French mourn loss of their golden age
Surprisingly, Arsenal’s Bacary Sagna isn’t in the France squad for the needle match against Germany tomorrow night, whereas Louis Saha of Tottenham is called up for the first time in two years. That’s partly because Karim Benzema is injured, but it also illustrates a lack of options in attack.
“We have two or three very good players, like Benzema and Franck Ribery,” Michel Platini told a German newspaper on Friday. “The rest are very average. Germany have the best team in Europe.”
Blanc retaliated: “That’s a bit radical. We’ve got talented players, even if we don’t have great ones at present.”
Yet it reflects the shortage of top players coming through in a country that seemed to have developed a production line just a few years ago.
The puzzle is why the supply of top talent has dried up in France while Germany are overflowing with brilliant young players.
Last year’s row about racial quotas hasn’t helped.
Blanc himself was officially exonerated but the transcript of a meeting back in November 2010 indicated officials at both national and club level were prepared to restrict the numbers of trainees of African and Arab origin in favour of “ethnic balance”. Some clubs were apparently already operating discriminatory practices.
It seemed strange for a country that achieved World Cup glory with Zinedine Zidane, Marcel Desailly, Lilian Thuram, Patrick Vieira and Christian Karembeu. The unofficial excuse was that France was training players with a foreign background who were then opting to play for another country.
That has happened of course. But one of the main reasons is the French training system has in a sense been too successful. The regional training centres, largely funded with public subsidies, have produced a surplus of young players. Clubs in turn over-recruited, going for quantity rather than quality.
French regulations allow so-called federal contracts, reserved for clubs in the lower divisions, providing limited remuneration for non-professional players and the number of these licensed “semi-professionals” more than doubled, rising above 600 in the space of three years.
At the same time the number of players out of contract at the end of each season has been rising while their average age has been falling — to 23-24 from 27-28.
The French also, perhaps predictably, blame the English.
“The internationalisation of the transfer market deprives French clubs of their best prospects who finish up losing themselves in the grey obscurity of a third division club in a Manchester suburb,” wrote one commentator.
Players previously moved abroad and developed — examples include Sebastien Frey at Fiorentina and Patrick Vieira at Arsenal. Now they disappear or stagnate — for example Francis Coquelin at Arsenal.
All the same, the gloom is a bit exaggerated.
The Arab takeover of PSG has brought a big financial boost, followed by Al Jazeera’s purchase of Ligue 1 TV rights.
While Marseille are struggling in the league they could still go through to the Champions League quarter-finals, whereas the last two Premier League clubs are close to elimination. And at the weekend Lyon and PSG went one better than Arsenal and Spurs by sharing eight goals.
Now they just have to try and tweak the German tail in Bremen.
