Aller au contenu

Presse 2022/2023

Modérateur

Par Modérateur
dans Espace supporters

Messages recommandés

mine02

mine02

Posté(e)
Posté(e)

Dans une interview, Comolli disait qu’il cherchait quelqu’un s’occupant du sportif à sa place car aujourd’hui il n’en fait que 5% contre 95% de politique. 

Debevinho

Debevinho

Posté(e)
Posté(e)

Rien n’indique que cette candidature soit retenue (au poste de directeur sportif ?), mais je dois reconnaître que le CV de ce monsieur me hype beaucoup moins que celui de Jaubert ou McFarlane. 
Si c’est le poste dont il s’agit, il faudrait quelqu’un avec un gros réseau dans le milieu. Mulhouse et Montluçon ça fait pas rêver quand même. 
Toutefois, son réseau dans le corps arbitrale peut être un atout. 

J’espère que ça n’augure pas un départ de Jaubert par contre. 

taz

taz

Posté(e)
Posté(e)

La dépêche

Ligue 1 : Desler et maintenant Sylla, les latéraux du TFC serrent les dents...

Montage DDM - Laurent Dard et Xavier de Fenoyl
3-4 minutes

l'essentiel Philippe Montanier et son staff doivent composer avec les pépins physiques des côtés droit et gauche de la défense toulousaine. Un casse-tête.

C’est un début de saison pénible que vivent actuellement les latéraux toulousains. À gauche comme à droite, Philippe Montanier et son staff doivent se gratter la tête pour savoir quel nom cocher sur la feuille de match depuis l’ouverture du championnat (le 7 août dernier).

 

Dernier exemple en date, l’absence d’Issiaga Sylla, dimanche 21 août dernier face à Lorient. Touché aux ischios le vendredi précédant le match, le latéral gauche Guinéen avait été contraint d’écourter sa séance d’entraînement et n’a pas pu prendre part à la rencontre.

Desler ménagé, Sylla à part...

Ce pépin physique s’ajoute à celui que subit Mikkel Desler depuis le début de l’été. Le Danois qui a disputé l’intégralité des matchs de Ligue 2 la saison passée accuse le coup. Il traîne une blessure au tendon d’Achille depuis quelques mois et cette dernière l’empêche de participer normalement aux entraînements de la semaine.

 

Il a d’ailleurs été une nouvelle fois ménagé par le staff lors de la séance du mardi 23 août, tandis que Sylla effectuait de longues courses en marge de groupe pro.

Un secteur très fragile

Pour l’heure, Philippe Montanier a décidé de piocher dans le réservoir de la formation toulousaine pour remédier aux absences des deux titulaires. Le jeune Kévin Keben, défenseur central de formation, a été repositionné à droite par le staff, faisant de lui le suppléant de Desler. La cellule de recrutement s'active depuis longtemps pour renforcer ce côté droit mais aucune piste sérieuse n’a fuité depuis le début du mercato.

 

À gauche, si le TFC a recruté le jeune Suédois Oliver Zanden, c’est pourtant Moussa Diarra – lui aussi formé dans l’axe – qui a été choisi pour remplacer Sylla face à Lorient. Selon le coach violet, Zanden n’est pas encore prêt et cela « n’aurait pas été un cadeau de le faire démarrer » dimanche. Soit. Le Suédois est pourtant arrivé en forme car son championnat d'origine battait son plein au moment de sa signature au TFC début juillet. Mais l’exigence requise pour la L1 contraint le staff à faire patienter son Scandinave.

 

Le secteur défensif violet semble donc particulièrement fragile et à une semaine de la fermeture du mercato (le 1er septembre), l’arrivée d’un renfort ne ferait pas de mal pour consolider l’arrière-garde violette.

  • Like 1
taz

taz

Posté(e)
Posté(e) (modifié)

https://theathletic.com/3526081/2022/08/24/toulouse-inside-a-football-club/

Cet article (en anglais) reprend pas mal de choses que l'on sait déjà.

Il y a quelques passages intéressants aussi, où l'on apprend par exemple que la première année de L2, le groupe restait parfois tard au Stadium à fêter les victoires. Ou encore que les comptes étaient équilibrés en L2, avec un bénéficie significatif la saison dernière.

Intéressant à lire. A priori, la suite demain.

 

Modifié par taz
  • Like 2
  • Top ! 2
VioletSmurf

VioletSmurf

Posté(e)
Posté(e)
Aug 24, 2022

Philippe Montanier is fresh off the training pitch, the head coach and his Toulouse players having negotiated safe passage through an excitable gaggle of young autograph hunters demanding their toll of signatures and selfies on the forecourt outside the stadium. Now, catching his breath in a small office round the corner from the changing rooms, he is contemplating how best to describe this club’s transformation.

He wonders, briefly, whether the upturn in enthusiasm in this vast corner of south-west France is a natural reaction given lockdowns and pandemic restrictions appear to be a thing of the past. Attending live sport en masse feels an appealing prospect once again. “But it is not just that,” he says. “This is a new team, a young team, playing a style of football people here recognise from a previous era. I played for and against this club in the 1990s and Le TeFeCe were offensive, energetic, attack-minded… as a goalkeeper at Caen, I knew I would be busy when we played here.

“Every club has its own DNA, a style and approach that the supporters demand, which is why it was important we went down this road. I’m a Liverpool fan — Kevin Keegan was one of my favourite players — and there are similarities here with what Jurgen Klopp has done there. I’m not saying I’m our Klopp, but he tapped into what the fans of that club wanted. They buy into what he is doing as a result. That is what has happened here, too. Suddenly we are something fresh, something with which Les Toulousains can identify.

“Life at this club had been so tough. Pretty much for five or six seasons, they had been clinging on in Ligue 1, low in the table and just fighting, fighting, fighting to stay up. Then they were relegated in the first COVID-19 season and all the optimism had drained away. But now, with new owners, a new president, a new team and this philosophy change, people see the trauma has finished.

“Suddenly, there is something to celebrate. Now, more than anything else, we have hope.”

GettyImages-1242635019-scaled.jpg

Toulouse are back in Ligue 1 and revitalised under new ownership (Photo: Valentine Chapuis/AFP via Getty Images)

Toulouse are newly restored to the French top flight. The youngest and least experienced team in the division are unbeaten after their first three matches and attacking life at the higher level with all the vim and vigour that saw them establish goalscoring records while claiming Ligue 2 last term. Their corporate lounges are rammed on matchdays. Season ticket sales have gone through the roof. Montanier’s vibrant team — a blend of academy graduates and players innovatively handpicked by a shrewd recruitment department that relies heavily upon data — delight near-full houses at the Stadium de Toulouse these days.

The Athletic has spent time behind the scenes at a club reborn, talking to those who have instigated the upturn in fortunes, and others who have embraced it and are now intent upon maintaining momentum.

This is the first of two articles detailing that revival and how a promoted side, who welcome Kylian Mbappe, Lionel Messi and Paris Saint-Germain to the banks of the Garonne at the end of the month, are approaching life back in the French top flight. The second instalment will address the innovative recruitment strategies that have helped spur on the team’s on-field success, and look at how this club is booming in a city often considered a rugby stronghold.

Theirs has been a renaissance instigated on and off the pitch — but it was a metamorphosis kick-started by an American-led takeover.

Damien Comolli starts with a warning. The club president has retired to his office — where the walls are decked with as many reminders of his time working as a scout for Arsene Wenger at Arsenal as mementoes of last season’s Ligue 2 championship — after concluding the weekly heads of departments meeting in the boardroom and is anxious to put the club’s progress in proper context.

“Our culture has not changed yet,” he says. “We are in cultural transition. We’ve turned the ship by maybe 60 per cent, and we want to turn it fully around. It’s not job done, box ticked. Not yet.”

GettyImages-1240236452-scaled.jpg

Montanier and Comolli celebrate promotion (Photo: Valentine Chapuis/AFP via Getty Images)

The 50-year-old, a former sporting director at Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool, has run the football operation at Toulouse for RedBird Capital Partners since the US-based private equity firm purchased an 85 per cent stake in the club in the summer of 2020. RedBird, founded by Gerald Cardinale in 2014 and whose interests include a $750million (£634.2m) stake in Fenway Sports Group — the owners of Liverpool, Pittsburgh Penguins and the Boston Red Sox — had been exploring the European football market for potential investment opportunities for several years.

Alec Scheiner, a partner in the firm and a figure who had previously helped run the Dallas Cowboys and Cleveland Browns, suggested recently they had scrutinised more than 80 clubs in nine countries across 13 leagues. They visited at least 50 of them over four years to gather information. Comolli, who had recently left Fenerbahce, was presented with that hefty dossier when meeting members of the group around the Super Bowl in Miami early in 2020. One of those listed was Toulouse.

The Americans were seeking to buy a club in a dynamic city — economically and demographically — that was blessed with solid facilities, a thriving academy and a local partner with whom they could work. “Le TeFeCe” met all those criteria. Toulouse, with a population of around 800,000, is France’s fourth biggest city and, as home to major players in the aeronautical industry, has a distinctly international flavour.

Its stadium, rented from the city for €1.62million (£1.36m, $1.6m) a year, may be tired but it can accommodate 30,000 spectators and has staged games at Euro 2016, the 2007 rugby union World Cup and, going back even further, the 1998 football World Cup. The current playing staff pass the original, rather weather-beaten mural for France ’98 as they arrive at the ground — as many on bicycles or e-scooters as driving 4x4s — for training every day.

The club’s academy, situated next to the stadium, was placed in the top five of 36 similar institutions in the country last year by the French Football Federation (FFF) and has a long and proud history of producing players who have thrived in senior football at Toulouse and beyond. The fact that Olivier Sadran, a local businessman who had bought his local team in 2001, was keen to retain a 15 per cent shareholding offered a nod to continuity and reassured any locals wary of outside investment. Comolli, born around 100 miles to the east in Beziers, recognised the club’s potential. He could also quickly identify where they were broken.

Toulouse were at their lowest ebb in that summer when the pandemic was at its peak. “I use the analogy that our campus, with our stadium and the training centre for all our teams, is on an island in the Garonne and there are bridges, but those bridges were down,” says the club president. “There had been a catastrophic breakdown in the relationship between the fanbase, the sponsors, the city as an institution — politically and socially — and the club.

“This club represents the region of Occitania, not just the city. Look at the map: there is Bordeaux 200 miles to the north west, Montpellier 160 miles to the east, and then us. Nothing else. Where I grew up, Toulouse was our ‘local’ club. There were Toulouse fans up in Tulle and Aurillac on the Massif Central, into the Pyrenees, in Carcassonne and Narbonne. They used to come here. They were not coming anymore. People were appalled by the constant failure. When Toulouse were relegated (in the abbreviated 2019-20 season) they had the lowest number of points after 28 games ever – 13 – but it had been a car crash in the making for years.”

toulouse-map1-1.png

When the French domestic football season was curtailed early two years ago, Toulouse had secured one point from their last 18 league games. They may have been an opportunity, but they were also a laughing stock.

The revival off the pitch was instigated via a blend of clever marketing, the re-establishment of basic lines of communication and the empowering of a beleaguered workforce. Comolli constantly referenced “community” in his sales pitch with fan groups, sponsors and local student unions — Toulouse is one of the most student-dense cities in France— and stressed a desire to put the club back at the heart of the city in discussions with local government. A PR company, hired from Paris, came up with the slogan “Debout toujours” (“Always standing”).

“This is a club that always recovers,” says the president. “It never lies down.” That defiant mantra caught on and is still inescapable. It even adorns the coffee mugs used by administrative staff at the Nespresso machine outside the boardroom.

