Coaches: Building the Successes of French Teams

Coaches: Building the Successes of French Teams

Seeing the two English teams walking out to compete in the 2001 FA Cup Final in the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff rather than at Wembley raised, for some, the issue of the inability of government and sporting authorities to agree on building a national stadium; but many viewers could not fail to be struck by another novelty: two French managers leading out the teams. Did this signify that British coaching had fallen behind continental practices? Gérard Houllier led out the eventual winners Liverpool, and Arsène Wenger (who has since won his second League and Cup double) headed an Arsenal team that also contained five French players. The same season, a third French coach, Jean Tigana, brought Fulham into the top flight as champions of Nationwide Division 1. Behind the successes of individual French coaches abroad is a national French system that is recognised as a model for the future of national coaching elsewhere in the world. A Guardian journalist’s comment is typical: ‘Now France is quite simply the world-wide example for the production of young footballers’ (Williams 2000b). The English FA now has a National Technical Director – the very post is an imitation of the French system and its first holder, Howard Wilkinson, a friend of Gérard Houllier who had such an influence when he established the functions of the French equivalent. A national Centre of Excellence is also to be set up by the English FA on French lines. Whatever French professional clubs’ structural weaknesses in the 1980s and 1990s, it is now generally recognised that it is sporting development policies, particularly regarding coaching, that have allowed France to produce such successful teams and impressive individual players in the 1990s, after minimal sporting success in international or European club football in earlier years. French Coaching Policy and Structures The coaching systems and strategy adopted by French football fit into a wider national sports policy for the development of elite sport. They are regulated and part-funded by the State and local authorities, even in the case of a professional sport like football.

The French Model of Development of Elite Sportsmen and Women The development of football and of elite sport in general in France can be traced back to State intervention and long-term strategic planning, which gained urgency following the national humiliation represented by the country’s poor showing at the Rome Olympic Games of 1960, the first major international competition under de Gaulle’s presidency (see Dine 1997b, 1998b). De Gaulle conceived of sport as one strand of his broader national project to restore the nation’s grandeur, and commissioned the Joxe-Herzog plan in the 1960s, which initiated a major programme of capital investment in the nation’s sports facilities, with particular emphasis on achieving success in international competition. Over the years the importance attached to sport within government has increased from sport being represented, when de Gaulle first became President, by a High Commissioner, then, in 1963 a Junior Minister, and for two years by a full minister. After de Gaulle the position was generally at Junior Minister level, until 1991. Since then, with one brief interlude, a full cabinet place has been occupied by the Ministre de la Jeunesse et des Sports (Ministre des Sports from 2002). Government strategy for sport included, in 1975, the establishment of the State-funded Institut national du sport et de l’éducation physique (INSEP), a combined national sports research and training centre. A fundamental part of the Institut was the establishment of the special status of the ‘sportif de haut niveau’, elite sportsmen and women who are housed and trained within the INSEP at the State’s expense. In 1997 there were 5,500 sportsmen and women with this status. It allows them to get sponsorship from public service organisations such as the Post Office, France Telecom, or a municipality such as the City of Paris, which can give them a job with special hours of work to facilitate training and competition. This is under the supervision of the Ministry, which provides some 50 million francs for it (La Poste 1997). Although this status tended not to affect professional football as directly as it did athletics, judo, swimming, gymnastics and other Olympic sports, a model and a tone were created, and the football authorities, in collaboration with the State, gradually took this on board. Changes within education took France in a similar direction: since the 1950s all candidates for the school-leaving examination, the baccalauréat, have to take a sport and PE test, and from 1984 this test counted for 8 per cent of the overall result. Since 1992 this has been doubled, and is an incentive for youth participation in sport and physical education. Of Western European countries, as seen in Chapter 2, France has the strongest State intervention in sport. High public expenditure on sport is one thing, but the key element of the French model of development of elite sport is what it is spent on. Top of the list is the organisation of coaching, with close collaboration between the State and the different sports federations. The French Sports Ministry employs 7,000 officials, 95 per cent of whom work in the regions (Callède 2000: 163). This includes 1,700 specialist coaches and sports development staff whom the State seconds to sports fédérations. An important category of civil servant (fonctionnaire) was created by the State in the 1950s: the directeur technique national (DTN – national technical director) whose mission was to work with a sport’s governing body to develop their particular sport. This was initially aimed at Olympic sports, but was later extended to professional sports including football (Mignon 2000: 237). Since 1985 there are over a hundred Centres permanents d’entraînement et de formation (CPEF) at national, regional and local level, usually in establishments run by the Ministry. Miège (1993: 72) reported that they were used by 2,800 sportsmen and women. He also reports that by 1993 specialist Sports Medicine centres were run by local authorities and the State, for example in the INSEP for elite sports people. The State built a lot of sports facilities between 1962 and 1975, and still builds national facilities, although local ones are the responsibility of the local authorities (ibid.: 72– 73). The whole system of coaching, from school level through grass-roots amateur to professional level, from mass participation to elite sport, is very ‘joined-up’ and coherent. As in other fields of education and training (for example via the selective grandes écoles system), there is an unapologetic policy of democratic selection and training of an elite. An important part of this is the encouragement of mass participation and therefore equality of opportunity, so that chances of succeeding in the competition to become part of the elite are fair. This legitimises the creation and training of an elite and State spending on it. The State ensures fairness by a highly regulated system. In football the responsibility for the development of this elite is shared between the State and the French Football Federation. First of all the sport of football itself has been organised into a single hierarchical pyramid, from small amateur grass-roots clubs to the elite of Division 1 and the international side. There is also obvious progression through the different age groups, who eventually grow into the adult (‘senior’) level through two-year steps. In theory, it is possible for a team in the lowest district division to rise through promotion to the regional and national divisions, and for a player starting off in a small amateur club to emerge through the ranks, benefit from coaching centres and become part of the professional elite. (See Appendix for football’s league structures.) French National Football Coaching Strategy The football coaching system operates on a similar pyramidal structure to that of the leagues, with the elite system very much attached to the grass-roots system.

This is reflected in the FFF’s published mission statement regarding its coaching structures: its three aims are (1) to develop football as a mass game, (2) to develop an elite of top players, and (3) to train coaches and sports officials (Thomas et al. 1991: 86). At the top of the pyramid is the National Technical Director of Coaching, the DTN, who, in concert with the Federation’s president and management committee, sets policy at the strategic level in four-year plans. Under his authority are eight national coaches, each in charge of a different level national team and each with particular responsibilities for co-ordinating a specific aspect of either player coaching or the training of coaches at different levels. Below them are 27 Regional Coaching Advisers (conseiller technique régional – CTR), and a further 80 Département1 [County] Coaching Advisers (conseiller technique départemental – CTD) working with the regional and district leagues respectively. Most of these are paid by the State – somewhat fewer in recent years, but the FFF has been able to fund their own CTRs and CTDs to fill gaps (Miège 1993: 71; FFF website June 2001; Thomas et al. 1991: 90–95). The post of DTN is a highly prized and high-profile position. Gérard Houllier took on the job in 1990. He was replaced by World Cup winning coach Aimé Jacquet in 1998. It is quite the opposite of a sinecure and the DTN’s priorities were described in 2001 by Jacquet’s number two as: (1) setting targets for increasing numbers of registered players at grass-roots level; (2) developing elite players through youth training schemes and in collaboration with professional clubs; (3) (described as the most important) training coaches (éducateurs) at every level; and (4) promoting underdeveloped or new forms of football, such as women’s football and Futsal (indoor five-a-side football) (Morlans 2001). The DTN staff firmly believe that the key to their success is both the training of coaches and a youth coaching policy, the first being just as important as the other:

