In training centers, the Covid-19 has changed the situation for young footballers: education disrupted, limited outings and above all more official matches to punctuate the week, record progress … and be noticed.
In the SCO Angers youth weight room, half a dozen teenagers, pen in hand, are working on a questionnaire on their goals and the means to be implemented to achieve them.
Normally, they should be on the pitch preparing for their next game. But all the amateur championships, where young teams or reserve clubs from Ligue 1 or Ligue 2 are engaged, have been suspended for months.
So the physical trainers have slipped into the planning this mental preparation session, which will continue with individual interviews, to help the young people to move forward by projecting themselves in the long term.
Because the present worries: the clubs must decide before the end of April which players to thank and to whom to offer a contract. And it is heartbreaking for Abdel Bouhazama, director of the Angers training center.
– “Lost generation”? –
“My big worry is not being able to give the right answers to our young people,” he explains. However, matches are an essential factor of progression and evaluation.
“We continue to train, train, train. And we do not know where we are,” regrets Lilian Raolisoa, 20, winger or right side of the reserve team. “It is in matches that we are evaluated, by our coaches, but also by people outside.”
Last year, when confinement sent everyone home from mid-March, Angers opted for a blank season in its training center: no one entered, no one left.
This year, “we will not be able to keep everyone”. And we will have to juggle the restrictions to recruit future promotions, for example by allowing young people already spotted to come and try out. “I hope that we will not come to speak of a lost generation,” worries Abdel Bouhazama.
In Angers, there are currently 75 young people aged 15 to 20 under different types of contracts (training, aspirants, interns …), including 26 housed at the center. The club is indeed looking to recruit locally, proximity to the family remaining a guarantee of success for these teenagers subjected to intense stress: they know it, only a handful of them will become professional.
– Cascading closures –
All the clubs therefore focus on education, via agreements with high schools for courses with flexible hours, so that those who will have to leave do not do so empty-handed.
But here too, it is not easy and special attention is needed for the “lodged” who are only accommodated in high school one week out of two, and who return as little as possible on weekends to limit the risks.
So far, the Angers training center has only registered one case of Covid-19. Others have been less fortunate and have had to close temporarily in recent months, such as in Le Havre, Marseille, Nice or even currently in Lorient and Brest for the second time.
Under these conditions, the exemption allowing training centers to meet for friendly matches, even with tests a few days before, may seem risky. In Nantes, a young person tested positive for Covid-19 after a match against the young people of Lorient shortly before the discovery of a cluster among the Merlus.
But even for those who still have time to prove themselves, like Mattéo Corduan, 18-year-old midfielder for the reserve team, “games are our favorite part of football.”
And then the financial crisis linked to the matches behind closed doors and the fiasco of TV rights could also accelerate the integration of certain young people into the professional group, as a measure of savings. They still have to be ready. “And the best training is that they play”, explains Abdel Bouhazama.
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