The new owners canvassed all members of staff, around 230 people including volunteers and part-time employees, and conducted two-hour interviews with 17 figures — former players, managers, academy graduates, supporters, a sociology teacher specialising in fandom and Sadran — asking them what Toulouse FC meant to them. Some lapsed into English in their feedback, admitting they had come to equate the club with “To Lose FC”. Defeatism had seeped in. They craved a proper structure, a vision, even a discernible playing style into which they could buy after years of desperate mishmashes.

But there was pride, too. Pride in the work of the club’s foundation, overseeing a wide range of projects from stocking local clothes and food banks to coaching in schools and initiatives for the local homeless. Pride in the reputation of the academy. Pride, too, to be Toulousain and to represent Occitania. Those positives have become pillars of the new setup’s “Projet Viola”.

“They wanted a culture based on open dialogue where they could be innovative and not afraid if some of the ideas did not come off,” says Comolli. “A high-performance environment, and a club with a vision. We fed back everything we’d got to them and said, ‘We are going to rebuild the culture of this club, but it’s not going to be done top to bottom. It’s going to be bottom to top. You decide what it is to become’. They have bought into that, hugely.”

Working groups still meet to discuss new initiatives. Externally, a satisfaction questionnaire distributed at the opening Ligue 1 game of this season, against Nice, yielded 2,400 responses. Internally, the ideas box on the counter at the main reception is a reminder this is a process. 

Olivier Jaubert, formerly with Nike and the FFF, runs the commercial and business side of the club, with Comolli overseeing the football operation. There is regular dialogue, too, with the owners in the United States.

Toulouse now comes under the umbrella of RedBird FC, a separate entity to RedBird Capital Partners whose portfolio grows ever more impressive. The fund will add AC Milan to its roster early next month, has also taken a stake in the Indian Premier League cricket team Rajasthan Royals and owns 50 per cent of Zelus Analytics, a sports data business whose input shapes Toulouse’s transfer policy. The club have gladly tapped into their owners’ expertise in the fields of merchandise, media and sport, with the chain of decision-making slick and efficient.

RedBird representatives, initially frustrated by COVID-19 restrictions, have visited Toulouse two or three times since their purchase but there is a company business call once a fortnight, and a weekly football club call. “The operation needs to be self-sustainable, and we are,” adds the club president. “We were even in Ligue 2. We are making money. The owners couldn’t believe that, but last year we made money — a significant profit.

“Now the ambition is to improve the facilities. We are investing money into a new training ground and €1million to refurbish the academy. We want to invest in the stadium, and the municipality are very open to that. The fourth biggest city in France should be able to sustain a top-six club. Just be stressing those messages we were hit by this wave of positivity.

“But, of course, none of that mattered unless we won out on the pitch, and in a way that drew people to us.”

One of Comolli’s first appointments at Toulouse was Selinay Gurgenc as head of strategy and culture.

The pair had worked together at Fenerbahce where Gurgenc — who has a master’s degree in football business from Barcelona’s Johan Cruyff Institute and was a financial analyst earlier in her career — was the sporting director’s assistant. In France, Comolli needed someone to guide his decision-making. A “truth teller”, as he puts it, who would pull him up on his wilder ideas, urging caution where he might have taken the plunge (or vice versa), as well as ensuring the hierarchy’s policies were implemented further down the food chain.

“Selinay is there to challenge me,” says Comolli before adding through a smile, “and she tells me I’m wrong all the time.”

It was Gurgenc to whom Comolli turned when determining how to approach life in Ligue 2. It had quickly become apparent that the trauma of years of failure was too engrained in the playing squad for them to instigate a revival. The negativity was too entrenched, prompting an overhaul of backroom, technical and playing staff. The upheaval was significant. None of the matchday squad involved in last Sunday’s 2-2 draw with Lorient had been involved in the first-team setup back in 2020 when the team limped so feebly out of the top flight.

Toulouse were relatively blessed when it came to confronting the second tier so, having spoken to Gurgenc, Comolli adopted a bullish attitude towards that first campaign outside the elite. “We had the biggest turnover, the biggest wage bill, so we agreed we could not say anything other than, ‘We are going to get promoted’,” he says. “I told the players that, if there was a backlash, it was on me. But they had to target going up.

“Maybe the fact we were playing in front of only 5,000 fans due to COVID-19 restrictions helped us rebuild confidence that first season. The players had been booed at every home game the previous year and, this time round, we only had two points after four matches. How would the crowd have reacted if everyone had had access to the stadium? But, with fewer fans in the ground, the players felt they could take risks and try things. Towards the end of September, we beat Auxerre and things sparked.

“That was our first league win for almost a year but, when I came back upstairs to the offices, everyone was quiet and working on their laptops. I couldn’t believe it. So I shouted, ‘So you don’t know how to celebrate? Toulouse is supposed to be a party city, no? We need to have drinks! Everyone in the meeting room now’. So we all piled in there and celebrated a first win in 23 league games. Since then, after every win, all the staff go into the boardroom and celebrate. Sometimes they stay until 4am… it’s starting to cost us a lot, we’ve won so many games.”

TOULOUSE.png

Lacour, the academy directory, and Gurgenc, the club’s head of strategy and culture (Photo: Toulouse)

Yet the upturn thereafter was not quite good enough to secure automatic promotion, and a play-off against Nantes culminated in the controversial non-award of a penalty to Toulouse for handball and defeat on away goals over two legs. “That was so painful and still hurts now, and I wanted to go into last season telling the players — telling the world — this is now about revenge,” adds Comolli. “I had tunnel vision. But Selinay and our first-team psychologist, Nodji Myaro, counselled against it. You don’t build a season on frustration. You have to put a positive spin on it. That’s where having people who can shake me and ask, ‘What are you doing?’, is so useful.

“So, at our presentation to the players in pre-season, I just put up a picture of the Ligue 2 trophy on the screen. ‘This is what we are going to win’. We targeted how many goals we’d need to score, how many we could concede, and stressed only the title matters. Promotion is not enough. We wanted to be champions and to do it in a very particular way: to be known as a very attacking team with a very clear playing style. That playing style is the culture, really, and you build all the rest around it.”

There had been a change of coach that summer, with Patrice Garande leaving the club, but the style of play designed to propel the first team out of the division was determined by the one section of the club that had continued to thrive through the senior side’s years of toil.

Toulouse’s academy has always been prolific.

This is the institution that has produced Philippe Mexes and Moussa Sissoko, Alban Lafont and Issa Diop. Images and shirts from former players clutter the walls in the Centre de Formation, situated in the shadow of the Stadium de Toulouse, with as much emphasis granted to those who have forged league careers as others who have progressed into the national setup or established their reputations abroad.

Though 70 per cent of the club’s academy players were born within 30 miles of Toulouse, the catchment area stretches to the fringes of Occitania and the Massif Central, and even to Bordeaux, with around 25 partner clubs as far away as Aurillac supplying them with talent. The main building provides lodging for many of the youngsters on the books. The club reacted to the senior side’s relegation by investing further in their youth section, purchasing a small school a little over a mile away last year where around 50 of the trainees study for their baccalaureate.

The facility is run on a budget of up to €4million a year and its reputation continues to grow. Last season, the under-17s were national champions. The under-16s, under-15s, under-14s and under-13s all won their respective leagues, too, playing a trademark brand of expansive, attacking football along the way. “Our success is based on good coaching and methodology, and a clear style that is established with the ‘Pitchounes’ and now runs up into the first team — rather than the other way round — because our president quite rightly recognises true stability within a club lies in its youth section,” says the academy director, Julien Lacour, hoisting his foot on to a chair. Everything is an effort when you have recently fractured a tibia landing awkwardly from a zip wire.

“The kids here get to play and progress. We have quite a tight group with 120 players across the seven sides — four ‘senior’ academy teams, including the reserves, and then under-13s to under-15s in ‘pre-formation’ — and smaller squads mean everyone is involved. The first-team players train at the same time, eat in the same building and mix with the younger players to offer advice. There’s proper communication.

“It’s a very strong process because the club believes in developing its own talent — it’s something that has always connected us with our fanbase. We aim to have 40-50 per cent of the senior squad made up of players from the academy.” Eight of the current first-team squad were associated with Toulouse’s youth system from the age of 12.

GettyImages-1240236790-scaled.jpg

Toulouse players celebrate their promotion back to Ligue 1 (Photo: Valentine Chapuis/AFP via Getty Images)

Like the first-team’s mental coach, Myaro, who was a highly decorated and two-time Olympian handball player for France, Lacour’s background is not in football. He initially excelled at judo, at which he competed to an elite level before spending almost 14 years working in rugby union. Eleven of those were as academy director at Clermont Auvergne, one of the powerhouses of the sport in France. “My role is similar here because we are educating players, as we were in rugby. We offer them an apprenticeship. The boys are learning through trial and error, and we are here to guide them. We feel we are innovative. Avant-gardist.

“But what is clear is this is the heart of the club, and where a playing style that is identifiably Toulousain is established.”

The senior team had offered 183 games to under-23 players over the 2020-21 campaign, more than any other side across France’s elite divisions. So, during the interview process for the new head coach last summer, it was made clear to candidates — initially handpicked according to the metrics put forward by the club’s head of data analysis — that they would have to mimic the academy’s playing style.

“People say Toulouse is the bull horn of Spain piercing into the south of France,” says Comolli. “It’s a very Latin city, and Latin football is highly technical, skilled and attacking. In the interview, I told (Montanier) that his playing style had to be aligned with what the academy was doing, not the other way around. ‘You have to adapt to us’.

“When he left the interview I turned to the head of data and the head of strategy and said he’d never come back. But his agent called within an hour and said Phillipe absolutely loved it.”

“What they wanted fitted in well with my own philosophy,” says Montanier, the former Nottingham Forest, Real Sociedad and Rennes manager who, at the start of a distinguished 20-year coaching career, took Boulogne from the third-tier Championnat National to Ligue 1. “A high press, controlling the game through possession with an emphasis on pushing forward — they were qualities I look to instil in my teams. It felt like a fresh project with a clear objective, to win Ligue 2, and we just had this momentum from the start. In the end, all the objectives the club set us, we met.

“We scored a record number of goals (82). We had the best passer in the division (the young Dutch midfielder Branco van den Boomen), the leading scorer (the Englishman Rhys Healey) and six players in the team of the year. We started the season playing in front of fewer than 5,000 fans and ended it beating Nimes in front of more than 28,000 as champions, and the city came out to celebrate with us at the Capitole. I don’t think that would have happened if we had won the league playing a more restricted style. It is because they identified with us.”

The club shop took as much money on the day of the Nimes game, when they launched their new home shirt for the 2022-23 season back in Ligue 1, as they had over the entirety of the miserable 2019-20 campaign. Montanier chooses not to mention the team also benefited from the coach of the year.

“The challenge now is to step up because we have one of the smallest budgets at the higher level and we play with the youngest squad — the average age is 23.5 — and the least experience,” he says. “But we have started well and that has boosted confidence. And, believe me, we will not be changing our style. We will not betray that work from last season which has seen so many fans buy season tickets. We are attacking this division, just as we attacked the last.”

Those numbers have scaled new heights. The club liaised extensively with fan groups over ticket pricing and, as of last Saturday, had sold more than 13,000 season tickets, a club record. Their previous best, set in 2007-08 after finishing third in the top division the year before, had been 7,500. Nearly three-quarters of this year’s sales were made to new supporters and 65 per cent of season ticket holders are below the age of 35, while sales to women have leapt from five to 18 per cent. That rise in interest should bode well for the development of the women’s team.

Antoine Gerard’s side were quietly successful in their own right last season, beating Monaco in a play-off to gain promotion to the second tier of the women’s game in France. “That was a huge step forward,” says the coach. “The club follow the same approach with the women as they do on the men’s side, promoting young players coached in the system rather than throwing money at everything. We could spend heavily and try and rise as quickly as possible into the top division, alongside Lyon and Paris Saint-Germain, but that would block the pathway for our youngsters into the first team. Instead, they rightly want us to use what we have intelligently and try to build, progressively, an ambitious project through our youth and women’s team.