One of the major reasons for the success of French football in the last thirty years is its having been able to push forward concurrently the training of coaches and the training of players. In concrete terms, by the establishment of training centres for players and the creation of a coaching and management diploma. (Morlans 2001)

The CTRs and CTDs put this coaching policy into action on the ground. They train 17,000–19,000 éducateurs per year, a figure they still regard as insufficient for the 20,000 French amateur clubs (which run several teams each). At grassroots level these coaches organise competitions, identify young talent for further training, and run training courses for young coaches and organisers. In 1990 it was estimated that France had about 9,000 qualified éducateurs, mainly unpaid volunteers running small amateur clubs. The term éducateur is not a neutral one. It carries within it the status long attached to the teaching profession, which since the educational reforms of the 1880s has carried with it a notion of Republican mission, and a wider view of the function of a youth coach than simply passing on skills. In order to select an elite of players there has to be a massive input at grass-roots level, which in a country with a Republican ethic also means providing appropriate training to widen access. This is the role of the CTR and CTD: ‘As regards mass participation, a major activity has been the development of local competitions and of organised football from beginners to the end of primary school age’ (Morlans 2001). In the district leagues, the CTD has three functions: (1) animateur (organiser/ developer): liaising with schools and amateur clubs to encourage competitions and generally encourage mass participation; (2) entraîneur-sélectionneur (trainer and selector): scouting for the best young talent, selecting, coaching and managing the representative teams for his county (sélection départementale) ; (3) formateur (trainer or instructor): training coaches at all levels and all ages within his area (again regarded as the most important of his tasks, since it is the FFF’s priority). Between 100 and 200 éducateurs are trained per year in each district, and they are subsequently followed up through up-dating of skills (Pion 2001). The DTN’s deputy, Jean-Pierre Morlans, co-ordinates the training of the country’s entraîneurs (managers), the rank above the éducateurs. Entraîneur is the term used to describe the qualified, paid coach working with teams from the Regional Division d’Honneur upwards. Morlans is very conscious of the huge evolution of their role in recent years, but already sees the day when the 300–400 French entraîneurs will need to have even greater skills. The more sophisticated training programmes will consequently need to include, according to Morlans, further differentiation of levels and objectives of the job of entraîneur, basing the qualification on real knowledge of the job on the ground backed up by theoretical knowledge, and not the other way round. This comment raises the issue of the extent to which the French model is based on a unique set of State-backed and Federation-backed coaching qualifications, including written as well as practical tests that must be studied for and passed before a coach or manager can be authorised to work at a given level. Gérard Houllier, as DTN, added the more practical Federal diplomas. Table 5.1 sets out the range of official French coaching qualifications, from lowest to highest. The DTN sets the tone and the standards for these qualifications. The lowest level above requires a three-day training course, at district or regional level, the second 25–30 hours of training at weekends or evenings. The second-level diploma to become an initiateur requires attendance at a six-day course ending in written tests covering football, fitness training, the laws of the game, and associated regulations; and practical tests in teaching skills and technical football skills. The first-level State exam, the Brevet d’éducateur (without which it is illegal since the law of 1984 to coach or teach sport for money) includes, for instance, a compulsory first-aid and life-saving certificate, knowledge of technical skills, the humanities, the spirit of the game, human biology, teaching skills, institutions and management of a training institution (Thomas et al. 1991: 92–94). Assuming the earlier FFF certificates have already been done, the training period lasts for 250 hours. Just as a teaching certificate for a school requires a period of teaching practice, this certificate has a practical 160 hours of supervised coaching practice. The DEF level of qualification requires a two-week training course (practical and theoretical) covering written and oral exams in human biology, the humanities, law, and social science as related to sport. It is followed by a season’s supervised coaching in a club and a further week’s course organised by the local CTR. To become a coach/manager of a professional club requires first of all to have gained the DEF diploma with a mark of at least 14/20 in the footballspecific elements, to have followed six three-day training courses (on fitness training, skills and tactics, communication skills, psychology and man management, business management and administration, and video skills). The very French nature of the qualifications does not mean the system is very inward looking: the training deliberately includes the study of football beyond the French borders. A compulsory element in the training is English as a foreign language, and if all the above exams are passed, there follows a compulsory full week’s work placement in a professional club abroad, with a written report and an oral report to be given before an audience of fellow candidates. The placement is another Houllier innovation. Not only are the standards of training of coaches very closely specified and controlled jointly by the State and the FFF, but also, once in post in an FFF club, practising coaches have to conform to quality control demands and regular updating of skills under the aegis of an FFF national committee, the Commission centrale du Statut des Educateurs. The official job specification of football coach under French employment legislation runs to 14 pages of A4 paper (as printed from the FFF website). This statut des éducateurs de football requires in the first month of a coach’s contract that he sends to this Committee a copy of his club’s weekly training schedule for the year, plus twice-yearly reports on his activities. Failure to do this can lead to fines and even suspension. Coaches holding the State brevet qualification are also required to engage in activities to cascade their skills down to lower-level coaches by putting on training days locally. They themselves must attend an annual seminar run by national coaches to update their skills. The cascading of knowledge and the continuity of the coaching system from one generation to the next may be illustrated by the case of Yannick Stopyra, who was trained by Pierre Tournier at the Sochaux Centre de formation, and who, after a successful playing career has become the Director of the Lorraine regional Centre de préformation (Tournier and Rethacker 1999: 114). Clubs too are required to play their part in spreading coaching expertise by facilitating their players’ attendance at coaching training on request. Any qualified coach who has not exercised the profession for five years has to retrain before becoming employable again. In recognition of the full-time nature of the position of entraîneur, players are not allowed to act as player-manager in the top four divisions. If, in the name of continuous quality management, there are these constraints on coaches, then this employment legislation also prevents clubs from employing people in coaching positions who are not qualified. (This can also be construed from outside as protectionist.) Clubs can be fined or even have points deducted if they do not employ properly qualified coaches for the level in which they play. To facilitate their job, depending on their level, coaches have free entry to matches either in their regional league or, for DEPFs, in the national professional league. The jobs are pensionable and minimum rates of pay are set down nationally in a collective bargaining agreement between the coaches’ representatives, the FFF and the LNF. The professionalism of the function of coach is thus taken very seriously and defined as such by both the State and football authorities. If, thanks to top-down, highly centralised coaching models, the skills training of French players has improved, to the point that players like Zidane and Henry have few equals, one aspect of the French preparation that has been recognised as falling short is physical fitness. DTN Gérard Houllier picked this up in 1997 after the under-20s World Championship, where France lost in the quarterfinals to Uruguay (on penalties). In his report he says: ‘In terms of athleticism, we only just came through, whereas others coped easily. That confirms that our 18–21 year olds do not play enough, or do not train enough’ (Tournier and Rethacker 1999: 141). Ironically, as Aimé Jacquet noted in 1998, after many French internationals had been lured abroad, for Zidane the physical work done in Italy allowed him to play a whole match at top pace, which gave him great confidence. Two daily training periods of three hours in early season, plus weight training, had been very hard for him initially, but he had gritted his teeth. The ex-Monaco coach Pierre Tournier comments that the French internationals playing in Italy would probably not have accepted the same work regime or the same discipline in French clubs (ibid.: 142). Youth Training and Centres de Formation Alongside the training of coaches and the system of coaching qualifications under the aegis of the DTN, the other key element in the success of French football since the 1970s is the coaching of players from an early age, and in particular the creation of the Centres de formation, the youth academies. La Préformation Football, alongside other sports in France, has a strongly developed national and regional structure for finding and coaching talented youngsters. The CTDs are key figures in the scouting and selection process that takes a number of youngsters into préformation (pre-training); that is, special coaching in football academies or in sports sections of certain secondary schools. In fact coaching and scouting for talent begins now even earlier than secondary school age, and outside the school system. Registration with amateur clubs, coaching and organised football games begin at the so-called initiation phase (6–11-year-olds with 5-a-side or 7-a-side games, before the pre-training phase (12–15 years). The universality of the early organisation of children’s sport in France is shown by the existence of distinct names for the different age groups for participants (across all sports): Débutants (6–8), Poussins (8–9), Benjamins (10–11), Minimes (12–13), Cadets (14–15), and Juniors (16–18). The préformation period corresponds conveniently to the age-range of the early secondary school, the collège, which takes pupils at 11 or sometimes 10, for four years of study, before they move on to the lycée, the upper secondary school, for three years’ study towards the baccalauréat. As we have seen above, qualifications for éducateurs generally include modules on coaching to this age group. There are 71 special Sport-études sections in French collèges. Additionally, agreements with 600 schools allow combined football coaching and schooling for 11,000 pupils (figures for the year 2000). François Blaquart, as the assistant DTN responsible for coordinating and planning préformation, which includes the training of special coaches of course, works on both mass participation and elite selection in this age group (see Thomas et al. 1991: 71–86). In terms of the production of an elite at this level, the FFF has opened seven regional centres of excellence, called Centres de préformation. The first of these, founded in 1990, is the Institut National du Football housed in the National Centre of Excellence at Clairefontaine. The adoption of préformation as official policy was enthusiastically pushed by Gérard Houllier as DTN in the 1990s. He stopped the 15–18 years formation at the INF to devote all its efforts to 13–15-year-olds. He added regional centres from 1994.2 He saw them as the next step in improving French youth training. These now set the standards, claims Blaquart (2001), in terms of ethos, pedagogy and general education, pointing out that the emphasis is not on producing footballing performance at any price, but on the individual child’s personal development. Graduates of these Centres de préformation go on, at the next stage, in the 16–18 age group, to opportunities in Centres de formation in professional clubs (see pp. 102–105) or in 27 Sports-études sections in lycées (including one in Martinique). Scouting and selection of prospective elite players begin at 12 years of age in each département. At age 14, the regional inter-district league competitions allow the best players to represent their département in an Easter cup competition. After other representative matches and trials, by August, the best 25 players are called into an under-15 national squad. The DTN justifies this strategy of national youth teams in terms of it offering ‘an excellent complement to the activities of préformation. Selection for international matches gives the youngsters an international culture regarding tactics and irreplaceable experience of the highest level of football’ (Morlans 2001).

