French training has proven itself. We owe it to old sages of whom only those well over fifty have kept images. Henri Guerin, Georges Boulogne and closer to home Jean Snella, Robert Herbin, Pierre Garonnaire but also the sometimes forgotten Robert Philippe. With of course Roger Rocher to orchestrate. It was the day before yesterday but the fruits continue to ripen on the grafted trees in Rennes, Lyon or Monaco, the three best training clubs in Ligue 1 according to the FFF. After tomorrow, we will make a new harvest of laurels or hopes with the eponymous French team. The Lukeba, Caqueret, Cherki, Barcola and Lepenant above all show the predominance of OL, a tree hiding the forest, like the young shoots cultivated at PSG in the shadow of the stars and hatched in Germany where we know how to translate the notion of patience.
ASSE no longer plays in the same court, rather in that of Laval, Grenoble, Nîmes or Dijon and if we mention these clubs, it is because our colleagues from L’Equipe have cited them in various topics devoted to the issue leaders faced with training, its costs, its uncertainties. A question that can also arise in Saint-Étienne where we have certainly achieved great budgetary deals with Saliba and Fofana, but perhaps lost much more sportingly, philosophically and ultimately financially with ambitions stored at the bottom of the drawer of the interest, an inexorable descent until the big plunge in Ligue 2.
The height of trading, seeing a player go free like Krasso
Michel Platini, whose vision of the game no one can deny, even if he may have been led on a false track for the World Cup, wonders in La Tribune-Le Progres about the possibility for the Greens to return to the first plan. After having swept away the hope of quickly returning to the fore “Unless oil is found in the mines…”, he does not really believe in a rewriting of History with the same pencil as there is a half century. When our colleague asks him if “training can be the possible way of a return to the forefront”, the answer stings, realistic, cold as the economy of the ball, the loss of the values which he has long defended “Now, you are training a 16-year-old kid, at 17 he left. It’s the money that makes the difference. When you have money, you have good players”. In Sainté, the good ones leave. Saliba and Fofana certainly but the list is long from Zouma to Raveyre who leaves the club without even a pro match, and free, through Guilavogui, Ghoulam, Camara and others, less rated. Many have made it possible to respect the virtuous rule of shareholders before the DNCG. Did they have other choices? If so (we think so) they will have it less and less. “At the end of each contract (aspirant, elite, trainee) there is danger” observed Christophe Point, director of the Dijon training center, in L’Equipe, and the threat does not always come from afar. “Before, the French clubs between them did not steal the players in training”, regrets, still in L’Equipe, Bernard Blaquart, trainer and former director of the centers of Grenoble, Tours and Nîmes. Today, it seems to me that it is the jungle”. What to question a training policy that costs between 1.3 and 7 million depending on the category of the center? This is what Laurent Lairy, the president of Laval, who wants to make parents pay, suggests and what Rani Assaf, the president of Nîmes, did by closing up shop. Less expeditious, the general manager of Grenoble, Max Marty, says he is concerned about an evolution that many are already ahead of, as noted by Point in the same survey by our colleague “Everyone makes sure to lock”, that is to say signing younger and younger players, like at ASSE. Another path is that of trading enthusiasts, finding promising players, advancing them and reselling them. The height is then not to let go of the jewel without a ring. Like Krasso going free…”
Didier Bigard
To sum up
Didier Bigard wonders about the problem of leaders faced with training, its costs, its uncertainties. “In Saint-Étienne we have certainly achieved great budgetary deals with Saliba and Fofana, but perhaps lost much more sportingly, philosophically and ultimately financially with ambitions stored at the bottom of the profit-sharing drawer”, he writes. ..
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