“We feel very much part of the project at this club. Our players are used more and more at the heart of promotional operations. They do more and more media. The president (Comolli) is regularly at youth-team and first-team games. They’ve just put a bit more emphasis on the women’s game since coming in.”

There are 130 registered players within the women’s section, ranging from the ages of eight to 31, who train on-site and play their matches on the all-weather pitch next to the stadium. Average crowds were around 50 last season, but the club anticipate that figure will quadruple over the campaign. Their achievements have been celebrated by the men’s team, with every aspect of this club seemingly on the up.

Montanier’s team face a tough challenge in a division from which four clubs will be relegated this season, but his side have been enterprising to date.

They carved apart a sorry Troyes team in their first away fixture of term, winning 3-0 at a canter. Their home draws against Nice and Lorient have been missed opportunities. Naivety, perhaps inevitably, reared on Sunday with the sloppy concession of two penalties — one well saved by Maxime Dupe — and the late surrender of a lead, but their eagerness to pour forward, all overlapping full-backs and forward-thinking midfielders, is undeniable.

Their approach has already caught the imagination of the division, even if that has left Montanier anxious not to become “just the hit of the summer”.

“But we all feel we are part of something special that is happening,” adds Anthony Rouault, the young centre-half who has progressed from academy centre-half to mainstay of the first team over the past few years. “This is my club, the club my father supported and pushed me towards when I was a boy. In the past, when you were a Toulouse fan, you kept quiet. You did not talk too much about it. My uncle and my cousin were rugby fans and used to tell me that football sucked. But they are interested now.

“There is enthusiasm around the football club. The image of Le TeFeCe is transformed. To have contributed in a little way towards the success the club is now enjoying… well, that means everything. For me and my family. Because to wear this shirt is everything.”

Tomorrow, read “Inside a football club – part two: How you recruit”

(Top image: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic; photos: TeFeCe)

National
  • Like 2
  • Top ! 1
Debevinho

Debevinho

Posté(e)
Posté(e)
il y a une heure, taz a dit :

https://theathletic.com/3526081/2022/08/24/toulouse-inside-a-football-club/

Cet article (en anglais) reprend pas mal de choses que l'on sait déjà.

Il y a quelques passages intéressants aussi, où l'on apprend par exemple que la première année de L2, le groupe restait parfois tard au Stadium à fêter les victoires. Ou encore que les comptes étaient équilibrés en L2, avec un bénéficie significatif la saison dernière.

Intéressant à lire. A priori, la suite demain.

 

Merci beaucoup. Article passionnant. J’ai jamais vu un dossier aussi complet dans la presse française sur notre club. 

taz

taz

Posté(e)
Posté(e)
il y a 42 minutes, VioletSmurf a dit :
Aug 24, 2022

Philippe Montanier is fresh off the training pitch, the head coach and his Toulouse players having negotiated safe passage through an excitable gaggle of young autograph hunters demanding their toll of signatures and selfies on the forecourt outside the stadium. Now, catching his breath in a small office round the corner from the changing rooms, he is contemplating how best to describe this club’s transformation.

He wonders, briefly, whether the upturn in enthusiasm in this vast corner of south-west France is a natural reaction given lockdowns and pandemic restrictions appear to be a thing of the past. Attending live sport en masse feels an appealing prospect once again. “But it is not just that,” he says. “This is a new team, a young team, playing a style of football people here recognise from a previous era. I played for and against this club in the 1990s and Le TeFeCe were offensive, energetic, attack-minded… as a goalkeeper at Caen, I knew I would be busy when we played here.

“Every club has its own DNA, a style and approach that the supporters demand, which is why it was important we went down this road. I’m a Liverpool fan — Kevin Keegan was one of my favourite players — and there are similarities here with what Jurgen Klopp has done there. I’m not saying I’m our Klopp, but he tapped into what the fans of that club wanted. They buy into what he is doing as a result. That is what has happened here, too. Suddenly we are something fresh, something with which Les Toulousains can identify.

“Life at this club had been so tough. Pretty much for five or six seasons, they had been clinging on in Ligue 1, low in the table and just fighting, fighting, fighting to stay up. Then they were relegated in the first COVID-19 season and all the optimism had drained away. But now, with new owners, a new president, a new team and this philosophy change, people see the trauma has finished.

“Suddenly, there is something to celebrate. Now, more than anything else, we have hope.”

GettyImages-1242635019-scaled.jpg

Toulouse are back in Ligue 1 and revitalised under new ownership (Photo: Valentine Chapuis/AFP via Getty Images)

Toulouse are newly restored to the French top flight. The youngest and least experienced team in the division are unbeaten after their first three matches and attacking life at the higher level with all the vim and vigour that saw them establish goalscoring records while claiming Ligue 2 last term. Their corporate lounges are rammed on matchdays. Season ticket sales have gone through the roof. Montanier’s vibrant team — a blend of academy graduates and players innovatively handpicked by a shrewd recruitment department that relies heavily upon data — delight near-full houses at the Stadium de Toulouse these days.

The Athletic has spent time behind the scenes at a club reborn, talking to those who have instigated the upturn in fortunes, and others who have embraced it and are now intent upon maintaining momentum.

This is the first of two articles detailing that revival and how a promoted side, who welcome Kylian Mbappe, Lionel Messi and Paris Saint-Germain to the banks of the Garonne at the end of the month, are approaching life back in the French top flight. The second instalment will address the innovative recruitment strategies that have helped spur on the team’s on-field success, and look at how this club is booming in a city often considered a rugby stronghold.

Theirs has been a renaissance instigated on and off the pitch — but it was a metamorphosis kick-started by an American-led takeover.

Damien Comolli starts with a warning. The club president has retired to his office — where the walls are decked with as many reminders of his time working as a scout for Arsene Wenger at Arsenal as mementoes of last season’s Ligue 2 championship — after concluding the weekly heads of departments meeting in the boardroom and is anxious to put the club’s progress in proper context.

“Our culture has not changed yet,” he says. “We are in cultural transition. We’ve turned the ship by maybe 60 per cent, and we want to turn it fully around. It’s not job done, box ticked. Not yet.”

GettyImages-1240236452-scaled.jpg

Montanier and Comolli celebrate promotion (Photo: Valentine Chapuis/AFP via Getty Images)

The 50-year-old, a former sporting director at Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool, has run the football operation at Toulouse for RedBird Capital Partners since the US-based private equity firm purchased an 85 per cent stake in the club in the summer of 2020. RedBird, founded by Gerald Cardinale in 2014 and whose interests include a $750million (£634.2m) stake in Fenway Sports Group — the owners of Liverpool, Pittsburgh Penguins and the Boston Red Sox — had been exploring the European football market for potential investment opportunities for several years.

Alec Scheiner, a partner in the firm and a figure who had previously helped run the Dallas Cowboys and Cleveland Browns, suggested recently they had scrutinised more than 80 clubs in nine countries across 13 leagues. They visited at least 50 of them over four years to gather information. Comolli, who had recently left Fenerbahce, was presented with that hefty dossier when meeting members of the group around the Super Bowl in Miami early in 2020. One of those listed was Toulouse.

The Americans were seeking to buy a club in a dynamic city — economically and demographically — that was blessed with solid facilities, a thriving academy and a local partner with whom they could work. “Le TeFeCe” met all those criteria. Toulouse, with a population of around 800,000, is France’s fourth biggest city and, as home to major players in the aeronautical industry, has a distinctly international flavour.

Its stadium, rented from the city for €1.62million (£1.36m, $1.6m) a year, may be tired but it can accommodate 30,000 spectators and has staged games at Euro 2016, the 2007 rugby union World Cup and, going back even further, the 1998 football World Cup. The current playing staff pass the original, rather weather-beaten mural for France ’98 as they arrive at the ground — as many on bicycles or e-scooters as driving 4x4s — for training every day.

The club’s academy, situated next to the stadium, was placed in the top five of 36 similar institutions in the country last year by the French Football Federation (FFF) and has a long and proud history of producing players who have thrived in senior football at Toulouse and beyond. The fact that Olivier Sadran, a local businessman who had bought his local team in 2001, was keen to retain a 15 per cent shareholding offered a nod to continuity and reassured any locals wary of outside investment. Comolli, born around 100 miles to the east in Beziers, recognised the club’s potential. He could also quickly identify where they were broken.

Toulouse were at their lowest ebb in that summer when the pandemic was at its peak. “I use the analogy that our campus, with our stadium and the training centre for all our teams, is on an island in the Garonne and there are bridges, but those bridges were down,” says the club president. “There had been a catastrophic breakdown in the relationship between the fanbase, the sponsors, the city as an institution — politically and socially — and the club.

“This club represents the region of Occitania, not just the city. Look at the map: there is Bordeaux 200 miles to the north west, Montpellier 160 miles to the east, and then us. Nothing else. Where I grew up, Toulouse was our ‘local’ club. There were Toulouse fans up in Tulle and Aurillac on the Massif Central, into the Pyrenees, in Carcassonne and Narbonne. They used to come here. They were not coming anymore. People were appalled by the constant failure. When Toulouse were relegated (in the abbreviated 2019-20 season) they had the lowest number of points after 28 games ever – 13 – but it had been a car crash in the making for years.”

toulouse-map1-1.png

When the French domestic football season was curtailed early two years ago, Toulouse had secured one point from their last 18 league games. They may have been an opportunity, but they were also a laughing stock.

The revival off the pitch was instigated via a blend of clever marketing, the re-establishment of basic lines of communication and the empowering of a beleaguered workforce. Comolli constantly referenced “community” in his sales pitch with fan groups, sponsors and local student unions — Toulouse is one of the most student-dense cities in France— and stressed a desire to put the club back at the heart of the city in discussions with local government. A PR company, hired from Paris, came up with the slogan “Debout toujours” (“Always standing”).

“This is a club that always recovers,” says the president. “It never lies down.” That defiant mantra caught on and is still inescapable. It even adorns the coffee mugs used by administrative staff at the Nespresso machine outside the boardroom.

The new owners canvassed all members of staff, around 230 people including volunteers and part-time employees, and conducted two-hour interviews with 17 figures — former players, managers, academy graduates, supporters, a sociology teacher specialising in fandom and Sadran — asking them what Toulouse FC meant to them. Some lapsed into English in their feedback, admitting they had come to equate the club with “To Lose FC”. Defeatism had seeped in. They craved a proper structure, a vision, even a discernible playing style into which they could buy after years of desperate mishmashes.

But there was pride, too. Pride in the work of the club’s foundation, overseeing a wide range of projects from stocking local clothes and food banks to coaching in schools and initiatives for the local homeless. Pride in the reputation of the academy. Pride, too, to be Toulousain and to represent Occitania. Those positives have become pillars of the new setup’s “Projet Viola”.

“They wanted a culture based on open dialogue where they could be innovative and not afraid if some of the ideas did not come off,” says Comolli. “A high-performance environment, and a club with a vision. We fed back everything we’d got to them and said, ‘We are going to rebuild the culture of this club, but it’s not going to be done top to bottom. It’s going to be bottom to top. You decide what it is to become’. They have bought into that, hugely.”

Working groups still meet to discuss new initiatives. Externally, a satisfaction questionnaire distributed at the opening Ligue 1 game of this season, against Nice, yielded 2,400 responses. Internally, the ideas box on the counter at the main reception is a reminder this is a process. 

Olivier Jaubert, formerly with Nike and the FFF, runs the commercial and business side of the club, with Comolli overseeing the football operation. There is regular dialogue, too, with the owners in the United States.