L ’Institut National du Football (INF) Within the context of the national strategy for improving technical skills in sport, the French Football Federation created a National Football Institute near Vichy in 1972 to coach an elite of young players, when a National Technical Director of Coaching for football (Georges Boulogne) was first appointed (Tournier and Rethacker 1999: 26). In 1976 the President of the FFF, Fernand Sastre, took the decision to develop a purpose-built Centre Technique National du Football to house the INF and to prepare all national teams. A site was chosen and bought in 1982 at Clairefontaine-en-Yvelines, 50 km to the south-west of Paris. It started functioning in January 1988. Its national importance was recognised by an official opening by President Mitterrand in June of that year. The mission statement of French Football’s National Skills Centre has five elements:

1. Elite football: to act as a training centre for the national teams, and to house an elite of young male and female footballers in a period of youth training.

2. Training and up-skilling of football coaches and managers; acting as an examination centre for State and FFF qualifications.

3. Research into skills and sports medicine, which includes an audiovisual centre and sports medicine centre

4. As la maison du football, the home of French football, to play host to French and foreign clubs wishing to use its facilities; to put on seminars for officials of the French regional and district leagues; to host meetings of French referees; to host sports medicine conferences.

5. To host meetings, seminars and conferences for private sponsors.

Within the Clairefontaine complex, now called Le Centre technique national Fernand-Sastre, the Institut National du Football fulfils the youth training function (for boys), alongside its more recent equivalent for girls, the Centre national de formation et d’entraînement (CNFE). Like the other regional Centres de préformation the INF operates as a boarding school, bringing together 24 of the best young players of a given age group (at 13 years old) for three years. They train for about two and a half hours once a day, after school in nearby Rambouillet, where they attend from 8.30 a.m. to 3 p.m. They go home to their families (and local clubs) at weekends, except in their third year when they represent the INF in a local league. Practically all boarding expenses are paid by the FFF and the French Football League, except for school lunches, school books, and weekend travel to and from home (Bourcier et al. 2001: 14– 16; FFF web site; see also Holt 2001).

