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“In football, the coach is a bit alone in rowing against the tide”

Like five Ligue 1 coaches already this season, Claude Puel experienced the misfortune of a dismissal. The last time was in Saint-Etienne, in December 2021. “If you think ‘I risk being fired’, as soon as you make a decision, you have to stop immediately”, he says. He has almost never stopped since his debut on a bench in 1999 in Monaco. Free since his departure from the Greens, he took advantage of this break to tell himself, as well as his profession, in his autobiography: Libre (Solar editions, 240 pages, 19.90 euros).

At 61, the man with 1,248 matches on the Ligue 1 benches defends the idea that the coach is the last to still think about the collective in a sport where individualism tends to prevail.

In the first pages of your book, we understand that you were not really destined for this life linked to football…

Not at all, actually. I lived in my village near Castres (Tarn), I played with friends behind the church. Football was first, for me, a space of freedom. I had a need to run, especially when leaving school, where I felt confined. I was boiling inside or sleeping in class. I didn’t have too many specific ideas about what to do to become a professional. When I left for Monaco, at 15, my parents had above all demanded that I have my baccalaureate. I followed a normal education. I was still sleeping in class, but I got my baccalaureate [sourire].

We hear a lot that it is difficult to capture the attention of the new generation. As a coach, how do you adapt to changing mentalities?

Society is changing, and kids with it. We must constantly develop our management with them. The most difficult thing is to always manage to get up to date, while keeping one’s convictions. The coach is the one who must unite so that the players think of the team first, when everything around them tends to individualize them; he’s kind of the only one rowing against the current.

Read also Article reserved for our subscribers Claude Puel: “Being fired, I don’t care”

When we talk about Kylian Mbappé at the heart of the PSG project, are we in this individualization of football?

It doesn’t shock me that we build a sports project around a talent like him. I did it with Hatem Ben Arfa in Nice or for a month in Saint-Etienne with Wesley Fofana, before he was sold. When a player takes on such a dimension, he becomes the reflection of the team, and for his good we build a collective around him to help him express himself. But always in the interest of the team. What bothers me is when the player is programmed by his entourage or his agent to burn and not at all to serve the team.

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