Where have all the elite French men’s football coaches gone?

It was January 2016 and all was well in the world of elite French coaching in the men’s game.

Didier Deschamps had been the France men’s coach for three and a half years and was a few months away from leading them to the final of Euro 2016, which proved a key staging post on the path to World Cup glory two years later.

Zinedine Zidane had just been appointed Real Madrid coach and would soon be toasting the first of three consecutive Champions League titles at the Bernabeu.

Arsene Wenger remained master of all he surveyed at Arsenal and was in the midst of taking that club to a runners-up spot behind Leicester – their highest Premier League finish in 11 years. He would shortly be joined in the English top flight by two other French managers, both of whom he had coached in their playing days, with Claude Puel joining Southampton and Remi Garde pitching up at Aston Villa.

Rudi Garcia was coming to the end of a broadly successful two and a half year stint at Roma in Serie A, while in Germany, Valerien Ismael was a few months away from taking the top job at Wolfsburg.

On home turf, French coaches ruled the roost in Ligue 1. Laurent Blanc’s Paris Saint-Germain were closing in on a second successive clean sweep of the domestic trophies, while Lyon were destined for the runners-up spot under Bruno Genesio. Come the end of the 2015-16 campaign, 19 of the 20 coaches in Ligue 1 were either French or had French citizenship, with Monaco’s Portuguese head coach Leonardo Jardim the sole exception.

The relative prominence French coaches enjoyed did not seem particularly remarkable.

Over the previous two decades, Wenger had transformed Arsenal into the superclub they are today, Gerard Houllier had turned Liverpool back into a European force, and both Luis Fernandez and Raynald Denoueix had guided unfancied clubs (Athletic Club for the former, Real Sociedad for the latter) to impressive runners-up finishes in La Liga. With Jean Tigana, Jacques Santini, Alain Perrin and Philippe Montanier having also flown the Tricolore in foreign dugouts, French coaches were firmly part of the continental scenery.

Nine years on, the outlook could scarcely be less favourable.

As this season nears its conclusion, Genoa’s Patrick Vieira is the only French head coach in Europe’s four major domestic leagues (Premier League, La Liga, Serie A and the German Bundesliga). 

Deschamps remains at the France helm, but Zidane, his likely successor when he steps down after next year’s World Cup, has not set foot in a dugout since leaving Madrid for the second time (third if you count the end of his playing career) in 2021.

Wenger called time on his days as a manager when he left Arsenal in 2018 and neither Puel nor Garde has led a team in years. While Ismael was recently appointed head coach by Blackburn in the Championship, Garcia has turned his back on club football for the time being, having taken charge of the Belgium national team.

Blanc was out of work for four and a half years before being taken on by Qatari side Al Rayyan in 2020. Following an 11-month spell at Lyon, he is now at the helm of Saudi Pro League leaders Al Ittihad. Genesio continues to impress in France, having led Lille to the last 16 in this season’s Champions League, but his countrymen are becoming thinner on the ground in Ligue 1, where only eight of the now 18-club division’s coaches are French. (Rennes’ Habib Beye and Reims’ Samba Diawara were born in France but represented Senegal and Mali respectively as players.)

The situation with regard to coaches in the French women’s game, it should be said, is not nearly as concerning.

Eleven of the 12 coaches in its newly professionalised Premiere Ligue are homegrown, with Lyon’s Australian coach Joe Montemurro the sole outlier. There are also two French women flying the flag in England’s Women’s Super League, in the shape of Chelsea’s Sonia Bompastor, former coach of the all-conquering Lyon women’s side, and Leicester’s Amandine Miquel.

French female coaches have even made historic breakthroughs in the men’s game, with Corinne Diacre becoming the first woman to take charge of a game in the top two tiers of a men’s European league after being appointed head coach of Clermont in 2014.

Ligue 1 clubs, of course, are not alone in employing coaches from beyond their country’s frontiers. Although native coaches continue to hold sway in Spain and Italy (both 15 out of the 20 teams), they are only just in the majority in Germany (10 of 18) and there are only two Englishmen in charge of clubs in the Premier League (Graham Potter at West Ham and Eddie Howe at Newcastle).