Figures from the Clairefontaine centre are quoted by the FFF website as showing that the concentration of coaching activities on préformation has been successful. The justification they give is that 95 per cent of pupils go on to a club’s Centre de formation at 16 years old. More than 50 of them have been selected for the national team of their age group (but this could be a self-fulfilling prophecy). Fifteen of them, however, have gone on to play for the French European Cup winning teams at the under-18 level in 1997, 1998 and 2000. More than 30 have signed professional forms. They include Thierry Henry (Arsenal), Nicolas Anelka (Manchester City), Louis Saha (Fulham), Philippe Christanval (Barcelona) and William Gallas (Chelsea). Youth Coaching in Professional Clubs Alongside the national system run by the Federation, since 1974 all French professional league clubs have also been obliged by the FFF and the League to run Centres de formation for apprentices. Eric Cantona and Basile Boli, for example, emerged from the Auxerre club by this route, as did Deschamps, Desailly and Karembeu from Nantes, Zidane and Vieira from Cannes, Thuram, Petit, Trezeguet and Henry3 from Monaco. Every member of the World Cup winning squad came through a national or club Centre de formation (Tournier and Rethacker 1999: 161). The majority of players making up both the 1995 and 2001 Nantes championship winning teams were developed though their own youth scheme. Indeed, in 2001 22 out of their squad of 27 had come through the own Centre de formation, often regarded as the most successful French youth academy. But French youth training, such as it was at club level, has produced results from earlier days: the Saint-Etienne European Cup Final side of 1976 contained nine home-produced players and two foreign imports (Mignon 2000: 238). Arguably the origins of a youth policy go back to 1949 and FC Sochaux. The club used the Peugeot car distribution network to recruit 18-year-old talent nationally and bring them to Sochaux to form the ‘Lionceaux’ (lion cubs) in the hope of becoming professionals (Tournier and Rethacker 1999: 24). From the 1974/75 season the professional League encouraged clubs to set up academies. A number invested in facilities, equipment and appropriately qualified staff (BEES 2). From the 1976/77 season a centre became an obligation for Division 1 clubs, although residential facilities varied enormously from club to club (ibid.: 32). One issue today is the tension between school work and football training. In the 1970s recruits were aged 17–19 and so did not have to attend school, but a qualification called Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnelle des métiers du football gave an opportunity for subsidy, and centres put on classes in accountancy, administration, maths, French, anatomy and English. In the mid-1980s, through parental pressure, as recruitment got younger and younger, a full parallel school curriculum came in (ibid.: 119). As the Mission Sastre declared in 1989: ‘The aim of the training is first of all to prepare the profession of footballer while not neglecting general education’ (ibid.: 100). Since the 1990s, and the acceptance of the idea of préformation, recruitment of 13-year-olds means one of the main changes has been the reduction of the number of hours training – initially the DTN demanded 20–25 hours per week. With experience, this came down gradually to 15 hours, and with the appearance of a more complete school programme, the weekly norms were 12–15 hours in 1999 (ibid.: 71–72). Just as the coaching qualifications are highly regulated, so too are the Centres de formation in clubs. A centre has to apply for official approval annually, and is assessed on the quality of its resources (physical and human) and its results. Centres are awarded a classification that fixes among other standards a maximum number of trainees, and the amount of aid it will receive from the League (ibid.: 38–39; Faure and Suaud 1994b: 17). One of the more detailed published accounts of a professional club’s youth coaching programme is to be found in Tournier and Rethacker (1999: 71–108), based on Pierre Tournier’s own practice as head of the youth academies of Sochaux (1974 to 1982) and Monaco (1982 to 1993). Youth coaching has concentrated on skills, tactical sense, and fitness development. He recalls how Platini had left the job as national team manager in 1992 complaining that the graduates of the French youth academies were not sufficiently good in ball skills. Tournier claims that the solution has been the earlier start represented by préformation (Tournier and Rethacker 1999: 85). Sports science has been extensively used to measure and improve fitness and athleticism, and also ball skills (bio-mechanics of movement) (see Mandard and Zilbertin 2000). In comparing the Liverpool FC academy to youth training in France, Grégory Vignal picked out the level of French technical training as being better, not questions of mentality, structures or facilities (Rivoire and Ortelli 2002: 24). The dimension of ‘le mental’, mental attitude and strength of character, was what Michel Hidalgo deplored in French club teams competing in Europe. Tournier describes how to inculcate initiative, personal responsibility, will to work, self-confidence, and competitive spirit during training (Tournier and Rethacker 1999: 98–99). Tournier’s assessment of the most successful club training schemes in terms of producing professional players is, uncontroversially, to put Nantes clearly at the top of the list, followed by Auxerre. Faure and Suaud (1994b: 17–18) cite figures from the 1980s which show Nantes, Auxerre and Sochaux as the top youth academies. Nantes, with a series of outstanding directors of youth coaching (Arribas, Suaudeau, and Denoueix), have constantly cultivated their own ‘pass-and-move’ style of play that pervades the club, whereas Auxerre, under the long-term influence of Guy Roux, have their own man-to-man marking style of 4–3–3, mixing home-produced players with experienced buys from other clubs for his first team. PSG and Marseille, on the other hand, certainly in the 1980s, traditionally relied more on a star system and buying in established first-team players, using the income from their large crowds. They invested the minimum required of them by the Charte du football of 1973 in the obligatory Centre de formation. Faure and Suaud (1994b: 17) show that they, and Monaco too, in the 1980s, were not giving their home-produced talent opportunities. Their trainees often leave the club, like Anelka (Tournier and Rethacker 1999: 104–106). This was what PSG seemed to be trying to change in 2000 (see Chapter 4). In the Tapie years OM were between 31st and 22nd in the official classification of centres and since then still seem to be looking for a ‘quick fix’ (Faure and Suaud 1994b: 17). The Example of FC Nantes Looking at youth training on the ground, with the Nantes club as an example, we find a very systematic approach to youth recruitment policy. Nantes prefer to take in young players at age 13, but do so up to 16. They recruit within a 200 km radius for 13-year-olds, and nation-wide for the rest. Three times a year, for each age category, they organise training days in what they call their subsidiary clubs in different parts of the country, such as Saint-Maur, near Paris, and Albi in the south-west, as well as locally. They also have agreements with African clubs. In 2001 they had 22 trainees in their academy at préformation level (13–15 years), and 48 in formation (16–18). They run four teams in local competitions: one at under-15 level, another at under-17 level, a third in the regional Division d’Honneur, and one in the Championnat de France Amateur. Their youngsters alternate school (27 hours per week) and football training (10–11 hours). In the first year, the football training concentrates on ball skills; the hard physical work and muscle building comes later. The centre has three grass pitches, and one synthetic, and five coaches (including a specialist goalkeeping coach). The pupils have an school exam success rate of 88–90 per cent. In terms of football outcomes, on average three out of ten youths sign a professional contract, and 80 per cent of the squad has been trained at the club. Others go to other Breton clubs. They claim to be particularly keen to ensure that the ones who are less successful on the footballing side leave the academy with a good educational record (Bourcier et al. 2001: 20–21). The survey by Bourcier et al. (2001: 18–21) suggests that Nantes is not untypical. In 2000/01 16 out of 18 Division 1 clubs ran approved Centres de formation, whereas Sedan and Troyes, recently promoted, had been given official dispensation. Sixteen out of 20 Division 2 clubs had Centres de formation. About half of Division 1 academies now take their youths in at age 14–15, two or three at 13, the others at 16–17 years. Lyon claims the ones who succeed after starting training after 15 are the exception. Auxerre has some ‘satellite clubs’ in France; Bordeaux has a link with Casablanca (Algeria); Lens has links with clubs mainly in the north of France; Lille operates partnerships with 30 clubs from the Paris region to Belgium; Marseille looks only in the south-east and abroad; PSG concentrates on the Paris region. Few clubs recruit more than ten youth players per year, often less. Numbers in residence in youth academies vary widely: Lens and Monaco about 50, Bordeaux 42, Auxerre has 35, little Guingamp 22, the same as Marseille. In the bigger cities, understandably, there appear to be more non-resident youth players on the club’s books. Practically every centre echoes Nantes’s concentration on individual skills before physical/athletic development. Most centres mention physiotherapists and doctors on their staff, with on average at least one coach per 10–11 players. Auxerre claims to have the most home-produced players on their professional books among D1 teams. Most agree that three or four players signing professional forms per year is not uncommon and is a good result. A number of centre directors mentioned the importance of personal development of the youngsters or the family atmosphere of the club as a plus. The Lens academy director best echoed official FFF policy:

Lens means values, the stadium, the crowd, the jersey. It’s also a philosophy regarding the youngsters. Training a kid is 25% about football, 75% about his life. Our aim is for him to succeed in life, for him to achieve fulfilment. We take an interest above all in the individual, and in the individual you’ll find the player. (Bourcier et al. 2001: 19)

