It’s a 23 year old boy who gives a moving interview in The Team, this Thursday. Florent Duparchy suffered two concussions, in August 2022 and March 2023 in the Stade de Reims jersey, against which he decided to file a complaint, a first in football according to the daily. The young goalkeeper should have joined Guingamp this summer in Ligue 2, but he was unable to do so for medical reasons and had to return to his family near Lyon.
According to The Team, the Reims club considers that he is no longer part of its workforce despite a first professional contract which does not expire until June 2024. “No one looks after me anymore, no one pays me anymore, I am abandoned” , indicates the doorman who previously passed through Valenciennes, Auxerre and Lyon, who therefore decided to take legal action. He filed a complaint against 2022.
A neurologist only consulted after the second concussion
Even if the work remains immense, rugby has made progress in the management of concussions in recent years. But football remains very late. Duparchy judges that his concussions were not taken care of by Reims as required by the LFP regulations. He would not have consulted a neurologist after the first, following a knee strike in the jaw in August 2022, which caused him multiple fractures.
Despite symptoms, including headaches, the goalkeeper returned to training three months later, before suffering a second concussion, receiving a ball in the head, which did not prevent him from play the next day with the reserve team. After finally meeting a neurologist, he was off work for six weeks. But the symptoms reappeared while he was training in July with Guingamp even though he had not yet signed a contract with the Breton club, but only an endorsement.
And now ? “I take care of getting treatment alone,” says Duparchy. Fortunately, a former physiotherapist from Lyon helped me quickly get appointments with specialists, otherwise I would not have even started treatment. I have no news from Reims. » “I can neither register as unemployed, nor resume work-study studies, nor do an internship because I have a contract with Reims,” he adds, detailing the reasons which pushed him to wear complaint: “Have appropriate medical follow-up and make people understand that concussions can be extremely serious. »