Where have all the coaches gone? French sports media address the theme on a regular basis and with good reason: the country’s soccer managers are no longer wanted abroad. The days when Arsene Wenger and Gerard Houllier opened the door for Jean Tigana, Remi Garde, Claude Puel and others to coach in England are long gone. In the 2000s and 2010s, French managers could also find work in La Liga and Serie A, as Philippe Montanier did at Real Sociedad and Rudi Garcia at Roma and Napoli — leaving aside Zinedine Zidane and Didier Deschamps, who could not be really considered expatriates at Real Madrid and Juventus.
This is no longer the case and takes particular significance now that Deschamps, whose France side faced Croatia in a UEFA Nations League quarter-final last night, has entered the final straight of his 14-year association with Les Bleus and confirmed he would leave his position at the conclusion of the FIFA World Cup next year. Who could succeed him?
Of the 78 managerial positions available in the English Premier League, La Liga, Serie A and the German Bundesliga, one is occupied by a Frenchman: Patrick Vieira, the former head coach of New York City and Crystal Palace, who took over from Alberto Gilardino at Genoa in November last year, and appears to have saved Italy’s oldest club from relegation.
Photo: AFP
Further down the English pyramid, Regis Le Bris is doing well at Sunderland and last month Valerien Ismael made Blackburn his fourth English club after Barnsley, West Brom and Watford. That is all, unless Columbus Crew’s Wilfried Nancy and managers who have accepted lucrative assignments in the Middle East — Laurent Blanc at Al-Ittihad, Christophe Galtier at Al-Duhail, Sabri Lamouchi at Al-Riyadh — are taken into account. Given France’s reputation for the quality of its coaching of young talent and its status as a soccer power, it is a pitiful return.
Deschamps volunteered an explanation for this. French managers have a “language handicap,” he said.
“We’re not good enough in this respect. A foreign manager working in France might not speak French; we’ll accept it, but go to Italy, England or Spain, if you don’t speak the country’s language, you won’t even be considered,” he added.
Photo: EPA-EFE
As anyone who had to sit through a Jacques Santini news conference when he briefly was in charge of Tottenham Hotspurs would attest, Deschamps has a point, and the fact that Vieira and Ismael are trilingual and Le Bris should not be ashamed of their English reinforces it.
Once the fashion for hiring compatriots of Wenger and Aime Jacquet receded, there was not much to fall back on for French managers who, when they went abroad, tended to land jobs in French-speaking countries, especially in Africa, where Robert Nouzaret, Claude Le Roy, Alain Giresse and Patrice Neveu coached 13 national teams between themselves from the 1980s onward.
This is also becoming a thing of the past. There used to be at least a dozen French managers in charge of national teams at any given time. There are seven since Garcia’s surprise appointment by Belgium in January. Willy Sagnol and Herve Renard (once of Cambridge and Zambia) are still in charge of Georgia and Saudi Arabia respectively. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mauritius, South Sudan and Haiti also have French coaches, but French influence is also waning there.
The situation is even more concerning in the domestic game. There are not that many Italians working abroad in leading jobs, pace Carlo Ancelotti at Real Madrid, Enzo Maresca at Chelsea and Roberto De Zerbi at Marseille; but nobody thinks less of the quality of Italian managers for that and Coverciano’s Universita del calcio has lost none of its cachet.
Italian coaches have a ready market on their doorstep: all the clubs in Serie A’s top eight have domestic managers. By contrast, in the 2024 to 2025 season for the first time less than half of Ligue 1’s managers — eight of 18 (44.4 percent) — are French, while 80 percent of Serie A’s coaches are Italian. None of the head coaches of Ligue 1’s top three — Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), Marseille and Monaco — is French.
The decline has been spectacularly quick. In the 2012 to 2013 season, when Ancelotti took PSG to their first championship title of the Qatari era, he was the only foreigner in charge of a Ligue 1 club. Two years ago, that number was 14. Among the top 10 countries in the UEFA rankings, France is above only England in the table of homegrown coaches active in their top division. The Netherlands and Portugal, whose best managers are invariably snapped up by wealthier foreign leagues, are joint-top, with 77 percent.
This is proof it is possible to nurture coaching talent at home and export it without fear of drying up the well — and even suggests it could be a winning recipe for a thriving managerial culture. The same goes for Spain, where 75 percent of elite clubs are led by Spaniards and have coaches working at the very top of Ligue 1, Serie A, the German Bundesliga and the Premier League. France has not and the few managers it still has are not getting any younger.
Eric Roy and Bruno Genesio, who did wonders in this season’s UEFA Champions League with Brest and Lille respectively, are 57 and 58. The average age of Ligue 1 managers is 55 years and nine months.
Deschamps is 56. Zidane, 52, would be a shoo-in to replace him should he wish to step in, which is not guaranteed. Other than that? Thierry Henry, 47, failed with Monaco and did not convince at Montreal, but took France to an Olympic final. That is it.
Julien Stephan, 44, the son of Deschamps’s assistant Guy Stephan, was once considered one of France’s brightest managerial hopes after shining in the first of his two stints at Rennes, but he is looking for a job after being sacked in November last year. The only club that has considered hiring him since is Iran’s Persepolis.
It might be the “language handicap.” It might be, as former Montpellier manager Rene Girard said, “an absence of networks and decent agents.” Whatever the reason, the glory days are well and truly over.
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