But why do French coaches, who were once so ‘a la mode’, seem to have fallen out of fashion?

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A recurring lament in French football circles is that the country’s coaches no longer have access to the kind of networks liable to open doors to interesting job opportunities. Agents representing French coaches, it is felt, do not have the ear of the decision-makers at the major teams across Europe and have failed to build relationships with the consortiums, hedge funds and state-affiliated investment groups that increasingly run modern clubs.

In that respect, the average French coach has come to feel in recent years that he has a very specific nemesis: his Portuguese counterpart.

Whereas the French coach is left to plough his own furrow, Portuguese ones benefit from the connections of influential dealmakers such as the superagent Jorge Mendes, support from high-profile native coaches such as Jose Mourinho, and the energetic backing of the Portuguese Football Coaches Association (ANTF), the body that represents the nation’s coaches, whose stated ambition is “to promote and enhance Portuguese football and futsal coaches in Portugal and all over the world”.

The ANTF has its own brand, ‘Portuguese Coach’, and actively lobbies on behalf of its members via a website, a regularly updated Facebook page, publicity campaigns, sponsor events and a star-studded annual forum (Marco Silva, Jorge Jesus and Carlos Queiroz were among the speakers at this year’s event last week). It is a cooperative ethos that has attracted more than a few envious glances from France.

“The Portuguese coaches show more solidarity than us,” says vastly experienced French coach Frederic Antonetti, whose former clubs include Lille, Rennes, Nice and Saint-Etienne. “They have the institutions and they also have the big, well-established agents who have ins at the big clubs, which is something we lack.”

One recently qualified French coach, speaking anonymously to protect relationships, tells The Athletic: “The Portuguese network is excellent. One Portuguese guy gets fired and there are already 10 lining up to replace him. The problem isn’t about French coaches – the problem is that we haven’t got a network.”

While France’s shortcomings when it comes to its footballing networks are widely acknowledged, there is little consensus as to what could or should be done about it. 

“Is it up to the coaches to connect themselves to these networks or cosy up to the big agencies that are connected to the big European clubs? I honestly don’t know,” says former Montpellier defender Bertrand Reuzeau, who is now president of UNECATEF, France’s football coaches’ union.

“But it’s true that we have a real representation problem on that front. Particularly when, in France, we have more and more clubs with foreign owners, which makes things more and more complicated. Previously, you had French agents and French club presidents, but now they’re increasingly international and those networks have been cut. It’s another, much more international, network that facilitates access to the big European clubs these days. And France hasn’t adapted to that. We haven’t got big agencies in France like the Portuguese ones or the big English ones.”

The increasingly international profile of Ligue 1 owners has also contributed to the marginalisation of France’s homegrown coaches. Eleven of the 18 clubs in the French top flight are foreign-owned and when new owners have arrived from overseas in recent years, they have not always been inclined to keep faith with local coaches.

BlueCo, the American consortium that owns Chelsea and Strasbourg, appointed Englishman Liam Rosenior as coach of the latter last summer following the departure of Vieira. Toulouse, owned by American investment firm RedBird, replaced Montanier with Spaniard Carles Martinez Novell in 2023. Saint-Etienne’s new owner, the Canadian investment vehicle Kilmer Sports Ventures, opted for a promising Norwegian in the shape of Eirik Horneland after parting ways with Olivier Dall’Oglio in December.

Despite having engineered a spectacular turnaround at Lyon after being plucked from his role as head of their academy in November 2023, Pierre Sage was abruptly dismissed by the club’s American owner, John Textor, in January. His replacement? Portugal’s Paulo Fonseca. Although UNECATEF represents all coaches working in France, rather than just the French ones, Reuzeau describes Sage’s dismissal as “very frustrating”.

With foreign coaches in the dugouts at each of Ligue 1’s leading clubs – Spain’s Luis Enrique at PSG, Italian Roberto De Zerbi at Marseille, Austria’s Adi Hutter at Monaco, Fonseca at Lyon – there is a degree of despair in France at the extent to which native coaches are being overlooked.

“We’ve had lots of foreigners coming in to take over clubs,” says Antonetti, who currently works as the technical director at second-tier Bastia. “And what do they do when they take over? They stick to what they know, so they recruit (coaches) from their own countries. You have the same phenomenon in England, where English coaches are fewer and further between.