The beneficial effects of five years of French professional youth training are well known in Italy, where many clubs have bought products of French academies. The Juventus manager Lippi has been reported as saying that ‘the good thing about buying a French player is a good education, a good attitude, very professional, very focused and tactically fully aware. He knows all the systems’ (Hopkins and Williams 2001: 189). While the success of French youth policy is not in doubt, there are still those players who come into the game late from outside the system. The 2000/01 players’ Player of the Year Eric Carrière played for Nantes, but had not emerged from the conventional youth system. Small and slight for his age – in 2001 aged 28 he was still only 1.73m in height and weighed 61 kilos – he had been refused entry to a school Sports-études section and had played amateur football up to the age of 22, when he was spotted by Nantes playing in a Championnat national (Division 3) side, Muret. Leaving his higher education studies, he signed apprentice forms (stagiaire), and joined the Nantes Centre de formation as an over-age player. Going from three training sessions per week, to one or two every day took a toll on his body, until he decided to employ a personal physio and a specialist adviser to help him analyse his play on video. He played two games for the first team in 1996/97, and has not looked back since, winning his first international cap as play-maker in 2001 in the Confederation Cup tournament, and steering his new club Lyon to the championship in 2002 (Revault d’Alonnes 2001a). New Coaches for Old: from Batteux to Houllier and Wenger The terminology of football coaching and management is not interchangeable between France and Britain, although it may be converging as international exchanges and globalisation move on apace, and club structures become more alike – in the elite clubs at least. Football management culture has long been different on opposite sides of the Channel. There has of course also been evolution of the reality behind the terminology in both cultures. The average post-war English ‘manager’ always employed a track-suited ‘trainer’ to put the players through their paces on the manager’s behalf on training days and to wield a ‘magic sponge’ on match days, commonly an ex-player. The third person running the club was the Club Secretary. This was the model set in the 1920s and 1930s by the success of Herbert Chapman, aided by his trainer Tom Whittaker. They set the standards for what was the new model: the manager thinking creatively about tactics, and the trainer working on individual players’ fitness (Giulianotti 1999: 130–131; Walvin 1994: 137–138). Equally important was their example in setting the managers free of the Board of Directors. It was to be followed by the managers of the 1950s like Stan Cullis and the first ‘track-suited’ manager, Matt Busby (Russell 1997: 127), who dominated their clubs and were in charge of the office and administrative sides of the club as well as tactics and team selection, even if they did not publicly berate any director unwise enough to interfere, as Brian Clough was later prone to do. Managerial autonomy was slower to come to some clubs: the Newcastle United Board still chose the team well into the 1950s (ibid.: 90). There were one or two clubs where this alternative model had remained even more firmly in place: the club dominated by an old-style chairman, such as Burnley’s Bob Lord, who was the spokesperson to the press and who interfered in team matters. However, this model of relationship between Board and manager remained a minority one.

The Liverpool ‘boot-room’ model of a managerial team with a number of coaches under a dominant ‘manager’, that Bill Shankly had so intuitively begun in the 1960s, is a development of the manager–coach pairing. Writing as recently as 1996 about managers’ ‘right-hand-men’ no less a judge than Hugh McIlvanney (1996: 319) concluded: ‘Perhaps managers will soon need more than an assistant. Maybe they will need professional support from above as well as below.’ From the perspective of the first couple of years of the twenty-first century, this remark already seems very dated, such has been the effect of Houllier and Wenger. Many major clubs have indeed followed this direction: in addition to large coaching staffs below, there is considerable expertise above: a chief executive here or a vice-chairman there who takes full responsibility for transfer and salary negotiations, while leaving the ‘club manager’ to make all footballing decisions. However, as clubs have become plcs, tensions can emerge between the Board of Directors and the manager particularly in terms of buying and selling and therefore about issues of footballing strategy. In France, despite the odd exception, there is no equivalent of the traditional British model of an autonomous ‘manager’ dominating the club, setting the tone, and making all the decisions, footballing or otherwise, thus creating a club in his own image like a Busby or a Clough. The dominant figure within French club football, the person who has been most likely to mould the club in his own image, and sometimes for his own ulterior (extra-footballing) purposes, has been the chairman (‘président’). In the public eye, when we look for the major public figures of the post-war club game (not including players), club figureheads have most often been chairmen, like Roger Rocher (SaintEtienne), Bernard Tapie (OM), or, today, Jean-Michel Aulas (Lyon) (see Chapter 8). Since the dawn of French professionalism, businessmen-chairmen like JeanPierre Peugeot have been the driving forces in clubs. In this model of club management, the key dialectical relationship between président and entraîneur (literally ‘trainer’) has meant that the role of the team manager/trainer/coach has traditionally been more constrained and more narrowly defined than in Britain. It was summed up at the start of the 2001/02 season by the Lyon manager Jacques Santini, who had not appreciated the lack of consultation before his chairman had sold a player to Fulham: ‘Tensions? No, he’s the chairman, I’m just a manager[entraîneur], who should confine himself to on-the-field matters’ (Labrunie 2001b). The terminology reflects the cultural differences. When the FFF and State diplomas were set up to dignify the status of the French coaching and managerial staff, the terms chosen to describe their functions, as we have seen above, were ‘éducateur’ and ‘entraîneur’. The word ‘entraîneur’ is the default term, used by pre-teenage children in the lowliest amateur club to describe the man who looks after their team to the ‘manager’ of a professional team as expressed in the name of the official qualification ‘diplôme d’entraîneur professionnel de football’. A variation on this, especially at national level is ‘entraîneursélectionneur’, which refers back implicitly to a time when the coach was not the selector of the team. There is therefore within the French term a notion that the function is not autonomous, that there is implicitly some other authority to whom the ‘trainer’ reports, that it is a service position. The term does not have the status that the notion of ‘manager’ has acquired in the English-speaking world, consolidated through the importance of business values that have been more pervasive in British football and British society in general. In a sense, French football never completely professionalised and has never really accepted business values. The word éducateur, which, in another context, is used to refer to a ‘social worker’, has much wider connotations than simply passing on technical skills. There is unavoidably a notion of being responsible for the social aspects of personal development, which ties in with some of the values of public service that we have come across earlier in the voluntary and public sector involvement in mass and elite sport. More informally, the word formateur is also in use, in particular to describe the function of coaches working in youth coaching. The word is much more value free than éducateur, but not quite as neutral as ‘instructor’. Finally, with the increasing frequency of international travel, and the influence of American English via media coverage of basketball for example, the franglais term ‘coach’ can be heard as the mode of address of players to manager. Even if the French club manager has generally never had the same autonomy that many English managers enjoy and indeed take for granted, the role of the entraîneur has evolved. The number-two to Jacquet as DTN, charged by the FFF with overseeing the training of coaches, Jean-Pierre Morlans, describes how the role and image of the club manager has changed since the 1970s:

The role and image of the manager have evolved considerably. Thirty years ago, people had in mind a man with a bag of balls over his shoulder. Twenty years ago, as people became conscious of the physiological aspect of training, they imagined a man with a stopwatch in his hand, allowing him to measure effort and recovery times. Today, this image is largely outof-date. His role is much wider and goes beyond the purely sporting dimension. The manager must also be a psychologist, a good communicator, able to teach and have a preventative role. He has become a powerful figure within the club, but is not really recognised as such in France. (Morlans 2001)

