The giant French centre will play Major League Rugby next year and Samu Manoa, for one, is readying a very warm welcome indeed

Mathieu Bastareaud arrives at the hotel on Lexington and 57th with a stiff neck, but it’s not something to worry the French selectors. In Manhattan for the first time, he has simply spent most of his time looking up at buildings even bigger than he is.

Major League Rugby expands with care – is the Premiership watching? Read more

“This is maybe the city that is the most attractive in the world,” says a man who started his career in Paris and has spent the last eight years in the Mediterranean port of Toulon. “I know from the TV shows, CSI and Friends and things like that! I was very excited on the plane. I’m very happy to be here.”

It seems so. Shortly after our conversation, the 6ft 1in, 300lb centre formally signs for Rugby United New York. The franchise already employs the England full-back Ben Foden and it has pulled off a significant coup by engaging the Frenchman for 2020, the third season of Major League Rugby. Bastareaud will earn the top MLR salary of $45,000. The deal is done, it’s not a loan, and as L’Equipe put it, “Big Basta à Big Apple”. It is not guaranteed he will return to Toulon once he’s done.

When the move was announced in April, the Top 14 season remained to be completed. Toulon missed the playoffs so here Bastareaud is, a week before the French World Cup squad is named. Presuming he’s picked for Japan, and presuming he avoids harm in “pool of death” games against England, Argentina, Tonga and USA and whatever might come after, he will return to New York in December.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Matthieu Bastareaud poses with Pierre Arnald, James Kennedy and James English of RUNY. Photograph: Harry Britt/RUNY

Speaking softly, the English he says he wants to improve a thousand times better than the Guardian’s French, Bastareaud confirms that his motivation for the move was a break from the grind of Europe.

“I played 12 seasons in France,” he says, “eight in Toulon. I’ve won everything I wanted to win and I wanted a new challenge. But for me the big challenge is going outside Europe, and to come here was a big opportunity because the franchise starts at the beginning, and I love that.

“The Top 14 is a lot of players coming from New Zealand, South Africa” – he confirms that he talked to the Sharks of Durban but says a move was not a real prospect – “and the level is very high. For me, I don’t come here for a holiday. Not for me. I don’t like when we say I come here for the break. I just want change. I play eight seasons in Toulon and every time it was the same. I want to change everything.”

A man will think that way when, as Bastareaud says, he has played “maybe 25 games” of punishing pro rugby this season and yet “it’s not a lot” next to previous workloads of “37, 38 games” for club and country.

There are off-field factors too. The impending arrival of his first child, a son, means he will bring a young family with him. They will have about a month to acclimatise before MLR kicks off in February.

I think a lot of people don’t understand why I come here. But I think in one season they will change their opinion Matthieu Bastareaud

“For me it is important to play in another country, just for learning other cultures, because maybe in France we are …”

He seeks a little translation help from Pierre Arnald, the former Stade Français executive who is now a RUNY investor.

“Not open-minded.”

For a writer from Brexit Britain who works in Trump’s America, that’s rather hard to accept. But never mind. As on the field, where he can leave defences scattered in twitching pieces, Bastareaud ploughs on.

“I think a lot of people don’t understand why I come here,” he says. “But I think in one season they will change their opinion.”

As MLR concludes its second season, its newest signing has followed it as many fans do, via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. He agrees the rugby is more open than in Europe, the ball moved more, more tries scored thanks in part to relatively raw defences.

“For me it’s good,” he says, “it’s just playing rugby, [the teams] do not think about pressure, maybe there is more [opportunity] for me to enjoy my rugby. No relegation too, of course. When you don’t have relegation in your head I think it’s better in terms of negative pressure from outside. You can just think about the rugby.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Samu Manoa stretches the Saracens defence while playing for Toulon. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images

He has talked to Samu Manoa, the American flanker who shone with Northampton, won European Cups in Toulon and then came back to the US via Cardiff. Manoa now plays for the Seattle Seawolves, the MLR champions who defend their title in San Diego on Sunday night.

If you build it, will they succumb? Houston opens rugby field of dreams Read more

“Samu has told me he will give me a special welcome,” Bastareaud says, laughing, utterly delighted at the thought of apocalyptic confrontations to come. “Yes, yes! Every time we talk, he says, ‘I’m coming for you!’”

That should wet the whistles of the MLR marketing men: Big Basta versus the Block Monsta, an old-world collision on rugby’s new frontier.

Another punishing aspect of MLR is the necessary travel: RUNY v Seattle, for example, means a near-6,000-mile round trip. Undaunted, Bastareaud professes to welcome such long hauls as a way to see “new cities and new cultures”, although in fact they will be fewer in 2020 as the league splits into eastern and western conferences, with the addition of Boston, Washington and Atlanta.

Home or away, he will still face rugby players from New Orleans, Houston, Austin and Colorado. And when RUNY get good ball going forward, those players will line up to meet him head-on.

“I have come to win,” he says, “but I also come for a challenge with the American players, to have a mutual exchange, to learn from them but to give to them too. It’s different from in Europe. I want to live like an American man!”