“It’s even getting difficult for French coaches to find a job in France. None of the French coaches are in charge of the big clubs.

“And our big clubs aren’t the kind of big institutions that give coaches the means to go far in European competition in terms of players. There’s only Paris Saint-Germain. So apart from Paris, there’s no shop window (for French coaches). Our football is very good, but we don’t have institutions that enable our coaches to show what they can do.”

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French football’s approach to coach education has also fallen under the spotlight in the context of the country’s dwindling number of them at elite level. France’s top coaching qualification, the Brevet d’entraineur professionnel de football (BEPF), or Professional Football Coaching Certificate, which is the equivalent of the UEFA Pro Licence, is famously exacting but also famously difficult to even try to obtain.

To apply for one of the handful of places on the course, which is run on an annual basis by the French Football Federation, former players need to have at least five years’ previous professional coaching experience, to have played at least 150 matches in Ligue 1 or to have been capped at least 10 times by France at senior level (different criteria apply for candidates from women’s football and the amateur game).

That’s on top of the various preliminary certifications also required, which include the Diplome d’Etat Superieur (DES) or Higher State Diploma, a national qualification for sports coaches that is unique to France. The tuition fees for the BEPF are €27,100 and the total cost of following the course is estimated to be around €60,000 (£50,000/$65,000). Coaches already affiliated with professional clubs tend to have at least some of the cost covered by their employers.

Somewhat embarrassingly for the French Football Federation (FFF), several of the country’s high-profile former players have elected in recent years not to acquire their coaching badges on home soil, but with the Football Association of Wales (FAW). These include Vieira, Marcel Desailly and David Ginola, as well as former France Under-21s manager Thierry Henry and that team’s current assistant coach Gael Clichy.

Contrary to the meandering pace of the French system, Henry obtained his UEFA A Licence so swiftly that it prompted accusations he had been unfairly fast-tracked by the FAW. The fees for the FAW’s UEFA Pro Licence course are £12,000 (€14,300) for non-Welsh candidates, making it roughly half as expensive as its FFF counterpart.

The BEPF (or an equivalent qualification obtained elsewhere) is a prerequisite for any coach seeking to take charge of a team in Ligue 1, Ligue 2 or the third-tier National. French clubs must pay a charge of €25,000 per match for employing a head coach who does not possess it. But as demonstrated by the recent cases of Will Still at Reims and Didier Digard at Nice, neither of whom was fully qualified when first employed by those clubs, it is a hit some presidents are prepared to take.

The time it takes to become a fully qualified professional coach in France means the youngest coaches in Ligue 1 are invariably foreigners. Still, born in Belgium to English parents and now head coach at Lens, was only 30 when he took charge of Reims in October 2022. Italian Francesco Farioli was 34 when he was appointed by Nice the following summer, and Strasbourg’s Rosenior and Toulouse’s Martinez Novell are both 40.

The leading French coaches in Ligue 1 are all significantly older. Genesio is 58, Franck Haise, who has earned widespread plaudits for his work at Lens and Nice, is 53, and Eric Roy, the driving force behind Brest’s Champions League fairytale, is 57. Even Beye and Sage, who are seen as two of the most promising up-and-coming coaches in France, are in their mid-40s. According to Reims general manager Mathieu Lacour, who first gave Still his chance, “being a BEPF-qualified coach in France before the age of 40 or 45 is practically impossible”.

Puel believes the rigorousness of the FFF’s coach education programme should be celebrated, but thinks it also puts his compatriots at a disadvantage.

“To begin with, I think the training of young French coaches is very good, very focused and appropriately difficult,” he tells The Athletic. “But we penalise ourselves a bit, in France, with training programmes that are too long. Lots of foreign coaches get their diplomas very young, particularly coaches who haven’t had (professional) playing careers. You find them in France – young foreign coaches from all over the place – and they’ve had a headstart.

“They’re already coaches at 27 or 28, whereas in France, you need to have had a playing career and you need to have got your diplomas. By the time you’ve got all your diplomas, you tend to be 38 or 40 years old. You have 10 years to coach and when you get past 50, people think you’re a has-been. I think there’s a problem there.”