Looking at the key figures who, since the war, have established the French model of coaching and management at club level, there is a clear genealogical tree of successful managers and coaches, leading indeed directly to the French World Cup win and beyond. The spiritual father of the profession (to quote France Football, 26 December 2000: 44–45) is generally recognised as Albert Batteux, who coached the two most successful teams of the 1950s and 1960s: Reims and Saint-Etienne. He also coached the French World Cup side that finished third in 1958. His assistant in Sweden with the national team was Jean Snella, who managed Saint-Etienne in the period before his friend Batteux arrived. Snella himself won three championships as manager of ‘les Verts’. Robert Herbin was a key player under these two managers, and he succeeded Batteux to manage Saint-Etienne to four more league titles, three French cups and the famous European Cup sagas. Another key Saint-Etienne player who was at the club under all three of the aforementioned mentors was Aimé Jacquet. While managing Bordeaux, Jacquet went on to coach two players later to become successful managers, Tigana and Giresse. The former Lyon coach and new national team manager, Jacques Santini, also overlapped with Jacquet as a player at Saint-Etienne, and coached them from 1992–94. Personal influence, sometimes reciprocal, seems to have been important in passing on values and practices. Batteux is at the start of another genealogical branch of coaching success in so far one of his players at Reims was Michel Hidalgo, who went on to be France’s most successful national manager (until Jacquet) by reaching the semifinals of the World Cup in 1982 and then winning the European Nations Cup in 1984. Of the current generation of managers, Giresse, Tigana, and Luis Fernandez (the first Frenchman to manage a club to European success) all played many times under Hidalgo. The other key genealogical line starts in Nantes with José Arribas who established the Nantes one-touch, pass-and-move football and the most famous French youth academy. The Nantes tradition was carried on by Jean-Claude (‘Coco’) Suaudeau, who in turn passed the reins to Raynald Denoueix (1997). Suaudeau had joined Nantes as an apprentice in Arribas’s first year as manager (1960). By 1973 he was coaching the juniors to victory in the Gambardella Cup, and took over the senior team in 1981, at which point Denoueix became Director of the Youth Academy. This continuity and overlap of personnel is generally credited as the reason why Nantes has maintained the same style and values that are so recognisable (Faure and Suaud 1994b: 11–12, and 1999: 149– 189). Nantes was the only club to challenge Saint-Etienne in their heyday, winning six titles between 1965 and 1983; and have been one of the most successful sides of the last decade (titles in 1995 and 2001). The influence of Nantes on French management is indicated by the fact that, in the 2001/02 season, there were five managers of Division 1 clubs who had spent significant parts of their playing careers at Nantes: Denoueix and Angel Marcos (Lorient) under Arribas, and Vahid Halilhodzic (LOSC), Guy Lacombe (Guingamp) and Didier Deschamps (Monaco) under Suaudeau. Of these five only Deschamps did not win a Championship in the famous yellow shirt. Before becoming a European Cup Winner with Marseille and Juventus and a World Cup winning captain, he spent five years in the Nantes youth academy. He is spoken of as a possible future national team manager, and has acknowledged the Nantes influence on his managerial approach (Brochen 2001b: 6). One other significant manager to emerge from the Nantes school was Henri Michel, who played under Arribas and Suaudeau (as captain from 1971), went on to be assistant to Hidalgo as national team manager (1982–84), succeeded him (1984–88), and spent four years as DTN before managing the national teams of Cameroon, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and United Arab Emirates.4 A final coach who cannot be ignored and who is out of no mould other than his own is Guy Roux, the only club manager to appear regularly on the French TV satirical puppet show Les Guignols de l’info, and who has single-handedly made Auxerre into a major force. In a poll of ‘experts’ in 2000, France Football awarded trophies for the best French managers of the century, including club and country. The top ten names, in order, were: Jacquet, Batteux, Hidalgo, Wenger, Roux, Arribas, Snella, Suaudeau, Fernandez and Herbin. Albert Batteux: the Father of Modern French Coaching Batteux has the best club record in French football history in terms of championship wins, with Reims and Saint-Etienne (eight, including three leagueand-cup doubles). As manager of both Reims and the French national team, Batteux based his teams’ style on attack and individual skill. He was an excellent communicator, charismatic, a wonderful teller of stories. As a motivator he was precise in his choice of words, never violent or vexatious. His team talks would last two hours on the evening before a match, analysing players’ strengths and weaknesses. He fitted his tactics to his players rather than the opposite. Kopa said of him: ‘With Monsieur Batteux the player was king, his talent could be expressed without reservation’ (Larcher 2000). A good judge of a player, he recruited some excellent players from other clubs: Piantoni from Nancy, Fontaine from Nice. Late in his career, when he joined the Nancy board, he is credited with preventing a skinny young Michel Platini from being sent home from the youth academy for poor academic results (Larcher 2000). His international team were called ‘les Brésiliens de l’Europe’. To hone his players’ skills and speed, he invented practices such as three-against-three on a basketball court where, to score, the ball had to hit the net post. He is thought to have invented football tennis. To develop attacking play he encouraged defenders to think about quick counterattacks; for example, goalkeepers were asked look for opportunities to throw quick balls out to the side to begin attacks, which was a new tactic. He was also ahead of his time in using a specialist fitness coach. His influence on successive managers is not in doubt (Larcher 2000; Penverne 2000). The New Generation Having traced the genealogical lines of development of the traditional coaching model of the French club manager, we can now look at how the profession is changing. Bordeaux’s 1999 championship winning entraîneur Elie Baup confirms the view that in French clubs the model is not one of managerial autonomy – although he has strong views about the direction in which the job has to evolve. He would like to extend his field of action as a manager, to feel properly in charge of the entire ‘technical’ sector of the club:

The whole sporting side must belong to the manager [l’entraîneur]. Everything has become hyper professional in French clubs. We have [coaching] staff, video, medical structures. Inside that, the manager is the conductor of the orchestra. He is the boss of the club. It is the manager who makes choices, and if he gets it wrong, then he dies with his ideas. (France Football, 2856, 2 January 2001: 8)

The journalist calls this vision as that of a ‘manager à l’anglaise’. This concurs with Morlans’ view at the DTN, who cites the French managers operating in England as the models:

I think this evolution will take us to a more global function including the management of financial and administrative issues along the lines of the general manager embodied by Arsène Wenger, Gérard Houiller or Jean Tigana. This is why we have to be more effective in this area. (Morlans 2001)

