Be careful, we are going to shatter dreams from the start: if you have already played amateur football and your coach immediately positioned you on the side, sorry but it is not for your silky technique, your burst of speed or your crossing skills, no, it’s just because you weren’t the sharpest stud in the shoe. Almost always, in fact, educators have had this nasty tendency to put their best elements in the center of the field, the ideal place to control the chessboard and make their qualities shine as much as possible.
With the risk, at the end of the chain, of creating gaps on the sides of the defense, as has been the case in the French team for many years, with Willy Sagnol remaining the last professional reference in the right-back position.
Since then, Didier Deschamps hasn’t even bothered anymore and most of the time positions professional central defenders in this position, going so far as to do without the rare specialist line eaters, like Jonathan Clauss, absent during the last World Cup in Qatar on the pretext that he played as a piston for OM. But thanks to a change of coach and system at OM this summer, the former Lensois now plays on the right in a four-man defense, which earned him to be recalled by DD for the next two matches bruises.
He should also start on Friday against the Netherlands due to the absence of Jules Koundé. But as handsome and valuable as he is on a wing, Clauss nonetheless remains a thirty-year-old player who will have his card to play for the next Euro, but probably not beyond. It would therefore be a question of building tomorrow’s arrows today, the only problem being that this position still does not benefit from sex appeal. “upsetting”.
A full-back position neglected by young people
Gilles Bibé knows the problem better than anyone. Sports director of AC Boulogne-Billancourt (ACBB), one of the largest training clubs and providers of talent for training centers, he observes on a daily basis the lack of enthusiasm among young people to occupy the position of full-back. “It’s always the same problem: it’s hard to find good full-backs who first think about defending well before attacking. We see it, our teams concede a lot more goals, in particular because our full-backs think of themselves as wingers and they think more about attacking than anything else, because they have the impression that this position is not rewarding. They all dream of becoming a professional footballer and they think they have a better chance of catching the eye of recruiters if they attack excessively. » An observation shared by Amaury Barlet, assistant coach of the U19s of Olympique Lyonnais.
Young people never say to themselves ‘I want to become the future OL full-back’, they want to be a striker, a midfielder, a goalkeeper or even a central defender. The full-back position is not yet a dream, even if it evolves over the years, he tells us before thinking about the causes. Football with reduced numbers (7-a-side) does not necessarily allow this position to be highlighted, it is a little neglected. What is certain, it is factual, is that the full-backs are mostly by default at the start and that they arrive at this position late. »
This was the case of Malo Gusto, the French side of Chelsea and former Lyon player, moved from the Espoirs to the A this week after the injury of Dayot Upamecano. A fast and technical winger before joining OL, the kid was repositioned as a midfielder, before sliding to the right and establishing himself as a full-back at just 17 years old, in Ligue 1, during the 2022-2023 season.
“He wasn’t very keen to play this position at the start,” admits Barlet. We had to make him understand that he had characteristics that could perhaps allow him to reach the high level in that position, more than if he persisted in midfield. The argument hit the mark but it took a while, because Malo had this need to touch a lot of balls, he is a very generous person who ran everywhere in the middle and recovered lots of balls. And by putting him to the side, he felt that he was being isolated. But over the weeks and months he saw where his interest lay, he threw himself into it and developed a taste for it. »
A need for consistency in federal sports policy
Aware of this shortage for a long time, Landry Chauvin has always paid particular attention to training for the full-back position. And today he is delighted to see that Stade Rennais, whose training center he directed between 2015 and 2019, now plays with four full-backs trained at the club (Assignon, Truffert, Doué and Belocian).
“It was my leitmotif when I was in Rennes. I told them ”If you want to succeed tomorrow in a big European club, there is room to take in this position”. Today, the full-back comes just after the attackers in the positions most sought after by clubs. The young people are not crazy, they all dream of playing in big European clubs, so it’s a speech that they understand quite quickly, assures the U20 coach of the France team. And, more generally, I think that we are reaching a milestone, the clubs have become aware of the importance of training good professional full-backs, because they are in high demand and they, in fact, have a significant market value. »
“These are very popular positions,” confirms Gilles Bibé. Every time I talk with sports directors of professional clubs or with recruiters, they constantly ask us ”don’t you know a good right or left back? ”. It’s a rare commodity, professional clubs are in short supply. It is therefore necessary that we, educators, make young people understand that this position is extremely interesting and that it provides good opportunities. » “But for that, you still have to play with four defenders,” notes Chauvin. This is what we are doing on our side with the French youth teams at Clairefontaine in order to prepare for the future. » It is the same at the ACBB, where coaches are obliged to play with four at the back in order to facilitate the training of full-backs from a very young age.
If Landry Chauvin is “optimistic” on this subject for the future, that did not prevent Didier Deschamps from pointing out the persistent problem during his last press conference, Monday, in Clairefontaine. “There aren’t many players trained as full-backs. I was talking about it with Titi (Henry), it’s not easy to find, you often have to look for them elsewhere (at other posts).” Can the understanding between the two former world and European champions be able to accelerate the development of a common sports policy for the Espoirs and the A?
“We can say that it’s a good thing to have two coaches so close,” agrees Amaury Barlet. There seems to be a certain coherence in the bridges between Espoirs and A.” Holder on the right of Thierry Henry’s defense, Malo Gusto has everything to become this first pure product of the DD-Titi agreement, d ‘as much as, according to his former youth coach at OL, “he has a real card to play in this position in the France team”. The coach still needs to stop putting central players on the sides all the time. But that’s a problem of philosophy, not of training.