Toulouse now comes under the umbrella of RedBird FC, a separate entity to RedBird Capital Partners whose portfolio grows ever more impressive. The fund will add AC Milan to its roster early next month, has also taken a stake in the Indian Premier League cricket team Rajasthan Royals and owns 50 per cent of Zelus Analytics, a sports data business whose input shapes Toulouse’s transfer policy. The club have gladly tapped into their owners’ expertise in the fields of merchandise, media and sport, with the chain of decision-making slick and efficient.

RedBird representatives, initially frustrated by COVID-19 restrictions, have visited Toulouse two or three times since their purchase but there is a company business call once a fortnight, and a weekly football club call. “The operation needs to be self-sustainable, and we are,” adds the club president. “We were even in Ligue 2. We are making money. The owners couldn’t believe that, but last year we made money — a significant profit.

“Now the ambition is to improve the facilities. We are investing money into a new training ground and €1million to refurbish the academy. We want to invest in the stadium, and the municipality are very open to that. The fourth biggest city in France should be able to sustain a top-six club. Just be stressing those messages we were hit by this wave of positivity.

“But, of course, none of that mattered unless we won out on the pitch, and in a way that drew people to us.”

One of Comolli’s first appointments at Toulouse was Selinay Gurgenc as head of strategy and culture.

The pair had worked together at Fenerbahce where Gurgenc — who has a master’s degree in football business from Barcelona’s Johan Cruyff Institute and was a financial analyst earlier in her career — was the sporting director’s assistant. In France, Comolli needed someone to guide his decision-making. A “truth teller”, as he puts it, who would pull him up on his wilder ideas, urging caution where he might have taken the plunge (or vice versa), as well as ensuring the hierarchy’s policies were implemented further down the food chain.

“Selinay is there to challenge me,” says Comolli before adding through a smile, “and she tells me I’m wrong all the time.”

It was Gurgenc to whom Comolli turned when determining how to approach life in Ligue 2. It had quickly become apparent that the trauma of years of failure was too engrained in the playing squad for them to instigate a revival. The negativity was too entrenched, prompting an overhaul of backroom, technical and playing staff. The upheaval was significant. None of the matchday squad involved in last Sunday’s 2-2 draw with Lorient had been involved in the first-team setup back in 2020 when the team limped so feebly out of the top flight.

Toulouse were relatively blessed when it came to confronting the second tier so, having spoken to Gurgenc, Comolli adopted a bullish attitude towards that first campaign outside the elite. “We had the biggest turnover, the biggest wage bill, so we agreed we could not say anything other than, ‘We are going to get promoted’,” he says. “I told the players that, if there was a backlash, it was on me. But they had to target going up.

“Maybe the fact we were playing in front of only 5,000 fans due to COVID-19 restrictions helped us rebuild confidence that first season. The players had been booed at every home game the previous year and, this time round, we only had two points after four matches. How would the crowd have reacted if everyone had had access to the stadium? But, with fewer fans in the ground, the players felt they could take risks and try things. Towards the end of September, we beat Auxerre and things sparked.

“That was our first league win for almost a year but, when I came back upstairs to the offices, everyone was quiet and working on their laptops. I couldn’t believe it. So I shouted, ‘So you don’t know how to celebrate? Toulouse is supposed to be a party city, no? We need to have drinks! Everyone in the meeting room now’. So we all piled in there and celebrated a first win in 23 league games. Since then, after every win, all the staff go into the boardroom and celebrate. Sometimes they stay until 4am… it’s starting to cost us a lot, we’ve won so many games.”

TOULOUSE.png

Lacour, the academy directory, and Gurgenc, the club’s head of strategy and culture (Photo: Toulouse)

Yet the upturn thereafter was not quite good enough to secure automatic promotion, and a play-off against Nantes culminated in the controversial non-award of a penalty to Toulouse for handball and defeat on away goals over two legs. “That was so painful and still hurts now, and I wanted to go into last season telling the players — telling the world — this is now about revenge,” adds Comolli. “I had tunnel vision. But Selinay and our first-team psychologist, Nodji Myaro, counselled against it. You don’t build a season on frustration. You have to put a positive spin on it. That’s where having people who can shake me and ask, ‘What are you doing?’, is so useful.

“So, at our presentation to the players in pre-season, I just put up a picture of the Ligue 2 trophy on the screen. ‘This is what we are going to win’. We targeted how many goals we’d need to score, how many we could concede, and stressed only the title matters. Promotion is not enough. We wanted to be champions and to do it in a very particular way: to be known as a very attacking team with a very clear playing style. That playing style is the culture, really, and you build all the rest around it.”

There had been a change of coach that summer, with Patrice Garande leaving the club, but the style of play designed to propel the first team out of the division was determined by the one section of the club that had continued to thrive through the senior side’s years of toil.

Toulouse’s academy has always been prolific.

This is the institution that has produced Philippe Mexes and Moussa Sissoko, Alban Lafont and Issa Diop. Images and shirts from former players clutter the walls in the Centre de Formation, situated in the shadow of the Stadium de Toulouse, with as much emphasis granted to those who have forged league careers as others who have progressed into the national setup or established their reputations abroad.

Though 70 per cent of the club’s academy players were born within 30 miles of Toulouse, the catchment area stretches to the fringes of Occitania and the Massif Central, and even to Bordeaux, with around 25 partner clubs as far away as Aurillac supplying them with talent. The main building provides lodging for many of the youngsters on the books. The club reacted to the senior side’s relegation by investing further in their youth section, purchasing a small school a little over a mile away last year where around 50 of the trainees study for their baccalaureate.

The facility is run on a budget of up to €4million a year and its reputation continues to grow. Last season, the under-17s were national champions. The under-16s, under-15s, under-14s and under-13s all won their respective leagues, too, playing a trademark brand of expansive, attacking football along the way. “Our success is based on good coaching and methodology, and a clear style that is established with the ‘Pitchounes’ and now runs up into the first team — rather than the other way round — because our president quite rightly recognises true stability within a club lies in its youth section,” says the academy director, Julien Lacour, hoisting his foot on to a chair. Everything is an effort when you have recently fractured a tibia landing awkwardly from a zip wire.

“The kids here get to play and progress. We have quite a tight group with 120 players across the seven sides — four ‘senior’ academy teams, including the reserves, and then under-13s to under-15s in ‘pre-formation’ — and smaller squads mean everyone is involved. The first-team players train at the same time, eat in the same building and mix with the younger players to offer advice. There’s proper communication.

“It’s a very strong process because the club believes in developing its own talent — it’s something that has always connected us with our fanbase. We aim to have 40-50 per cent of the senior squad made up of players from the academy.” Eight of the current first-team squad were associated with Toulouse’s youth system from the age of 12.

GettyImages-1240236790-scaled.jpg

Toulouse players celebrate their promotion back to Ligue 1 (Photo: Valentine Chapuis/AFP via Getty Images)

Like the first-team’s mental coach, Myaro, who was a highly decorated and two-time Olympian handball player for France, Lacour’s background is not in football. He initially excelled at judo, at which he competed to an elite level before spending almost 14 years working in rugby union. Eleven of those were as academy director at Clermont Auvergne, one of the powerhouses of the sport in France. “My role is similar here because we are educating players, as we were in rugby. We offer them an apprenticeship. The boys are learning through trial and error, and we are here to guide them. We feel we are innovative. Avant-gardist.

“But what is clear is this is the heart of the club, and where a playing style that is identifiably Toulousain is established.”

The senior team had offered 183 games to under-23 players over the 2020-21 campaign, more than any other side across France’s elite divisions. So, during the interview process for the new head coach last summer, it was made clear to candidates — initially handpicked according to the metrics put forward by the club’s head of data analysis — that they would have to mimic the academy’s playing style.

“People say Toulouse is the bull horn of Spain piercing into the south of France,” says Comolli. “It’s a very Latin city, and Latin football is highly technical, skilled and attacking. In the interview, I told (Montanier) that his playing style had to be aligned with what the academy was doing, not the other way around. ‘You have to adapt to us’.

“When he left the interview I turned to the head of data and the head of strategy and said he’d never come back. But his agent called within an hour and said Phillipe absolutely loved it.”

“What they wanted fitted in well with my own philosophy,” says Montanier, the former Nottingham Forest, Real Sociedad and Rennes manager who, at the start of a distinguished 20-year coaching career, took Boulogne from the third-tier Championnat National to Ligue 1. “A high press, controlling the game through possession with an emphasis on pushing forward — they were qualities I look to instil in my teams. It felt like a fresh project with a clear objective, to win Ligue 2, and we just had this momentum from the start. In the end, all the objectives the club set us, we met.

“We scored a record number of goals (82). We had the best passer in the division (the young Dutch midfielder Branco van den Boomen), the leading scorer (the Englishman Rhys Healey) and six players in the team of the year. We started the season playing in front of fewer than 5,000 fans and ended it beating Nimes in front of more than 28,000 as champions, and the city came out to celebrate with us at the Capitole. I don’t think that would have happened if we had won the league playing a more restricted style. It is because they identified with us.”

The club shop took as much money on the day of the Nimes game, when they launched their new home shirt for the 2022-23 season back in Ligue 1, as they had over the entirety of the miserable 2019-20 campaign. Montanier chooses not to mention the team also benefited from the coach of the year.

“The challenge now is to step up because we have one of the smallest budgets at the higher level and we play with the youngest squad — the average age is 23.5 — and the least experience,” he says. “But we have started well and that has boosted confidence. And, believe me, we will not be changing our style. We will not betray that work from last season which has seen so many fans buy season tickets. We are attacking this division, just as we attacked the last.”

Those numbers have scaled new heights. The club liaised extensively with fan groups over ticket pricing and, as of last Saturday, had sold more than 13,000 season tickets, a club record. Their previous best, set in 2007-08 after finishing third in the top division the year before, had been 7,500. Nearly three-quarters of this year’s sales were made to new supporters and 65 per cent of season ticket holders are below the age of 35, while sales to women have leapt from five to 18 per cent. That rise in interest should bode well for the development of the women’s team.

Antoine Gerard’s side were quietly successful in their own right last season, beating Monaco in a play-off to gain promotion to the second tier of the women’s game in France. “That was a huge step forward,” says the coach. “The club follow the same approach with the women as they do on the men’s side, promoting young players coached in the system rather than throwing money at everything. We could spend heavily and try and rise as quickly as possible into the top division, alongside Lyon and Paris Saint-Germain, but that would block the pathway for our youngsters into the first team. Instead, they rightly want us to use what we have intelligently and try to build, progressively, an ambitious project through our youth and women’s team.

“We feel very much part of the project at this club. Our players are used more and more at the heart of promotional operations. They do more and more media. The president (Comolli) is regularly at youth-team and first-team games. They’ve just put a bit more emphasis on the women’s game since coming in.”

There are 130 registered players within the women’s section, ranging from the ages of eight to 31, who train on-site and play their matches on the all-weather pitch next to the stadium. Average crowds were around 50 last season, but the club anticipate that figure will quadruple over the campaign. Their achievements have been celebrated by the men’s team, with every aspect of this club seemingly on the up.

Montanier’s team face a tough challenge in a division from which four clubs will be relegated this season, but his side have been enterprising to date.

They carved apart a sorry Troyes team in their first away fixture of term, winning 3-0 at a canter. Their home draws against Nice and Lorient have been missed opportunities. Naivety, perhaps inevitably, reared on Sunday with the sloppy concession of two penalties — one well saved by Maxime Dupe — and the late surrender of a lead, but their eagerness to pour forward, all overlapping full-backs and forward-thinking midfielders, is undeniable.

Their approach has already caught the imagination of the division, even if that has left Montanier anxious not to become “just the hit of the summer”.