The model for French clubs has clearly become the one personified by French coaches abroad, among whom the ground-breaker was Arsène Wenger. Arsène Wenger Wenger is certainly an innovator and a precursor, and from an early age was always interested in living abroad (ITV1 interview 12 May 2001). Houllier has said it would have been more difficult for him to come to Liverpool, but for Wenger’s example. Through his articulate analyses in television interviews, as much as by his team’s rapid success, Wenger is, as Paul Weaver has written (2001), ‘the man who, more than any other, has popularised the notion of foreign coaches in British football’. He also had the courage to work in a culture as different as Japan’s. He is highly respected in France, as shown by his rating in the France Football millennial survey (26 December 2000: 34), where he was voted fourth best French manager of the century. He won the French championship once, early in his seven-year stint at Monaco, and then his team was fairly consistently runner-up, before dipping in form. For a time it looked as if a similar story was unfolding in England, where Arsenal won the double in his first year in charge, and qualified for the Champions League consistently, but coming second ever after in the domestic league – until Arsenal won the League and Cup double again in 2002. He felt he stayed a year too long at Monaco, where he was sacked in the last year of his contract after earlier being begged to stay on, for which he turned down Bayern Munich (Lawrence 2000a). So far he gives every indication of wanting to stay long enough at Arsenal to make a real difference. He was rumoured to have turned down the chance to manage the French national side in 2002. He is sometimes called ‘the professor’, not just because of his glasses – he is obviously an educated man, who speaks several languages. He also takes for granted the lessons of sports science when it comes to fitness, diet and lifestyle. He introduced modern stretching exercises and vitamin supplements. Steve Bould reckoned it added two years to his career (Lawrence 2000b: 208). The laddish drinking culture of English football has been seriously dented by Wenger’s arrival – his captain did after all prolong his career by admitting he had become an alcoholic and sought successful treatment. ‘Diet is for sportsmen what petrol is for a car. If you put the wrong petrol in a car it does not work as well as it could. If you put the wrong diet into a body it does not work well’ (Humphries 2001). Steak and toast followed by rice pudding for the pre-match lunch – Jim Smith’s recollections of his diet as a player – or beer, sausages and going home from the pub ‘legless’ after the match (Harry Redknapp) – were definitely not on the menu at Highbury. Tales of smoking and hard drinking by relegated Manchester City players in 2001 (Taylor 2001) will only confirm the sense of the new culture that Wenger has initiated, and underline his strength of purpose. Wenger is a self-confessed football addict and workaholic – he took a week’s holiday in summer 2000, one more week than he normally takes, according to Amy Lawrence (2000a). He watches a TV (or video) match every night via a large satellite dish in his back garden, in order to keep abreast of potential opponents, players to buy, or just to keep up with tactical developments. Just like his admirer Elie Baup (Bordeaux), who had gone to Rome as part of his managerial training and constantly does his scouting by video (Machenaud 1999), Wenger’s football world is global. His teams, as Ian Ridley (1999) has said, are a ‘mixture of style and steel, graft and grace’ (Vieira and Henry). He has relied heavily on French players, apart from his English defence, but has been criticised for being too prudent in spending. He argues there is something more to football than money: ‘It’s team spirit, collective quality, work on the field, giving a chance to young players’ (Lawrence 2000a), which of course is what the Bosman exodus has forced upon French football as a whole since the late 1990s. Gérard Houllier Hopkins and Williams (2001: 183), in their insightful analysis of an interview with Gérard Houllier that shows the depth and subtlety of his thinking about football, nicely call him ‘both a technocrat and a humanist’. By humanist they do not simply mean that he may occasionally quote Proust and Milan Kundera in his team talks (Whittell 2001), but that his analysis of the game is set within an ethical perspective and a broad vision of sport as intimately linked to its social and economic surroundings. Ross (1999) reports him as justifying on ethical grounds the commitment and work rate he demands of players: ‘Players have responsibilities, because, whether they like it or not, they are public figures. The players have to be aware that the people who come to the ground spend fortunes in relation to what they earn on a weekly basis.’ Humanist too in the sense that, from his early contact with Liverpool as a student of English, researching his Masters dissertation in the deprived suburbs of Toxteth, in his French language classroom, and on the Kop, he developed an understanding of and an admiration for the ‘structure of feeling’ of the Liverpool people, and the part that the football club played in their sense of identity, their ‘imaginaire’ (Hopkins and Williams 2001: 174). As manager of Liverpool he has attempted to connect with that spirit and place it at the core of the club’s values. He cannot, for example, conceive of picking a team that does not have a ‘heart’ of Liverpoolborn players, let alone no Englishman, as Chelsea did under Vialli. He has noticed too that football is played differently from town to town. It has got something to do with ‘the way of living, the culture, the history’. ‘Football is more than just eleven players, it’s an environment, it’s a context, and they [the Liverpool fans] have had so much more of the good football practice in the successful years that you could not break away from that’ (ibid.: 187). Hence he has to play a passing game, modified only by wanting to educate his players to ‘pass forward’ more. More than the style of play, he had to change the player culture. He believes in the all-round education and culture of the products of the French youth system that he did so much to shape as DTN: good decision-makers, flexible and intelligent on the field. He believes that the improvement of football skills needs to go along with a player’s all-round education and culture. What he found at Liverpool was the dominant English player culture, which lacked discipline and modern professionalism: ‘laddish’ behaviour and mentalities, drinking, a particular ‘code of masculinity’, an anti-intellectual ‘thug culture’, and chauvinistic insularity, that has been analysed in various academic studies.5 English training has too often produced players who require direction and supervision, and so lack flexibility, and who act irresponsibly on and off the field. Houllier quickly got rid of those whom he saw as impervious to change and resistant to his authority. What he admired about English football was its ‘culture of effort’, its work ethic, which the Liverpool crowd always expects, and which often goes handin-hand with team spirit. This does not exclude a scientific approach to preparation. Hopkins and Williams (2001: 182) neatly sum up the ‘new scientism’ imported from the Continent into British football and that Houllier represents so well: ‘greater club “professionalism”, a more holistic view of player development and education; the need for rigorous control of player diets; a place in the game for top-class medical back-up; and careful psychological, and well as physical, player preparation for matches’. When Roy Evans left the club soon after Houllier’s arrival, this marked the end of the ‘boot-room’ era, reliant on passing down received wisdom and Shankly’s intuitive methods. A back-room team still exists, but it is more numerous and more specialist, and Houllier takes every opportunity to give them credit. He dedicated the 2001 UEFA Cup victory to his staff (France Football, 18 May 2001: 23), the ‘team behind the team’, typically containing both some of his own men (like Patrice Bergues, with whom he worked at Lens and at the DTN) and some long-term Liverpool servants (assistant Phil Thompson, coach Sammy Lee, director of the Youth Academy Steve Heighway).6 His book on coaching and management (Entraîneur: Compétence et passion, 1993, jointly authored with J. Crevoisier, who joined the Liverpool staff in 2001) is well regarded. Not that Houllier ever thinks he has all the answers; on the contrary. A key aspect of his approach is a constant calling into question what he is doing: ‘If you don’t question and try to update your methods you will be left behind . . . you have to be adventurous . . . that’s how you progress.’ This is another aspect of the learning culture that he sees at the core of modern football. Perhaps he owes much of this to his father, who, involved in the amateur game successively as player, coach, and club official, gave his son a passion for the game, but refused to let him become a professional footballer, insisting he train to be a teacher (Hopkins and Williams 2001: 175). In the 2001/02 season he almost learned too directly the effects of taking his commitment to Liverpool football to the point where it became more important than life and death (to misquote his famous predecessor Bill Shankly). Overwork caused a life-threatening illness from which he recovered remarkably quickly in view of its gravity. The way his technical staff were able to carry on in his four-month absence is perhaps the greatest tribute to the impact he has made at Anfield. The emotional reaction of the fans to his unexpected return to the dug-out in an important Champions League quarter-final is evidence not only of how much he is now loved by them, but also of his sense of timing, since his presence heightened the atmosphere generated by the crowd, which at Anfield, as he well knew, has been so important, especially in key games. The Coach as National Hero: Aimé Jacquet It was with the arrival of professionalism that the FFF set up an administrative department to help the selection committee liaise in picking the national team, and only in 1964 did the committee give way to a single selector-manager. The position was made a full-time one in the 1964/65 season. Previously, selection and coaching functions were, as in the Batteux era, kept separate. From the 1970s onwards the national technical director was a support to or sometimes the same person as the national team manager. The team manager, usually with outstanding coaching credentials, has sometimes emerged from the DTN staff or gone back to the position of DTN. The modern entraîneurs-selectionneurs have not lasted long in the post if results have not gone their way. So far, only the two most successful have been able to resign with heads held high, after major victories: Hidalgo and Jacquet. They feature in prominent position in the pantheon of French coaches. Were they just lucky enough to have a generation of great players at their disposal, or did they contribute something that turned a squad into a winning team? Hidalgo certainly had the incomparable Platini, with Giresse, Tigana, and Fernandez making up the midfield diamond. Jacquet had a solid defence built around Blanc and Desailly, a tactically astute captain and leader in Deschamps, and the outstanding player of his generation in Zidane. Hidalgo is remembered fondly and with pride, but Jacquet reached an altogether different level of hero worship. The warmth emanating from what seemed like the whole of the French nation towards national team manager Aimé Jacquet from the point when France reached the final of the 1998 World Cup at least equalled the admiration even for Zidane, and arguably surpassed it. This was partly because Jacquet was suddenly perceived as having been unfairly criticised for two years by the footballing press (see McKeever 1999), indeed ridiculed by the sports daily L ’Equipe for his apparently old-fashioned and uninspiring approach – unfairly since the victory seemed to have come about less because of outstanding individual performances and more because of teamwork. Having stuck to his tactics and choices, he suddenly found himself a hero of the national press, which presented him more and more as a representative of the values of French tradition – in counterpoint to the adoption of Zidane as symbol of new attitudes to the nation and to integration (see Dauncey and Hare 2000). Almost without exception, the rest of the national press suddenly saw in Jacquet a tragic misunderstood hero. Le Monde and other dailies and weeklies produced glowing profiles of Jacquet before and after the final (Chemin et al. 1998). Having been mocked for his provincial accent and inarticulacy in front of the TV cameras, for his refusal to play the communication game, and for generally being unfashionable, Jacquet now stood for virtues of hard work, modesty, humility, respect, honesty, rigour, simplicity, authenticity, competence, professionalism: all that was good in French tradition. His approach to football had worked: methodical, protecting his players, building teamwork, unselfishness, valuing character, effort as much as talent, getting a result rather than being flashy. He came to represent all those unpaid volunteers who coach young children in the smallest amateur clubs. The term that best described him, for Le Monde, was not coach, or trainer, or manager, but éducateur. Indeed the éducateurs ’ role was compared to that of the ‘hussars of the republic’ in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, the lay primary school teachers of the first universal free and secular State school system: transmitting Republican values to the youth of France, promoting a meritocracy, and creating the national unity that in recent decades has been eroded. Despite the criticism that had been heaped upon him, Jacquet’s track record had none the less been irreproachable, whether as a player or a club manager. The former skilled factory worker had been a key part of the Saint-Etienne midfield, winning two cup-winners medals and five championships between 1964 and 1970. As a manager he won three championships and two French cups with Bordeaux and a place in Europe every year, before being sacked by chairman Claude Bez for being ‘too straight’. As national manager, for some he symbolised a new era of French football, the opposite of the Tapie years when lucre and glitz were everything. The symbolism extended to the idea that the team he had created had become an analogy of the way forward for a nation in decline. For having inspired a multiracial team, in France’s image, to all pull together successfully in the national interest, Jacquet was presented as incarnating the three integrative forces of old: not only the Republican school teacher, but the other mainstays of pre-war France, the provincial priest, and the factory worker that he had in fact been before becoming a professional footballer. If the Republic was once again threatened in its cohesion and fraternity, in its troubled banlieues, much of the French press saw Jacquet’s ‘traditional values’ and self-belief as the answer.7 Conclusion In the mid-1980s and the Platini era, when French football began to get a taste of success after ten years of youth training schemes, three-quarters or even four-fifths of professional footballers in the French Division 1 had learned their trade in a Centre de formation (Tournier and Rethacker 1999: 128). The figures are not going down. The footballing success of France, in moving from a world ranking of fifteenth to first in the 25 years of the youth training in the INF and in clubs’ centres, cannot entirely be put down to coincidence. In the 1990s a key development was the national and regional youth training centres for 13– 15-year-olds, set up by Gérard Houllier as DTN, where a good general education is combined with training to become a professional footballer. This contrasts with the situation in Britain, as interpreted by Richard Holt, where there is no equivalent way into professional sport while maintaining one’s general education and leaving open the possibility of entering higher education. He claims that the problem with English professional football is not so much a general lack of players, but the confining of recruitment to a shrinking working class, through the belief among the expanding middle class that their children can only maintain their social status through educational achievement, whereas entering a professional football career requires exclusive commitment to it at the age of 16 or earlier at the price of dropping GCSE and A-level study (Holt 1994: 39–40). Alongside the importance of the French youth coaching system, other associated factors cannot be ignored, however: the interest and support of the State under governments of various political colours, the systematic training of coaches, a highly centralised system of qualifications obligatory for coaches and managers to be able to practise professionally, a regular desire on the part of the FFF to improve the system, concentration as much on spreading interest in football among the nation’s youth as on selecting and developing an elite – all have played their part. Along with French youth training methods that have improved skills there has been the fortuitous final touch of rigorous foreign (particularly Italian) character building and fitness training for the many French internationals who played abroad. The contribution of outstanding individuals such as Gérard Houllier and Aimé Jacquet cannot be underestimated. Nor should it be forgotten that their contributions have been facilitated by the French system rather than being hindered by it. The meanings associated in the press with Jacquet as a national symbol show how important is the figure of the éducateur in France and the values that are invested in it. They reveal too how much football has become a part of the wider social and cultural context of France in recent years. But they reveal something deeper about French society too, in as much as they do not equate to the commonly understood metaphor of the World Cup as acceptance of modernisation, of a new France comfortable with its definitive multiracial identity, as symbolised by the multicoloured national team winning for France.

