French football fans who closely monitor the form of their best players ahead of the World Cup keep their eyes on the English Premiership, where superstars like Thierry Henry, Robert Pires, Patrick Vieira, Emmanuel Petit, Marcel Desailly and Fabien Barthez ply their trade. They also frequently check in on Italy’s Serie A, to follow the progress of David Trezeguet, Lilian Thuram and Vincent Candela. Then there’s Spain’s Primera Liga, which includes maestro Zinedine Zidane, Claude Makelele and Philippe Christanval. Oh. And don’t forget the German Bundesliga, home of Bixente Lizarazu and Youri Djorkaeff. Les Bleus, as the French national team is commonly known, are scattered across Europe’s best leagues. Keeping the first-XI regulars company in foreign lands are a phalanx of up-and-comers that, by common consent among the game’s pundits, represent the most powerful force in modern football.
As an exporter of world-class talent, France now outshines Brazil and Argentina, which have traditionally dominated the trade. Football’s French Foreign Legion has more than 100 professional players, over 40 of them in the English Premier League alone. And lest you think the high volume is a result of low value, consider this: 11 of the 50 candidates shortlisted for last year’s European Player of the Year honors were French, as were five of the 11 footballers on uefa’s 2001 European all-star team. Once the perennial underachiever of world football, France has capitalized on the bountiful flowering of talent to become European and World Champion.
Perhaps even more remarkable than France’s surplus of superb players is that it is not a happenstance but the deliberate product of a footballing factory — and there’s plenty more where they came from. “Since 1998, the world has taken notice of French football and asked, ‘Where did this come from all of a sudden?'” remarks Aimé Jacquet, who selected and coached the French team that won the 1998 World Cup and has since directed France’s national coaching and development program. “But this was the result of a long, painstaking, carefully planned process to organize and teach football in an entirely new way.”
France’s new approach to training and development began in the mid-1970s, when the French Football Federation (FFF), established the Institut National du Football, or INF, which assembled the nation’s top recruits aged 16 and over for specialized training from élite coaches. The FFF also required all the country’s professional clubs to establish and finance development centers where older prospects could combine studies with high-level footballing instruction and practice. Clubs in England, Italy, and Germany also train apprentice players, but they must find their future stars on their own. In effect, the INF provided French clubs with a pool of young, precociously gifted players to recruit from. As a result, the youth programs of French teams like Nantes, Cannes, Saint-Etienne, Montpellier and Auxerre became factories of exceptional young talent.
And that was just Phase I. By the late 1980s, the youth systems of many pro clubs had got so good that the INF’s role as a talent incubator had become somewhat obsolete. So it launched programs to catch ’em even younger: 14 to 15-year-olds began receiving technique and ball-control instruction, awaiting the more physical training of the pro centers. “The result was that, before long, youngsters began entering pro training programs with technical skills no one had seen so early before,” recalls FFF official Philippe Tournon.
The pre-apprenticeship program was launched under the direction of Gérard Houllier — a former French national coach who currently manages a resuscitated and rejuvenated Liverpool club. The program is built on seven regional training centers, where young players scouted and recruited from small youth clubs and FFF-organized tournaments follow normal educational programs supplemented with daily training in football technique. The best players from regional centers are periodically called to the INF camp near Paris for higher-level instruction with national team coaches. On the weekends, the players return to their local clubs for their league games. “This system doesn’t work if the coaches and teams at every level don’t feel they’re getting something out of participation in the national program,” Tournon notes.
That the system works is clear from the success of France’s youth teams. The under-18 squad won the world title last year, and in 2000 the national team of 18-year-olds were European champs. France’s national team was also quarter-finalists in the under-20 World Championships last year, losing to eventual champion Argentina. Many of the junior players are already on the wish-lists of top European clubs. Didier Deschamps, who captained the all-conquering senior squad until his retirement last year, says, “What should be scaring other nations is that our development system is producing younger generations just as good” as Zidane and company.
Unsurprisingly, other footballing nations are now aping the French system — including the country that invented the game. The English Football Association plans to open its own national football academy next year. “The French have this talent factory, and they are obviously doing something right,” says F.A. spokesman Andrin Cooper. “Our strategy is to take the best of other countries and add a bit of our own.” But can the French system be adapted to other football environments? The centralized approach to football, after all, is a variation on France’s large, dirigiste state structure that liberals generally decry as reminiscent of Gaullist, if not Soviet, organization. Deschamps also notes France’s system involves a collective effort between the FFF and French pro clubs that “can’t afford to buy the best players the way foreign clubs do, so the only way they can survive economically is to produce them.” Such cooperation is hard to imagine in more market driven football nations’ where clubs find it easier to buy talent from overseas than to groom it at home.
Meanwhile, the French development system unwillingly outsources crucial finishing work to the same foreign clubs it often accuses of poaching. If modest means — as well as France’s weighty tax structure — has made player development a common priority of French clubs, it has also left them unable to withstand the flight of players abroad. (In Korea/Japan 2000, coach Roger Lemerre’s first XI may not include a single player from a French club.) “The soccer schools in France are great, and young players are given the chance to play,” says AS Roma defender and national team hopeful Jonathan Zebina. “But the best players will always want to go to Italy, Spain and England. That’s where the clubs are that you’ve always dreamed about.” Luckily for French clubs, they can depend on the footballing factory to churn out new generations of stars to replace the exports.
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