“But we all feel we are part of something special that is happening,” adds Anthony Rouault, the young centre-half who has progressed from academy centre-half to mainstay of the first team over the past few years. “This is my club, the club my father supported and pushed me towards when I was a boy. In the past, when you were a Toulouse fan, you kept quiet. You did not talk too much about it. My uncle and my cousin were rugby fans and used to tell me that football sucked. But they are interested now.

“There is enthusiasm around the football club. The image of Le TeFeCe is transformed. To have contributed in a little way towards the success the club is now enjoying… well, that means everything. For me and my family. Because to wear this shirt is everything.”

Tomorrow, read “Inside a football club – part two: How you recruit”

(Top image: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic; photos: TeFeCe)

National

en cliquant sur le lien que j'ai mis, on a la même chose... :ninja:

simba

simba

Posté(e)
Posté(e) (modifié)
Il y a 3 heures, Debevinho a dit :

Rien n’indique que cette candidature soit retenue (au poste de directeur sportif ?), mais je dois reconnaître que le CV de ce monsieur me hype beaucoup moins que celui de Jaubert ou McFarlane. 
Si c’est le poste dont il s’agit, il faudrait quelqu’un avec un gros réseau dans le milieu. Mulhouse et Montluçon ça fait pas rêver quand même. 
Toutefois, son réseau dans le corps arbitrale peut être un atout. 

J’espère que ça n’augure pas un départ de Jaubert par contre. 

Attend c’est quand même le Tube de l été 

toujours dans la mouvance red bird 

on a pas eu Lolo Batlles , on aura sûrement pas Lola mais on aura peut être Lolli 

Modifié par simba
Hermes

Hermes

Posté(e)
Posté(e)
Il y a 3 heures, ClarkGaybeul a dit :

Un peu comme Milli-Vanilli :ninja:

Faudrait pas que le président nous fasse ses interviews en playback :ninaj:

  • Haha 1
taz

taz

Posté(e)
Posté(e)

https://theathletic.com/3526088/2022/08/25/transfers-data-market-toulouse/

 

La suite, je vous ai enlevé les photos pour moins charger le message

 

Inside a football club: Transfers with data, the extreme version

Dominic Fifield
22-27 minutes

Toulouse are newly restored to the French top flight. A club that appeared to be sinking without a trace as French domestic football shut down prematurely, paralysed by the pandemic, in the spring of 2020 is enjoying a renaissance on and off the pitch under American ownership and the chairmanship of Damien Comolli.

Philippe Montanier’s side, the youngest and least experienced team in the division, are still unbeaten after their first three matches and attacking life at the higher level with all the vim and vigour which saw them establish records for goalscoring while claiming Ligue 2 last term.

The Athletic was invited to spend time behind the scenes at a club reborn, talking to those who have instigated the upturn in fortunes and others who have embraced it. The first of two articles, Rising from the Ashes, detailed the story of that revival following the purchase of “Le TeFeCe” by RedBird Capital Partners, a United States-based investment fund valued at over $6billion (£5.1bn), a little over two years ago.

 

 

The second looks at the innovative techniques Toulouse have implemented, and the sporting partnerships they are forging, as they seek to maintain momentum and re-establish themselves at the top level.

Theirs is a bold approach, on and off the pitch. “But we’ll have no inferiority complex attacking Ligue 1, and by ‘attack’ I mean on the pitch and psychologically,” says Comolli, a former sporting director at Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool. “We are as good as the others. You’ll not hear me, the head coach or the players — from the youth section to the senior and women’s teams — saying our target is merely ‘to stay up’.

“For us, always, the sky is the limit.”

Toulouse benefited from some time to prepare for promotion. Montanier and his players built up a head of steam as last season reached its halfway point and were in the division’s top two since the third round of games. 

Yet, even with the benefit of bonus breathing space, their planning in the new year had to take into account the fact they would be fighting at a disadvantage from the outset at the higher level.

The distribution of television rights money in France leans heavily on a team’s performances over the preceding five years, a period in which they finished 18th, 16th and 20th in the top division before their two-season stint in the second tier. On top of that was the reality that, in March, the Ligue de Football Professionnel sold a 13 per cent stake worth €1.5billion (£1.3bn, $1.5bn) in the organisation’s new commercial company, which handles the selling of broadcast rights for Ligue 1, to the Luxembourg-based private equity firm, CVC Capital Partners.

“All our competitors are getting €33million each (from that arrangement),” says Comolli. “We get €16.5million as a promoted team. So not only do we have hurdles to vault with less television monies, but we only get half the money from CVC Capital, too. We have a clear path as to where we should be after three years in this division, by which time we should have increased merchandising, marketing and broadcasting revenues and will be in a better place to compete financially with the other clubs, barring Paris Saint-Germain.

“But, for now, we have to optimise what we do with transfer fees and wage bills. If we go after the same players as, say, Montpellier and Lorient, we won’t get those players. We have to do things differently. Our recruitment department spent hours, days, weeks working on a strategy to give us a competitive advantage and we follow that religiously.”

Comolli envisages the club ranks around 16th in terms of its wage bill in a division from which four teams will be relegated this season. The edge they possess stems from the self-imposed discipline of their recruitment operation, and the sheer depth of data they have generated to shape transfer policy and in-game approach — an attempt to make life in a volatile environment as risk-free as is feasible.

“We decide how we work and we won’t deviate from that just because an agent calls pushing a player to us, or if people think we should do things differently,” says Julien Demeaux, the club’s head of data who was one of the first appointments made by Toulouse following RedBird’s takeover in the summer of 2020. “There is a real discipline to our approach, and the ownership likes that. It all starts from the top.”

 

 

Demeaux is sitting in the boardroom flanked by Brendan MacFarlane, the club’s head of recruitment, and the senior scout Julia Arpizou. The latter, a former player in the youth and reserve teams at Toulouse, Bordeaux and Lyon, where she shared a dressing room with Megan Rapinoe, is the only one of the trio to have played football at a high level. Demeaux’s background is actually in aeronautics having spent a decade with Airbus and ATR in Toulouse, before “a fresh start” with a move to San Diego in 2015 found him working as a high school football and baseball coach.

“That’s where I first met people involved in high-performance areas, in baseball specifically, and began digging into how they use data to make decisions,” he says. “I started to educate myself in how we could translate that into football. I came back to France in 2018 and worked for a company developing the sporting side of data: in contact with football, rugby, basketball clubs. Then the pandemic set in.

“While we were all stuck at home, Seattle Sounders organised a virtual conference in which they ran a ‘data in football’ contest. I was at home, with nothing else to do, so I entered. You had to create a 10-slide deck based on soccer data and present it. Some people looked at season-long trends — you could do anything — but I did a pre-game analysis of FC Barcelona. They announced the result three days later: ‘And the winner is… Julien Demeaux in Toulouse, France’. My Twitter lit up. I didn’t have a clue what was going on given it was the middle of the night over here.

“But some people from RedBird were following the process. They were buying the club at the time, and you could almost hear them thinking: ‘Oh, he’s French. Wait, he lives in Toulouse!’. The following week, Damien contacted me and asked if I was available to talk.”

There are three million rows of data in Demeaux’s database, covering up to 70 leagues around the world and separate divisions within those domestic setups. They compile reports for the top six divisions in England, and go down to the third tier in France and Germany. If anyone was inclined to watch every match they have collated, back-to-back and with no breaks, it would take them 30 years. “My responsibility is to interpret that data science, accumulated by our partners, in a way that benefits our club. If I run my algorithm over those three million rows then, very quickly, I can tell you if a player is good at doing this or that.

“I can see way more than any human, and very quickly, through that data.”

That partner is Zelus Analytics, a sports data business founded by Luke Bornn — formerly head of analytics at Roma — in which RedBird owns a 50 per cent stake. It has a team of data scientists and engineers, the majority dotted around the US, who work for Toulouse whether accumulating raw numbers that will help the club analyse their own team, their opposition or the transfer market. “All the data infrastructure and science that helps us be efficient is done by Zelus,” says Demeaux. “They work with me to create the algorithms and with a data provider to gather the numbers, create the models.

“I will provide them with some feedback from the ground: what worked, what didn’t, where we need more insight. I need to be able to interpret the data and make the science work for us. When I’m here at the training ground and there is a question from Brendan, from Damien or from the coach, I have to be able to provide an answer, so I’m in constant dialogue with Zelus. Their brief is broader than just football but, on ‘soccer’, they have seven or eight full-timers, two of whom are based in Europe.”

Those same analysts will supply data for AC Milan once RedBird completes its purchase of the Serie A champions on September 6, for all that the Italians will presumably be targeting players who are Champions League ready. Regardless, that database will continue to benefit the French.

 

 

“We use data in a lot of different areas,” adds Comolli. “There is stuff we do internally in Toulouse, and stuff we ask Zelus to report back with. Julien then distributes that to the stakeholders in the club: the coaching staff, the academy, the fitness guys, the nutritionists, whoever. We used data when appointing Philippe Montanier as head coach in the summer of 2020, analysing what he had done with previous teams and determining whether he was a good fit for the style in which we want to play football here.

“So, yes, as a club, we are extremely data-driven.”

Over the summer, Demeaux analysed 600 player profiles and, from specifications drawn up by MacFarlane in conjunction with Comolli and Montanier, provided a more succinct list of suitable players to the recruitment department. “Data tells us ‘what’ the player does great or not,” says Demeaux. “Then the scouts give context to understand the ‘how’.”

Even the chronology here is at odds with many other football clubs, who apply the data to specific targets only once they have been pinpointed as potential purchases. “There is obviously scope for one of our scouts, if they do spot a player they like, to check how he scores on the data but, in general, we start with the numbers,” says MacFarlane. “The scouts are there to look at what the data says, and they go out and file their reports armed with that knowledge. So many other clubs use the data to back up what the scouts already believe, which just leaves you open to confirmation bias.

“The way we use what we have is more intelligent than the way lots of other clubs work. Even the scouting we undertake is not ‘old school’. We trust the data 100 per cent, but we just try to fill in any blind spots, things the data cannot pick up: a player’s tackling technique, perhaps; pace, sometimes, in terms of work off the ball. That’s something we used to worry about with centre-backs, but it’s a small issue in the process. We signed (Rasmus) Nicolaisen from the data, and he’s been outstanding.”

MacFarlane had been Brentford’s lead scout in France before joining Toulouse in March 2021 but, again, his entry into the industry is atypical. He studied French and International Relations at St Andrews University in his native Scotland, a course which involved a year as an English language assistant in a French secondary school. The student might have been dispatched anywhere in France. “Actually, I could even have been sent to Martinique, New Caledonia, Tahiti,” he says. “But I ended up in Niort where, in all honesty, there was very little to do outside work in the school.

“So, really to alleviate the boredom, I started following the local team in Ligue 2 and, as I got more into it, noted down players I was seeing who I felt might do a job for Celtic, the team I support, back home. Guys like Riyad Mahrez, N’Golo Kante, Diafra Sakho and Sofiane Boufal. It became an obsession and, when Niort were playing away, I’d watch whatever games were being broadcast. Almost inadvertently I built up a database of the best players in the division — something that might be quite useful to a club.”

Celtic blanked his unsolicited report on Tours’ Andy Delort — a regular scorer since for Toulouse, Montpellier and Nice in Ligue 1 — so, unperturbed, MacFarlane set up his own blog and wrote about those quietly making a mark in the second tier. That attracted interest from clubs in England, Scotland and the Netherlands to the extent that, once he had concluded his studies in 2016, his part-time scouting was eventually formalised by the late Rob Rowan — he, like MacFarlane, grew up in Kirkcaldy — who brought him in at Brentford.