The two metaphors are in conflict or at least in counterpoint. They represent two different understandings of French identity: the one the values of modernisation and the new France, and the other the values of French tradition, the old France, before large-scale immigration (or at least before black and Arab/ Muslim immigration), and before the second industrial revolution and the modern deprived city suburbs, before mass unemployment. Jacquet is used as a means of looking back proudly to French traditions and continuity. But the euphoria of the victory celebrations conveniently obscured these different visions of France. A reminder of their continuing actuality came in the abandoned France–Algeria match of October 2001. These issues will be explored in Chapter 6 through a study of players and national identity.

Notes:

1. The département is, since Napoleonic times, the basic administrative division of the French State. Metropolitan France is divided into 96 départements, plus five more overseas. Since the 1970s a larger unit, the région, has been superimposed on the départements. Metropolitan France has 22 administrative régions.

2. In addition to the INF at Clairefontaine the centres are: 1994/95 Vichy, and Tours (moved to Châteauroux in 1997); 1995/96 Castelmaurou in the Midi-Pyrénées; 1996/97 Liévin in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais; 1997/98 Madine in Lorraine, and Ploufragan in Brittany. Other centres are in the pipeline.

3. Thierry Henry was in préformation at the INF before joining the Centre de formation in Monaco.

4. For article on French coaches in Africa see ‘L ’Afrique des coaches français’, France Football, 2881 (26 June 2001: 36–38).

5. Hopkins and Williams (2001: 177–178) cite Wagg (1984); Williams and Taylor (1994); Williams (2000a), who also cites John Cartwright on the ‘thug culture’.

6. See the Independent (19 May 2001: 30), for a formal photograph of all ten technical staff surrounding trophies and manager.

7. See Colombani (1998), and also Haget (1998), Chemin et al. (1998), Benamou (1998), Bozonnet (1998).