Might coaches from France additionally be penalised by the fact there is no pre-eminent school of thought in the French game?

The country’s great coaches of yesteryear – Albert Batteux with Reims and the national team in the 1950s, Michel Hidalgo with France in the 1980s, Jean-Claude Suaudeau at Nantes, Wenger in his early years at Arsenal – were renowned for their swashbuckling football, but their modern equivalents tend to be more pragmatic. When Deschamps and Zidane, for example, talk about the coaches who inspired them, they are both much more likely to cite the steely-minded Marcello Lippi, who coached both of them as players at Juventus in the 1990s, than any of the mentors they encountered in France.

For the country’s coaching fraternity, this makes it hard to promote or sell a general ‘idea’ of French football.

Whereas Italian coaches are famed for their tactical discipline, Spanish coaches for their attachment to possession-based football and German coaches for a commitment to aggressive counter-pressing, their French counterparts have no catenaccio, juego de posicion or gegenpressing (as reductive and unhelpful as any of those concepts might actually be) upon which to hang their hats.

Deschamps’ case is illustrative.

As the man who has steered France to three major tournament finals, in addition to a run to the Champions League final with Monaco in 2004 and a first Ligue 1 title in 18 years with Marseille in 2010, he has enjoyed a remarkably successful coaching career. But he has also long been derided, rightly or wrongly, for what is perceived to be a defensive style of football and does not subscribe to a formalised playing philosophy that younger French coaches might want to adopt as their own.

Reuzeau, for one, dismisses the idea that Deschamps could be seen as anything other than an outstanding ambassador for French coaching. “Didier Deschamps knows how to find a way to play, but he also knows how to find a way to win,” says the UNECATEF president. “If you know of a club president who doesn’t want to win games and trophies, you’re welcome to name him.”

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For all the success teams have enjoyed under Deschamps and Zidane, for all the charisma and star power of decorated former players such as Henry and Vieira, French coaches as a whole undoubtedly suffer from something of an image problem. One executive from an unnamed Premier League club paints a less-than-flattering picture.

“It’s that slightly grey, ‘stale pale male’ thing,” he says. “They’re just not dynamic enough. They don’t speak English very well – even when they say they do. And a lot of them don’t look like natural media performers.

“I think in England, we still have that slightly romantic view of the old-fashioned manager being the face of the club and the only person who speaks on behalf of the club in public. Whereas in France, sporting directors and chairmen are much more vocal in the press.

“French coaches don’t have the dynamism, the showmanship or the actor-type skills that the English still expect of their managers. We want more than just a technocratic coach. And the French don’t seem to produce that model of coach.”

The irony, as far as England is concerned, is that at a time when the Premier League is moving away from the traditional model of all-powerful managers backed by supportive chairmen towards more stratified hierarchies of head coaches, sporting directors and technical directors, English clubs still prefer to have someone in their dugout who walks the walk and talks the talk like an old-fashioned manager.

It is a dichotomy that has proven particularly problematic for the French.

Puel achieved creditable results with Southampton and then Leicester, leading the former to a League Cup final appearance and an eighth-place finish in the Premier League in 2017 and coming ninth with the latter the following year. But at both clubs – Leicester in particular – his timorous communication style meant he struggled to get players and fans alike onboard.

His reflections on the role of the modern coach suggest he feels he overlooked the importance attached to image in English football and regrets not having made more of an effort to control the narrative about his approach both inside and outside the club.

“A coach needs to work on his image,” Puel says. “You need to be able to present yourself well, to speak well and to show certain competencies – not just in terms of results. You have to sell yourself. It’s part of the game. You also might need someone who has a network and can distribute information, so that certain things are understood.

“I joined all of my clubs with a small backroom staff of two people maximum because I felt it was part of my role to develop the people around me so they could take up the baton when I left. But in fact, you need only to think about yourself. You need to say to yourself, ‘I need to arrive in a strong way, with a very large staff. Even if there are already competent people in place – tough luck for them.’

“You need to appoint your own people to important roles, so they’ll adhere to what you’re doing and help you to send the same message to the players and the directors. That saves time when you arrive, but it also gives you stability because you form a united front and everyone is working to the same plan. And you don’t get people feeding back in a negative way to the directors.”