The head of recruitment will go and meet prospective signings, armed with extensive background research, and their family members to determine whether a transfer is to be pursued. Toulouse do not have the financial margins to take unnecessary risks. “We found a player recently who looked amazing on the data but, when I did my research, there’d been drink driving and drug abuse and you realise you shouldn’t go near him,” says MacFarlane. “So we need to contextualise it.

“We’re meeting players to make sure it’s the right cultural fit for the club. Football’s maybe the only sector of the world where you might spend £15million to sign someone and not interview them. That’s crazy. It’s so absurd. But we do that. We interview the player. We speak to the family.”

Their successes, on a relatively tight budget, have been eye-catching. Rhys Healey, whose life became a series of loans at Cardiff City, was picked up after 18 relatively prolific months with MK Dons for around €500,000 and won the golden boot in Ligue 2 last term. He boasts 36 league goals in 58 appearances, for all that he will now be absent long-term after rupturing the cruciate knee ligament in his left knee in stoppage time at the end of Sunday’s 2-2 draw with Lorient.

Branco van den Boomen had spent most of his career in the second tier of Dutch football before signing for €350,000 in the summer of 2020. Last season he scored 12 times and provided a league record 21 assists. “There’s one phrase Julien uses all the time which I love: ‘Let other clubs make the mistakes,’” says MacFarlane. “That’s a good mantra. People look at us and wonder why we’re looking at players in the Second Division in the Netherlands. So let them make the mistake of not looking at the leagues we’re looking at. The longer they do that, the better it is for us.”

 

MacFarlane, Comolli and Demeaux meet formally once every fortnight to discuss strategy and progress. In the interim, the head of recruitment and his small team of scouts — he has two full-time scouts, including Arpizou, and one part-time — spend their weeks poring through games, sometimes in person but, more often than not, on-screen in one of the prefabs that flank the full-size academy training pitch. “We only watch two each per day, maximum,” says Arpizou, whose time as a left-back was curtailed by a serious ankle ligament injury. “You want to be fresh and focused when writing your reports, so Brendan has set that limit.

“I will watch the first team, under-19s and women’s team training while I’m working at the club, tracking the evolution of the players we have brought in. But it is also important to look at the progress of the youngsters coming through so that we never block their pathway into the first team by making unnecessary signings.”

Arpizou had initially embarked on a coaching career once her playing days were over, and was overseeing Toulouse’s under-15s in the women’s section when her input at the cultural questionnaire seminars run immediately after RedBird had bought the club impressed Comolli. “He said he wanted me in his scouting team instead,” she says. “I may be the only female scout in the men’s game in France. I certainly don’t know of any others. People are very open-minded here in the club, with men and women treated as equals. When I’m speaking with agents, it’s not been a problem. They see me as a scout, not as a gender.”

That ability to unearth gems in unlikely places has given Montanier’s first-team squad, even with its reliance on graduates from the academy, a distinctly international flavour. Toulouse’s matchday squad for the game against Lorient was made up of players representing 14 different countries from Denmark to Morocco, Australia to Japan. The on-field language used at training is an odd blend of French and English, with franglais clearly understood by all.

A head coach who once took a team of amateur players at Boulogne into the top division over five years takes it all in his stride. “People always say we’re the big boss of data, and that everything we do is down to numbers, but it is actually just another big decision-making aid,” says Montanier. “It helps us locate players and to know they will fit in with our style of play. But we need that other element, the human quality, to know he will integrate into our group. There’s a balance.

“But it is a huge help. We have objectives as a team, and the data shows us whether we are on course to meet them. We receive detailed reports after every game in each player’s performance, and once a month we meet with the head of data to look at a bigger, longer-term analysis to help plan ahead. In-game, it can help us improve set pieces, throw-ins and to pinpoint weaknesses in our opponents.”

In the season before the head coach’s arrival, Demeaux’s analysis ahead of a fixture against Paris FC suggested the visiting goalkeeper, Vincent Demarconnay, struggled to react to shots pinged low to his right. Stijn Spierings, another Dutchman, recalled the pre-match heads up and duly scored the game’s only goal with a shot in Demarconnay’s perceived blind spot midway through the second half. The head of data received his own round of applause in the dressing room post-match.

But does he allow himself the luxury of feeling proud when the players he has helped pick excel?

 

 

“That’s an emotional thing,” says Demeaux. “In this job, when it comes to making decisions, I’m trying to be as cold as possible. To stick to the process. The data tells me one thing. The scouts provide context. Whether a player should sign for us should never be an emotional question, so I try and keep that separation in there.

“It’s tough. This is still a team sport. An individual player like Branco (van den Boomen) needs those around him to be performing if he is to show his best, too. So I take more pleasure in that — when the collective operates smoothly. The pride comes from that. The long-term vision, the discipline we have. Look, I was happy at the end of last season. So there probably was some pride. For all of us…”

“I wasn’t here when Branco signed but, if I were Julien, I would be proud,” interrupts Arpizou. “No one knew this player. Even coaches in the Netherlands think they missed this player. It’s the same with Spierings.”

“That’s one of the best feelings,” adds MacFarlane. “When you speak to people in those countries and they ask, ‘Wow, how did we miss that guy?’ But, for me, the thing that makes me proudest is when you see kids with the name of the player you identified on the back of their shirts. That is something else.”

Those replica jerseys are increasingly visible on the streets of Toulouse these days where, only recently, locals might have sported the colours of Paris Saint-Germain, Marseille or, most likely of all, Stade Toulousain.

This city has a reputation for being a rugby stronghold, and with good reason. Though Toulouse FC can point to three Ligue 2 titles and victory in the 1957 Coupe de France final — a 6-3 trouncing of Angers in a French fixture, uniquely, refereed by an Englishman — Stade Toulousain have been a dominant force in French and European club rugby union. They are five-time European Champions Cup winners and have won the domestic league, the Top 14, 21 times in their history. They won both of those competitions in 2021 while Toulouse FC were being beaten in the Ligue 2 play-offs.

Montpellier may have claimed their crown in June, but Ugo Mola’s team remain a powerhouse of the sport, playing a fast, carefree style of rugby that is lapped up by their fanbase. They have long been Toulouse’s sporting success story.

When one acknowledges that US Colomiers Rugby play in the French second tier, the Prod D2, and Toulouse Olympique, the local rugby league side, are currently competing for the first time in the Super League — admittedly, their debut season will culminate in relegation — then it might be easy to assume the football club would struggle to find a niche in the city.

The reality is somewhat different. “There are those three rugby clubs, then the city’s volleyball and handball teams are in their top divisions, the women’s volleyball side are in the top division and now so are Toulouse FC,” says Comolli. “During COVID-19 we all came together and met local government over grants and, in that process, a very strong bond developed between the seven clubs that probably had not existed previously.

“We liaise constantly, swapping ideas and spending time at each other’s clubs, learning from each other, whether in the marketing or media departments, data or sports science, and have created a dynamic of communication at chairman level and below. Our respective coaches meet every month at a different venue. One month they can talk about data. Last month they met around ‘return to play’ — how you bring a player back from injury as quickly as possible. They share ideas constantly. There is a spirit of collaboration.”

The football club president is actually due to have lunch with his opposite number at Stade Toulousain, Didier Lacroix, once he has finished speaking to The Athletic. Lacroix has described their relationship as “very constructive”. “We do things intelligently rather than trying to get in each other’s way,” he said.

His team play most of their games at their Stade Ernest-Wallon but the municipality, which owns the bigger Stadium de Toulouse, allows Stade Toulousain to play six fixtures at the ground on the Garonne each season. At their final game of the 2021-22 campaign, the rugby club paraded their counterparts from football, as Ligue 2 champions, on the pitch at half-time. Lacroix has also requested 30 tickets for the Virage Brice Taton, in among Toulouse’s ultras group ‘The Indians’, for the Ligue 1 fixture against PSG on 31 August.

His players intend to wear t-shirts declaring “Stade Toulousain supports Toulouse FC”.

“And remember they have the Leo Messi of the rugby world in their team, too,” says Comolli. “These are some of the best in the world.” He was probably referring to the France captain and scrum-half, Antoine Dupont, though it says much about Stade Toulousain’s strength in depth that he could arguably have also meant the young fly-half, Romain Ntamack.

“We see a lot of synergies, and a lot of areas where we can work together,” adds the football club president. “We have sold tickets for each other’s matches and are even thinking about appointing staff to work at both clubs, in IT particularly. The balance is good. People say the city is rugby, probably, but the region is football. There are six times more football clubs than rugby clubs in the region, and six times more licensed players. So football is very much engrained here, too.

“All sports can thrive in this city. There is the appetite. The positivity we have experienced here at Toulouse has touched us all, and made us more determined than ever to maintain it. We are at the table we deserve to be at. Where we were before, in Ligue 2, was wrong. Now it is about maintaining this momentum and establishing ourselves back in the top division.

“The hard work never stops.”

  • Top ! 1
Trinita

Trinita

Posté(e)
Posté(e)

Excellents articles, vraiment.

La phrase "But it is also important to look at the progress of the youngsters coming through so that we never block their pathway into the first team by making unnecessary signings." confirme qu'ils font confiance aux jeunes du centre de formation et je suis de plus en plus certain qu'il n'y aura probablement que peu ou pas du tout d'arrivées cette fin de mercato.

ClarkGaybeul

ClarkGaybeul

Posté(e)
Posté(e)
il y a 11 minutes, Trinita a dit :

Excellents articles, vraiment.

La phrase "But it is also important to look at the progress of the youngsters coming through so that we never block their pathway into the first team by making unnecessary signings." confirme qu'ils font confiance aux jeunes du centre de formation et je suis de plus en plus certain qu'il n'y aura probablement que peu ou pas du tout d'arrivées cette fin de mercato.

Peu (2 joueurs max) VS pas du tout d’arrivées ce sont les deux options restantes pour le club…. 
Tu auras effectivement raison ! :ninja:

  • C’est un message populaire.
Zorglub

Zorglub

Posté(e)
  • C’est un message populaire.
Posté(e) (modifié)

Pour les non anglopgones et les paresseux, ce devrait être mieux que Googletrad :

 

Toulouse vient de retrouver l'élite du football français. Un club qui semblait sombrer sans laisser de trace alors que le football national français s'est arrêté prématurément, paralysé par la pandémie, au printemps 2020, connaît une renaissance sur et en dehors du terrain sous la direction de propriétaires américains et de Damien Comolli.

L'équipe de Philippe Montanier, la plus jeune et la moins expérimentée de la division, est toujours invaincue après ses trois premiers matches et attaque la vie au niveau supérieur avec toute la vigueur qui lui a permis d'établir des records de buts en Ligue 2 la saison dernière.

L'Athletic a été invité à passer du temps dans les coulisses d'un club renaissant, à discuter avec ceux qui ont été à l'origine de ce retournement de situation et ceux qui l'ont adopté. Le premier des deux articles, Renaître des cendres, détaillait l'histoire de cette renaissance suite à l'achat du TeFeCe par RedBird Capital Partners, un fonds d'investissement basé aux États-Unis et évalué à plus de 6 milliards de dollars (5,1 milliards de livres), il y a un peu plus de deux ans.



La deuxième partie s'intéresse aux techniques innovantes que Toulouse a mises en place et aux partenariats sportifs qu'il est en train de nouer, dans le but de maintenir sa dynamique et de s'établir à nouveau au plus haut niveau.

Leur approche est audacieuse, sur et en dehors du terrain. "Mais nous n'aurons pas de complexe d'infériorité en attaquant la Ligue 1, et par "attaquer" je veux dire sur le terrain et psychologiquement", affirme Comolli, ancien directeur sportif de Tottenham Hotspur et Liverpool. "Nous sommes aussi bons que les autres. Vous ne m'entendrez pas, pas plus que l'entraîneur principal ou les joueurs - de la section des jeunes aux équipes seniors et féminines - dire que notre objectif est simplement de rester en haut.

