A year before France hosts the World Cup its young players are the envy of Europe, the result of an imaginative system with the accent on skill
SOCCER: Richard Williams
THE builders and decorators are in residence at the big house on the Avenue d’Ina, resplendifying the grand stone staircase and refurbishing the offices of the executives of the Fdration Franaise de Football as they prepare to welcome their guests to the 1998 World Cup. Twenty kilometres or so to the north the vast new Stade de France is rising from the ground of Saint-Denis.
But it would be a mistake to think that French football is all about window- dressing and grand monuments. Thanks to an imaginative and rigorous development programme, the internal organs appear to be in better working order than ever before.
France had two representatives in the semi- final rounds of the three European competitions.
This is no fluke. France had semi-finalists in all three competitions last year, finalists in two of them, and produced the champions of one: PSG in the Cup Winners’ Cup. That sort of consistency is a phenomenon more conventionally associated with clubs from Serie A or, from time to time, the Bundesliga.
Further evidence is apparent in a breakdown of the players called up from Italian clubs for squad duty in the recent worldwide programme of World Cup and friendly international matches. The list features three Croats, one Dane, four Russians, two Dutchmen, two Belgians, two Portuguese, one Englishman, one Czech, four Yugoslavs, one Austrian, one German, two Uruguayans, two Argentinians, one Brazilian, one Swiss, two South Africans, one Ghanaian, one Liberian, three Swedes – and 10 Frenchmen.
There could hardly be a greater tribute to the work done by the people in charge of training French footballers over the last dozen years than the respect in which Inter’s Youri Djorkaeff, Juventus’s Didier Deschamps and Zinedine Zidane, Milan’s Marcel Desailly, Barcelona’s Laurent Blanc, Parma’s Lilian Thuram and Sampdoria’s Christian Karembeu are held.
The admiration extends to players currently outside Aim Jacquet’s international pool, such as Coco Martins at Athletic Bilbao and, of course, the eternal Eric Cantona. Nor is this generation’s talent exhausted. At the Parc des Princes recently Milan’s Arrigo Sacchi and Inter’s Giacinto Facchetti were present to watch Ibrahim Ba, Bordeaux’s slippery 24-year-old winger, decorate his third appearance with several exhilarating runs.
Yet there is indeed an even greater tribute, and it takes the form of the covetous interest being shown in the next generation of French internationals, the players currently in the Under-20 side that won last year’s European championship under the tutelage of Grard Houllier, who is also technical director of the French federation.
We already know about his team’s captain, Monaco’s prodigious Thierry Henry, the wing-heeled 19-year-old destroyer of Newcastle and prime target of Real Madrid. We are dimly aware of Nicolas Anelka, the 18-year-old forward recently smuggled by Arsne Wenger from PSG to Arsenal and who is, according to Houllier, “the most promising player I’ve ever seen at that age”.
We will get to know David Trzguet, Monaco’s 19-year-old Franco-Argentinian striker; Jean-Sbastian Jaurs, Auxerre’s left-back, also 19; Peter Luccin, a 17- year-old defensive midfielder who subdued Monaco’s dangerous playmaker Ali Benarbia for Cannes shortly before his recent move to Bordeaux; and the goalkeeper Mikal Landreau, another 17-year-old, pitched into Nantes’ first team early this season and now regarded as a Shilton or a Zoff in the making.
In the interests of maintaining the quality of domestic professional football, significant moves were made last week to stop these boys following the path of their elders into the foreign leagues. Anelka has already escaped; he was followed last week by David Hellebuyck, a 17-year-old left- winger signed by Atletico Madrid from Lyons.
“No one minds players going abroad at 25 or 26,” Houllier said. “That’s a good age. Personally, I think Djorkaeff, Deschamps and Zidane have been improved as players by the experience of another kind of adventure and the new responsibilities that go with it. But the young players are a different matter.”
The belief that Anelka and Hellebuyck will be the last to go is based on two factors. First, the French government announced its intention to lift the tax burden on professional sportsmen and sportswomen, putting them in the same category as actors. Not only have the players been taxed more heavily than those of other countries, but the government levied a large national insurance contribution from the clubs, powerfully reducing the amount available to the players.
Second, from July 1 all French clubs will be allowed to sign young players to five- year contracts, rather than the arrangement – a two-year apprenticeship, a one-year assessment and a two-year youth contract – which offered predatory foreign clubs and the players’ agents two windows of opportunity, one on either side of the assessment year, allowing 17-year-olds to be spirited away.
All this would have shocked those who watched French football 20 years ago. “In the Seventies,” Houllier said, “we were useless. Nothing at all in terms of Europe or world football, at youth or senior level.” And when the great side of Platini, Tigana and Giresse appeared in the early Eighties, it lacked depth.
So Houllier’s Seventies predecessor decreed the compulsory establishment at all clubs of centres de formation, where 15-year-olds could spend five years learning their craft. These centres produced the Cantonas and Papins, and their successors. When Houllier took over in 1990 he extended the scheme into the area of prformation, first drawing in boys between the ages of 12 and 15, and more recently into initiation, between nine and 12, and the government- approved Premier Foot programme, which provides primary schools with a sort of football equivalent of the Kwik-cricket kit on the understanding that the children – boys and girls – are encouraged to use them for one hour a week.
“We noticed that when a child arrived at a centre de formation at 15 or 16, if he had something lacking in his skills, it was difficult to help him catch up,” Houllier said. “So we tried an experiment. We decided to take hold of them earlier, at 10 or 12, and work on one thing: skills, skills, skills. Only skills. No physical pressure, nothing.
And the results with the first group of 20 boys were so outstanding that we knew we had to do it everywhere.”
Of the 20, who included Henry and Anelka, 11 were recruited by professional clubs. Of the most recent groups, the figure is up to 95%. “This has become a priority scheme with us. And it’s like learning a language, it’s easier at 12 or 13 than at 16. But we don’t overdo it. One hour’s training a day, five days a week. They’re boarders, they do their normal school work and at the weekends they go home to their families and their small local clubs. And if they score a lot of goals, it doesn’t matter. It gives them confidence.
“The problem is that, a long time ago, boys grew up playing in the streets, in the fields, in the open spaces. Now, no more. If there’s an open space, it’s a car park. So we have to replace that somehow. And the idea is to restore the creativity, the special skills, movement and the mastery of the ball. The physical and technical sides can come later.”
But they do come. “We know our players can be very good on the ball, like our rugby players – the French flair. That’s one of our assets and we’ve got to develop it. But 10 years ago one of the criticisms aimed at us was that we weren’t so good when we lost the ball. I don’t think that’s true any more.”
The youth coaches, the only ones in Europe to take a special diploma for their role, have complete tactical freedom. “We don’t teach one system, like the Dutch. Coaches change, and systems change with them. Our coaches are told to use whatever formation they want but to put the players into the ideal positions to exploit their skills.”
Will those skills provide the basis of a victory for the host nation next year? Jacquet, the national coach, certainly seems to have a superabundance of world- class players fighting over almost every position in the senior team.
But after an anti-climactic showing in Euro 96, and incoherent performances in recent friendlies, the fans have been grumbling about selection and tactics.
Which merely strengthens the feeling that the France of 1997 resemble the Brazil of 1993: a group of talented players led by a coach wise enough to know that extravagant victories 12 months ahead of the real thing are not the point and that his team need not reveal its true shape and nature until the moment of truth arrives. Because, in Houllier’s words: “When you have the skills, everything is possible.”
ENDS