Where have all the coaches gone? French sports media address the theme on a regular basis and with good reason: the country’s football managers are no longer wanted abroad. The days when Arsène Wenger and Gérard Houllier opened the door for Jean Tigana, Rémi 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 really be considered expatriates at Real Madrid and Juventus.
This is no longer the case and takes particular significance now Deschamps, whose France side face Croatia in their Nations League quarter-final second leg on Sunday having lost the first leg 2-0, has entered the final straight of his 14-year association with Les Bleus and confirmed he will leave his position at the conclusion of the 2026 World Cup. Who could succeed him?
Of the 78 managerial positions available in the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A and the 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 last November, and appears to have saved Italy’s oldest club from relegation.
Further down the English pyramid, Régis Le Bris is doing well at Sunderland and last month Valérien Ismaël 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 football power, it is a pitiful return.
Deschamps volunteered an explanation for this. According to him, French managers suffer from 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.”
As anyone who had to sit through a Jacques Santini press conference when he was briefly in charge of Spurs will attest, Deschamps has a point, and the fact that Vieira and Ismaël are trilingual and Le Bris should not be ashamed of his English, reinforces it. Once the fashion for hiring compatriots of Wenger and Aimé 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 onwards.
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 Hervé 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. There, too, French influence is waning.