"Pour nous, toujours, le ciel est la limite".

Toulouse a bénéficié d'un certain temps pour préparer la promotion. Montanier et ses joueurs ont pris de la vitesse à mi-parcours de la saison dernière et étaient dans les deux premiers de la division dès la troisième journée.

Pourtant, même en bénéficiant de ce délai supplémentaire, ils ont dû tenir compte, dans leur planification de la nouvelle année, du fait qu'ils seraient désavantagés dès le départ au niveau supérieur.

La répartition des droits télévisés en France repose en grande partie sur les performances de l'équipe au cours des cinq années précédentes, période au cours de laquelle elle a terminé 18e, 16e et 20e en première division avant son passage de deux saisons en deuxième division. En outre, en mars, la Ligue de football professionnel a vendu à la société de capital-investissement CVC Capital Partners, basée au Luxembourg, une participation de 13 % d'une valeur de 1,5 milliard d'euros (1,3 milliard de livres sterling, 1,5 milliard de dollars) dans la nouvelle société commerciale de l'organisation, qui gère la vente des droits de diffusion de la Ligue 1.

"Tous nos concurrents reçoivent 33 millions d'euros chacun (grâce à cet accord)", a déclaré M. Comolli. "Nous recevons 16,5 millions d'euros en tant qu'équipe promue. Donc non seulement nous avons des obstacles à franchir avec moins d'argent de la télévision, mais nous ne recevons que la moitié de l'argent de CVC Capital, aussi. Nous avons une idée précise de ce que nous devrions faire après trois ans dans cette division. À ce moment-là, nous devrions avoir augmenté nos revenus de merchandising, de marketing et de diffusion et nous serons en meilleure position pour rivaliser financièrement avec les autres clubs, à l'exception du Paris Saint-Germain.

"Mais, pour l'instant, nous devons optimiser ce que nous faisons avec les frais de transfert et les salaires. Si nous recherchons les mêmes joueurs que, par exemple, Montpellier et Lorient, nous ne les aurons pas. Nous devons faire les choses différemment. Notre département de recrutement a passé des heures, des jours, des semaines à travailler sur une stratégie pour nous donner un avantage compétitif et nous la suivons religieusement."

Comolli envisage que le club se classe autour de la 16e place en termes de masse salariale dans une division dont quatre équipes seront reléguées cette saison. L'avantage qu'ils possèdent provient de la discipline qu'ils s'imposent dans leur opération de recrutement, et de la profondeur des données qu'ils ont générées pour façonner leur politique de transfert et leur approche du jeu - une tentative de rendre la vie dans un environnement volatile aussi sans risque que possible.

"Nous décidons de la manière dont nous travaillons et nous ne nous en écarterons pas simplement parce qu'un agent nous appelle pour nous proposer un joueur, ou si des personnes pensent que nous devrions faire les choses différemment", explique Julien Demeaux, le responsable des données du club, qui a été l'une des premières nominations effectuées par Toulouse après le rachat par RedBird à l'été 2020. "Il y a une vraie discipline dans notre approche, et la propriété aime ça. Tout commence par le haut."


Demeaux est assis dans la salle de réunion, flanqué de Brendan MacFarlane, le responsable du recrutement du club, et de la scout senior Julia Arpizou. Cette dernière, ancienne joueuse des équipes de jeunes et de réserve de Toulouse, Bordeaux et Lyon, où elle a partagé le vestiaire avec Megan Rapinoe, est la seule du trio à avoir joué au football à un haut niveau. La formation de Demeaux est en fait dans l'aéronautique, ayant passé une décennie chez Airbus et ATR à Toulouse, avant qu'un "nouveau départ" avec un déménagement à San Diego en 2015 ne le trouve en tant qu'entraîneur de football et de baseball dans un lycée.

"C'est là que j'ai rencontré pour la première fois des personnes impliquées dans des domaines de haute performance, dans le baseball en particulier, et que j'ai commencé à creuser la façon dont ils utilisent les données pour prendre des décisions", dit-il. "J'ai commencé à m'éduquer sur la façon dont nous pourrions traduire cela dans le football. Je suis revenu en France en 2018 et j'ai travaillé pour une entreprise qui développait le côté sportif des données : en contact avec des clubs de football, de rugby, de basket. Puis la pandémie s'est installée.

"Alors que nous étions tous coincés à la maison, les Seattle Sounders ont organisé une conférence virtuelle au cours de laquelle ils ont organisé un concours de "données dans le football". J'étais chez moi, je n'avais rien d'autre à faire, alors je me suis inscrit. Il s'agissait de créer une présentation de 10 diapositives basée sur des données relatives au football et de la présenter. Certains ont examiné les tendances sur toute la saison - on pouvait faire n'importe quoi - mais j'ai fait une analyse d'avant-match du FC Barcelone. Ils ont annoncé le résultat trois jours plus tard : "Et le gagnant est... Julien Demeaux à Toulouse, France". Mon Twitter s'est allumé. Je n'avais aucune idée de ce qui se passait, car c'était le milieu de la nuit ici.

"Mais des gens de RedBird suivaient le processus. Ils achetaient le club à l'époque, et on pouvait presque les entendre penser : "Oh, il est français. Attendez, il vit à Toulouse !". La semaine suivante, Damien m'a contacté et m'a demandé si j'étais disponible pour discuter."

La base de données de Demeaux compte trois millions de lignes de données, couvrant jusqu'à 70 ligues dans le monde et des divisions distinctes au sein de ces structures nationales. Ils compilent des rapports pour les six premières divisions en Angleterre, et descendent jusqu'au troisième niveau en France et en Allemagne. Si quelqu'un était enclin à regarder tous les matchs qu'ils ont rassemblés, dos à dos et sans pause, il lui faudrait 30 ans. "Ma responsabilité est d'interpréter cette science des données, accumulée par nos partenaires, d'une manière qui profite à notre club. Si je fais tourner mon algorithme sur ces trois millions de lignes, alors, très rapidement, je peux vous dire si un joueur est bon à faire ceci ou cela.

"Je peux voir bien plus que n'importe quel humain, et très rapidement, à travers ces données."

Ce partenaire est Zelus Analytics, une entreprise de données sportives fondée par Luke Bornn - anciennement responsable de l'analyse à la Roma - dont RedBird détient 50 % des parts. Elle dispose d'une équipe de scientifiques et d'ingénieurs spécialisés dans les données, dont la majorité se trouve aux États-Unis, qui travaillent pour Toulouse, que ce soit pour accumuler des chiffres bruts qui aideront le club à analyser sa propre équipe, son adversaire ou le marché des transferts. "Toute l'infrastructure de données et la science qui nous aide à être efficaces sont réalisées par Zelus", explique Demeaux. "Ils travaillent avec moi pour créer les algorithmes et avec un fournisseur de données pour rassembler les chiffres, créer les modèles.

"Je leur fournirai un retour d'information du terrain : ce qui a fonctionné, ce qui n'a pas fonctionné, les domaines dans lesquels nous avons besoin de plus d'informations. Je dois être capable d'interpréter les données et de faire travailler la science pour nous. Lorsque je suis sur le terrain d'entraînement et que Brendan, Damien ou l'entraîneur me pose une question, je dois être en mesure d'y répondre. Leur mission ne se limite pas au football mais, pour ce qui est du "soccer", ils ont sept ou huit personnes à plein temps, dont deux sont basées en Europe."

Ces mêmes analystes fourniront des données à l'AC Milan une fois que RedBird aura finalisé l'achat des champions de Serie A le 6 septembre, même si l'on peut supposer que les Italiens viseront des joueurs prêts pour la Ligue des champions. Quoi qu'il en soit, cette base de données continuera de profiter aux Français.


"Nous utilisons les données dans beaucoup de domaines différents", ajoute Comolli. "Il y a des choses que nous faisons en interne à Toulouse, et des choses que nous demandons à Zelus de nous rapporter. Julien les distribue ensuite aux parties prenantes du club : les entraîneurs, l'académie, les préparateurs physiques, les nutritionnistes, etc. Nous avons utilisé des données lors de la nomination de Philippe Montanier comme entraîneur principal à l'été 2020, en analysant ce qu'il avait fait avec les équipes précédentes et en déterminant s'il correspondait bien au style dans lequel nous voulons jouer au football ici.

"Donc, oui, en tant que club, nous sommes extrêmement axés sur les données".

Au cours de l'été, Demeaux a analysé 600 profils de joueurs et, à partir d'un cahier des charges établi par MacFarlane en collaboration avec Comolli et Montanier, a fourni une liste plus succincte de joueurs adéquats au département du recrutement. Les données nous disent "ce que" le joueur fait de bien ou de moins bien", explique Demeaux. "Ensuite, les recruteurs donnent le contexte pour comprendre le 'comment'".
 

Même la chronologie ici est en contradiction avec celle de nombreux autres clubs de football, qui n'appliquent les données à des cibles spécifiques qu'une fois qu'elles ont été identifiées comme des achats potentiels. "Il est évidemment possible pour l'un de nos recruteurs, s'il repère un joueur qui lui plaît, de vérifier son score sur les données, mais, en général, nous commençons par les chiffres", explique MacFarlane. "Les recruteurs sont là pour regarder ce que disent les données, et ils partent remplir leurs rapports armés de ces connaissances. Beaucoup d'autres clubs utilisent les données pour confirmer ce que les recruteurs pensent déjà, ce qui ouvre la porte à un biais de confirmation.

"La façon dont nous utilisons ce que nous avons est plus intelligente que la façon dont beaucoup d'autres clubs travaillent. Même le scouting que nous entreprenons n'est pas "old school". Nous faisons confiance aux données à 100 %, mais nous essayons de combler les angles morts, les choses que les données ne peuvent pas détecter : la technique de tacle d'un joueur, par exemple ; la vitesse, parfois, en termes de travail en dehors du ballon. C'est quelque chose qui nous préoccupait avec les défenseurs centraux, mais c'est un petit problème dans le processus. Nous avons fait signer (Rasmus) Nicolaisen à partir des données, et il a été remarquable".

MacFarlane avait été le principal recruteur de Brentford en France avant de rejoindre Toulouse en mars 2021 mais, là encore, son entrée dans le secteur est atypique. Il a étudié le français et les relations internationales à l'université de St Andrews, dans son Écosse natale, un cursus qui impliquait une année en tant qu'assistant d'anglais dans un lycée français. L'étudiant aurait pu être envoyé n'importe où en France. "En fait, j'aurais même pu être envoyé en Martinique, en Nouvelle-Calédonie, à Tahiti", dit-il. "Mais je me suis retrouvé à Niort où, en toute honnêteté, il y avait très peu à faire en dehors du travail dans l'école.

"Alors, pour éviter de m'ennuyer, j'ai commencé à suivre l'équipe locale en Ligue 2 et, au fur et à mesure que je m'y intéressais, j'ai noté les joueurs que je voyais et qui, selon moi, pourraient faire l'affaire au Celtic, l'équipe que je soutiens, chez moi. Des gars comme Riyad Mahrez, N'Golo Kante, Diafra Sakho et Sofiane Boufal. C'est devenu une obsession et, lorsque Niort jouait à l'extérieur, je regardais tous les matchs qui étaient diffusés. Presque par inadvertance, je me suis constitué une base de données des meilleurs joueurs de la division - quelque chose qui pourrait être très utile à un club".

Le Celtic a refusé son rapport non sollicité sur le Tourangeau Andy Delort - un buteur régulier depuis pour Toulouse, Montpellier et Nice en Ligue 1 - alors, imperturbable, MacFarlane a créé son propre blog et écrit sur ceux qui font tranquillement leur marque en deuxième division. Cela a suscité l'intérêt de clubs d'Angleterre, d'Écosse et des Pays-Bas, à tel point qu'une fois ses études terminées en 2016, son activité de scout à temps partiel a été officialisée par le regretté Rob Rowan - qui, comme MacFarlane, a grandi à Kirkcaldy - qui l'a engagé à Brentford.

