Team appearing in French and Saunders finally retires (5)
I believe the answer is:
exits
'retires' is the definition.
The answer and definition can be both related to competing as well as being verbs in their -s form.
Maybe you can see an association between them that I can't see?
'team appearing in french and saunders finally' is the wordplay.
'team' becomes 'XI' (a football team, from Roman numerals for 11).
'appearing in' means one lot of letters goes inside another.
'french and' becomes 'et' ('and' in French).
'finally' says to take the final letters.
The final letter of 'saunders' is 's'.
'xi' inserted within 'et' is 'exit'.
'exit'+'s'='EXITS'
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for exits that I've seen before include "Egresses" , "Goes out, leaves" , "Leaves the stage" , "Withdraws" , "Departs" .)