1962: A fine Stade de Reims side featuring the brilliant Just Fontaine and Raymond Kopa stroll to a sixth post war French championship success. Twice European Cup finalists previously, the club looks forward to another European campaign as France’s foremost football ambassadors and one of the continent’s elite clubs.

1998: Those club stalwarts Just Fontaine (dark coat) and Raymond Kopa (light coat) are invited back to the club’s Stade Auguste Delaune by photographer Raymond Depardon in very different circumstances. The pair appear lost in their memories as they gaze wistfully around the stadium where many thousands once gathered to watch them perform. The receding hair lines and expanding waistlines demonstrate the ravages of time for these great footballers who are now pensionable aged men.

Change and decline is the obvious subtext at play in these Depardon pictures and the players’ natural physical decline through age is mirrored in the fall from grace of their former club. A quarter of a century after their heyday Reims existed as a shadow of its former self: a destitute club reduced to amateur fourth division status and playing in a derelict stadium that looks barely changed since the 1950s.

Sometimes the best football stories are the ones told without words.