Puel’s experiences speak to one of the fundamental issues facing French coaches in modern football: they tend to be coaches, most at home on the training pitch, rather than manager types, who have comparable technical competencies but also excel at communication, presentation and managing the people around them.

Coaches from France, such as Puel, have traditionally specialised in the technical side of the game and are widely seen as peerless training-ground operators. France refers to youth development coaches as “educateurs” and many of the country’s finest coaches were celebrated for their pedagogical approach. Georges Boulogne, the former national-team coach who became France’s first national technical director in 1970, had been a PE teacher earlier in his career. Houllier previously worked as an English teacher. Wenger was famously known in England as Le Professeur.

Both Houllier and Wenger embraced working in England partly because they enjoyed operating in English-style managerial roles with wide-ranging responsibilities. But the traditional French coach was, first and foremost, a coach. And at the very highest level of the game these days, the person in a team’s technical area is expected to offer something more.

The recently qualified coach mentioned earlier in this article obtained his BEPF in the past few years but believes that it did not equip him with the full range of skills required to be a head coach at the elite level.

“The BEPF produces coaches and not managers,” he says. “It’s really focused on the pitch — developing a playing style, (running) video sessions etc. In terms of communication, it’s how to prepare a team talk or how to prepare for a pre-match press conference. But it’s only one or two modules.

“French coach development is very good and I learnt an awful lot from the course leaders. But I think we’ve been left behind. You don’t learn English, you don’t learn Spanish, unlike what happens in other countries. You look at the Portuguese and they all speak four or five languages.”

In a statement sent to The Athletic, the FFF’s national technical director, Hubert Fournier, said: “The BEPF is the highest coaching diploma awarded in France by our training centre, both of which are internationally recognised for their quality. Indeed, we do not provide foreign language courses as we consider it the individual responsibility of BEPF trainees to undertake this aspect.

“With regard to the managerial side, this again is a matter of preference. Following an audit of professional clubs, we assessed that club directors’ expectations were mainly focused on the development of a technical coach capable of taking charge of a professional team rather than a manager of a club’s sporting setup. We also congratulate ourselves on the quality of the football training provided on BEPF courses and the fact that the development of our football coaches is mainly focused on the pitch.”

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Despite the doom and gloom, there are plenty of indications that French coaches still have much to offer.

Genesio, Haise and Roy have all received plaudits for their achievements over the past two years, Beye has made a promising start to life at Rennes, having previously guided Parisian side Red Star to promotion into Ligue 2, and Sage is unlikely to be out of work for long.

Likewise Julien Stephan, architect of Rennes’ stunning Coupe de France success in 2019, who left that club for the second time in his career earlier this season. Christophe Galtier, a Ligue 1 champion with both Lille and PSG, is currently in charge of Qatari side Al Duhail but is known to harbour ambitions of working in England and was linked with the recent managerial vacancy at West Ham.

Vieira has successfully steadied the ship at Genoa following his appointment in November and although Henry is currently focusing on his broadcasting career, he delivered a brilliant demonstration of his coaching credentials at last year’s men’s Olympic football tournament by steering hosts France to silver medals. Regis Le Bris, meanwhile, has won admirers by turning Sunderland into promotion contenders in the Championship after being appointed last summer.

Deschamps confirmed in an interview with French newspaper L’Equipe in February that he does not intend to retire when he steps down as France coach next year at age 57, downplaying suggestions he could take on another job in international football but keeping the door open to a return to the club game. And there is inevitably great anticipation in France as to what kind of evolution might await the national team under the tutelage of his anticipated successor, the great and long-awaited Zidane.

“We already have coaches who’ve proven themselves: Rudi Garcia, Philippe Montanier, Patrick Vieira, Didier Deschamps,” says Reuzeau. “We’ve got coaches who’ve been there and done it and who’ve been real drivers of French coaching. Now we’ve got new coaches coming through like Habib Beye and Regis Le Bris, real technicians who know how to manage and who are fully adapted to modern football. I remain optimistic.”

They are not extinct just yet, but having seen their ecosystem weakened and their natural habitat encroached upon, French coaches have become an increasingly endangered species.

(Top photo: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)