43-28 in Bordeaux in front of 35,062 people, a record crowd for women's rugby in France. She was in the Six Nations team of the championship in 2024 and 2025 and a nominee for player of the championship last year. The 2025 World Cup in England was harder: she was cited after a yellow card in the quarter-final win over Ireland, lost her appeal, and watched France lose the semi-final to England and the bronze match to the Black Ferns from the stand.

Under new coach François Ratier she was confirmed this year as sole captain and moved from lock to the back row. Ratier said she is "not someone who seeks the limelight". Through all of it the medicine has not moved. "Medicine will always be the priority," she told Grenoble's city magazine as a 21-year-old, and five years later she is proving it: she took a gap year to play the World Cup, went back for the second half of fifth year, and is now sitting the October exams that decide where she trains as a doctor. She wants to be a GP.

The sister on the tour

If you want to see a Feleu in Hamilton, watch the midfield. Teani, born in Mâcon too, in December 2002, made her France debut off the bench beside her sister against Italy in April 2024, the two of them side by side for the anthem. A week later they started together for the first time, and Manaé scored her first Test try. In 2025 Teani was named France's women's international of the year, and in this year's Six Nations the sisters were picked together in the team of the championship. She started at centre when France lost 28-14 to the Black Ferns in Lyon last month and is on the plane for the three Tests here.

Manaé is expected back for the Six Nations. She still captains Grenoble, and in July she and her teammates cycled 344 kilometres from Grenoble to Marseille as a pre-season dare. Her story is the mirror image of the one Pacific rugby usually tells. On Wallis and Futuna, according to the people who run the game there, the kids can name every current All Black and barely know Les Bleus. Feleu went the other way: a Futunan upbringing, a Hawke's Bay education, a French jersey, and a stethoscope waiting at the end of it.

France play the Black Ferns at FMG Stadium Hamilton on Saturday 17 October, then in Whangārei on 24 October and Christchurch on 31 October.