AP Luzenac, the side from a village with a population of just 650 up in the Pyrenees, will find out on Thursday whether they will be allowed to play in Ligue 2 – or be punished for being too small

Finally we will then find out whether France’s favourite football fairytale from last season can have a happy ending, after all, and thereby wreak havoc with league planning.

AP Luzenac, the side from a village with a population of just 650 up in the Pyrenees, amazed and enchanted the country last term by gaining promotion to the heady heights of Ligue 2; they were already the tiniest club to feature in the third tier, now here they were in the second. Their rise was recounted all around Europe and cited as an inspiration for small clubs everywhere, proof that even in the heavily corporatised world of modern football, the little guy still can still enjoy upward mobility. But then, just as the celebrations over an incredible campaign started to abate, the dream was dashed, as the league’s financial regulator banned the club from accepting their promotion. This, grumbled critics, was a case of the The Man putting upstarts back in their box.

The Direction Nationale de Contrôle et de Gestion (DNCG) is the body set up by the French Football Federation in 1984 to check the financial rectitude of professional clubs, with each having to submit accounts for approval every year. The declared aim is to preserve clubs by making sure that expenditure does not exceed income but Luzenac claim that the body, whose inner workings do not seem entirely in synch with the transparency that it demands from others, is now being used to uphold the status quo and prevent unfancied new faces from joining the elite.

Luzenac professed to being “stupefied and shocked” when their appeal against the DNCG’s decision was rejected earlier this month, the news becoming somewhat buried under previews of France’s World Cup quarter-final showdown with Germany the next day. On Thursday, 30 July, the club will make their last stand when the case is heard by a Toulouse court whose verdict will be final: if Luzenac lose, they will have to accept getting no reward for last season’s heroics and they will consigned to an uncertain fate; if they win, Ligue 2 will have to be expanded to feature 21 teams rather than 20 next season and organisers will have to devise a new fixture list accordingly – just two days before the campaign kicks off.

Until the legal ballyhoo, Luzenac was an entirely lovable story. Only five years ago they were an amateur team in the regional leagues; in 2009 they won promotion to the Championnat de France National – the country’s third tier – but it seemed unlikely that they would last there. After narrowly avoiding relegation for two seasons, Luzenac seemed set to go under due to financial problems – then in stepped Jérôme Ducros, a wealthy Toulouse businessman, to stave off extinction.

Last summer Ducros hatched a bigger plot and appointed a new managing director with a mission to recruit a team to deliver an unlikely promotion. That man was Fabien Barthez, the former France and Manchester United goalkeeper and a native of Lavelanet, another small town in the region.

The team’s budget for the year was increased – to around £2m – and Barthez proved a shrewd operator, luring players jettisoned by other clubs to form, under manager Christophe Pélissier, a robust and incisive unit that finished the campaign as the top scorers in the division and, most importantly, second in the table. “We had planned to gain promotion in three years so we are well ahead of schedule!” declared Ducros. “It’s incredible, exceptional, extraordinary!” exulted the club’s long-serving defender Jérôme Hergault. “When I came here we were struggling to stay up in CFA [fourth tier], now to be going up to Ligue 2 is hard to believe. People often just saw us as mere peasants playing football – this will make a lot of people shut up.”

Back in the 1980s, Auxerre rose from the amateur regional leagues to become an enduring force in the country’s top flight, crowning their ascent by becoming French champions in 1996; that success has served as a reference point for underdogs across the land – Luzenac even coming close to matching that feat would be far more outlandish and lovely.

With promotion secured, the club began preparing for the next step, which, first of all, meant finding somewhere to play: their own ground, the Stade Paul Fédou, has only one stand and 400 seats so was not even deemed worthy of the National, which is why they played last season at a ground in nearby Foix – but that only has a capacity of 3,000, far fewer than is required to meet Ligue 2 standards.

Luzenac had made arrangements to play their home games this season in Toulouse, some 80 miles away. It has been suggested that concerns over the club’s ability to pay the rent for that on an on-going basis was one of the chief factors in the DNCG’s decision to refuse admission, although Luzenac complain that one of the most vexing things about their rejection is that they have not been given any precise explanation for it.

“I want to stress how discourteous the authorities have been,” Ducros stormed after his club’s failed appeal. “I didn’t even get a mail informing me about the decision, I had to hear about it in the media and on the internet … it is shameful to treat us like this. They didn’t even say a single word to Fabien Barthez during the appeal.

“Imagine behaving like that just 24 hours before France play in the quarter-final of the World Cup! I’ll say it again: shame on the FFF! We answered every question and presented fully audited accounts. I’m going to fight to bring this system down, they are ruining the hopes of an entire district!”

Luzenac insist that they have a sound budget for the season ahead and that their books are perfectly balanced – “we are not even one euro in arrears,” said Barthez – and that they are being punished not for anything that they have done but rather for what the league suspects they will not be able to continue doing; in other words, not for any mismanagement, just for being small.

The DNCG has blocked the promotions of big clubs in the past – such as Nice in 2002 or Lens (from Ligue 2 to Ligue 1) just this summer – but both those decisions were overturned on appeal. Luzenac, meanwhile, fear going the way of AS Valence, who were repeatedly denied entry to Ligue 2 in 2004 and soon ceased to exist.