Le responsable du recrutement ira à la rencontre des recrues potentielles, armé de recherches approfondies, et des membres de leur famille pour déterminer si un transfert doit être poursuivi. Toulouse n'a pas les marges financières pour prendre des risques inutiles. "Nous avons récemment trouvé un joueur qui semblait incroyable sur les données mais, lorsque j'ai fait mes recherches, il avait conduit en état d'ébriété et consommé des drogues et vous réalisez que vous ne devriez pas l'approcher", explique MacFarlane. "Nous devons donc le replacer dans son contexte.

"Nous rencontrons les joueurs pour nous assurer qu'il s'agit de la bonne culture pour le club. Le football est peut-être le seul secteur du monde où l'on peut dépenser 15 millions de livres pour recruter quelqu'un et ne pas l'interviewer. C'est fou. C'est tellement absurde. Mais nous le faisons. Nous interviewons le joueur. Nous parlons à la famille."

Leurs succès, avec un budget relativement serré, ont attiré l'attention. Rhys Healey, dont la vie s'est résumée à une série de prêts à Cardiff City, a été récupéré après 18 mois relativement prolifiques avec MK Dons pour environ 500 000 € et a remporté le Soulier d'or en Ligue 2 la saison dernière. Il compte 36 buts en championnat en 58 apparitions, mais il sera désormais absent à long terme après s'être rompu le ligament croisé du genou gauche dans le temps additionnel du match nul 2-2 contre Lorient dimanche.

Branco van den Boomen avait passé la majeure partie de sa carrière en deuxième division du football néerlandais avant de signer pour 350 000 euros à l'été 2020. La saison dernière, il a marqué 12 fois et fourni 21 passes décisives, un record en championnat. " Il y a une phrase que Julien utilise tout le temps et que j'adore : " Laissez les autres clubs faire les erreurs ", dit MacFarlane. "C'est un bon mantra. Les gens nous regardent et se demandent pourquoi nous nous intéressons à des joueurs de deuxième division aux Pays-Bas. Qu'ils fassent donc l'erreur de ne pas regarder les ligues que nous regardons. Plus longtemps ils le feront, mieux ce sera pour nous."

MacFarlane, Comolli et Demeaux se réunissent officiellement tous les quinze jours pour discuter de la stratégie et des progrès. Entre-temps, le responsable du recrutement et sa petite équipe de recruteurs - il en a deux à plein temps, dont Arpizou, et un à temps partiel - passent leurs semaines à regarder des matches, parfois en personne, mais le plus souvent sur écran dans l'un des préfabriqués qui bordent le terrain d'entraînement grandeur nature de l'académie. "Nous n'en regardons que deux par jour, au maximum", explique Arpizou, dont la carrière d'arrière gauche a été interrompue par une grave blessure aux ligaments de la cheville. "Vous voulez être frais et concentré lorsque vous écrivez vos rapports, donc Brendan a fixé cette limite.

 

"Je regarderai l'équipe première, les moins de 19 ans et l'équipe féminine s'entraîner pendant que je travaille au club, pour suivre l'évolution des joueurs que nous avons recrutés. Mais il est également important de regarder les progrès des jeunes qui arrivent afin de ne jamais bloquer leur chemin vers l'équipe première en faisant des recrutements inutiles."

 

Une fois sa carrière de joueuse terminée, Arpizou s'était lancée dans une carrière d'entraîneur et supervisait les moins de 15 ans de Toulouse dans la section féminine lorsque sa contribution aux séminaires du questionnaire culturel organisés immédiatement après le rachat du club par RedBird a impressionné Comolli. "Il m'a dit qu'il voulait que je fasse partie de son équipe de scouts", dit-elle. "Je suis peut-être la seule femme scout dans le football masculin en France. Je n'en connais certainement pas d'autres. Les gens sont très ouverts d'esprit ici au club, les hommes et les femmes sont traités sur un pied d'égalité. Lorsque je parle avec des agents, cela ne pose aucun problème. Ils me voient comme un éclaireur, pas comme un genre".

 

Cette capacité à dénicher des perles dans des endroits improbables a donné à l'équipe première de Montanier, même si elle s'appuie sur des diplômés de l'académie, une saveur nettement internationale. L'équipe de Toulouse pour le match contre Lorient était composée de joueurs représentant 14 pays différents, du Danemark au Maroc, de l'Australie au Japon. La langue utilisée sur le terrain lors des entraînements est un étrange mélange de français et d'anglais, le franglais étant clairement compris par tous.

 

L'entraîneur principal, qui a fait monter une équipe de joueurs amateurs de Boulogne en première division pendant cinq ans, ne se laisse pas démonter. "Les gens disent toujours que nous sommes le grand patron des données, et que tout ce que nous faisons se résume à des chiffres, mais c'est en fait juste une autre grande aide à la décision", dit Montanier. "Cela nous aide à localiser les joueurs et à savoir qu'ils s'adapteront à notre style de jeu. Mais nous avons besoin de cet autre élément, la qualité humaine, pour savoir qu'il s'intégrera à notre groupe. Il y a un équilibre à trouver.

 

"Mais il est d'une aide précieuse. Nous avons des objectifs en tant qu'équipe, et les données nous montrent si nous sommes sur la bonne voie pour les atteindre. Nous recevons des rapports détaillés après chaque match sur les performances de chaque joueur, et une fois par mois, nous nous réunissons avec le responsable des données pour examiner une analyse plus large, à plus long terme, pour nous aider à planifier. En jeu, cela peut nous aider à améliorer les coups de pied arrêtés, les remises en jeu et à repérer les faiblesses de nos adversaires."

 

La saison précédant l'arrivée de l'entraîneur principal, l'analyse de Demeaux avant un match contre le Paris FC a suggéré que le gardien visiteur, Vincent Demarconnay, avait du mal à réagir aux tirs à ras de terre sur sa droite. Stijn Spierings, un autre Néerlandais, s'est souvenu de l'analyse d'avant-match et a marqué l'unique but du match d'un tir dans l'angle mort de Demarconnay au milieu de la seconde période. Le responsable des données a reçu ses propres applaudissements dans le vestiaire après le match.

 

Mais s'autorise-t-il le luxe de se sentir fier lorsque les joueurs qu'il a aidé à sélectionner excellent ?

 

"C'est une question d'émotion", déclare Demeaux. "Dans ce métier, quand il s'agit de prendre des décisions, j'essaie d'être le plus froid possible. De m'en tenir au processus. Les données me disent une chose. Les scouts fournissent le contexte. La question de savoir si un joueur devrait signer pour nous ne devrait jamais être une question émotionnelle, donc j'essaie de maintenir cette séparation.

 

"C'est difficile. C'est toujours un sport d'équipe. Un joueur individuel comme Branco (van den Boomen) a besoin que son entourage soit performant pour pouvoir donner le meilleur de lui-même. Je prends donc plus de plaisir à cela - lorsque le collectif fonctionne bien. La fierté vient de là. La vision à long terme, la discipline que nous avons. Ecoutez, j'étais heureux à la fin de la saison dernière. Donc il y avait probablement une certaine fierté. Pour nous tous..."

 

"Je n'étais pas là quand Branco a signé mais, si j'étais Julien, je serais fier", interrompt Arpizou. "Personne ne connaissait ce joueur. Même les entraîneurs aux Pays-Bas pensent qu'ils ont manqué ce joueur. C'est la même chose avec Spierings."

 

"C'est l'un des meilleurs sentiments", ajoute MacFarlane. "Lorsque vous parlez aux gens dans ces pays et qu'ils vous demandent : "Wow, comment avons-nous pu manquer ce gars-là ?". Mais, pour moi, ce qui me rend le plus fier, c'est quand vous voyez des enfants avec le nom du joueur que vous avez identifié au dos de leur maillot. C'est quelque chose d'autre".

 

 

 

Ces répliques de maillots sont de plus en plus visibles dans les rues de Toulouse où, il y a peu de temps encore, les habitants portaient les couleurs du Paris Saint-Germain, de Marseille ou, plus probablement, du Stade toulousain.

 

Cette ville a la réputation d'être un bastion du rugby, et ce à juste titre. Bien que le Toulouse FC puisse se prévaloir de trois titres de Ligue 2 et d'une victoire en finale de la Coupe de France en 1957 - une victoire 6-3 sur Angers dans un match français, uniquement arbitré par un Anglais - le Stade Toulousain a été une force dominante dans le rugby français et européen. Le Stade Toulousain a été une force dominante dans le rugby français et européen. Il a remporté cinq fois la Coupe d'Europe des champions et a gagné le championnat national, le Top 14, 21 fois dans son histoire. Ils ont remporté ces deux compétitions en 2021, alors que le Toulouse FC était battu lors des barrages de la Ligue 2.

 

Montpellier a peut-être remporté sa couronne en juin, mais l'équipe d'Ugo Mola reste une puissance du sport, jouant un style de rugby rapide et insouciant qui est adoré par sa base de fans. Ils sont depuis longtemps la success story sportive de Toulouse.

 

Lorsque l'on sait que l'US Colomiers Rugby joue en Prod D2, le deuxième échelon français, et que le Toulouse Olympique, l'équipe locale de rugby à XV, participe pour la première fois à la Super League - il est vrai que sa première saison se soldera par une relégation - il est facile de penser que le club de football aura du mal à trouver sa place dans la ville.

 

La réalité est quelque peu différente. "Il y a ces trois clubs de rugby, puis les équipes de volley-ball et de handball de la ville sont dans leurs divisions supérieures, l'équipe féminine de volley-ball est en première division et maintenant le Toulouse FC aussi", dit Comolli. "Pendant le COVID-19, nous nous sommes tous réunis et avons rencontré les autorités locales pour obtenir des subventions et, au cours de ce processus, un lien très fort s'est développé entre les sept clubs, qui n'existait probablement pas auparavant.

 

"Nous sommes en contact permanent, échangeant des idées et passant du temps dans nos clubs respectifs, apprenant les uns des autres, que ce soit dans les départements marketing ou médias, données ou sciences du sport, et nous avons créé une dynamique de communication au niveau du président et en dessous. Nos entraîneurs respectifs se rencontrent chaque mois dans un lieu différent. Un mois, ils peuvent parler des données. Le mois dernier, ils se sont réunis autour du " retour au jeu " - comment ramener un joueur après une blessure le plus rapidement possible. Ils partagent constamment leurs idées. Il y a un esprit de collaboration".

 

Le président du club de football doit en fait déjeuner avec son homologue du Stade toulousain, Didier Lacroix, une fois qu'il aura fini de parler à The Athletic. Lacroix a qualifié leur relation de "très constructive". "Nous faisons les choses intelligemment plutôt que d'essayer de nous mettre des bâtons dans les roues", a-t-il déclaré.

 

Son équipe joue la plupart de ses matchs au Stade Ernest-Wallon, mais la municipalité, qui possède le Stadium de Toulouse, plus grand, autorise le Stade toulousain à jouer six rencontres sur le terrain de la Garonne chaque saison. Lors de leur dernier match de la campagne 2021-22, le club de rugby a fait défiler ses homologues du football, champions de Ligue 2, sur le terrain à la mi-temps. Lacroix a également demandé 30 billets pour le Virage Brice Taton, au sein du groupe d'ultras toulousains "Les Indiens", pour le match de Ligue 1 contre le PSG le 31 août.

 

Ses joueurs ont l'intention de porter des t-shirts déclarant "Le Stade Toulousain soutient le Toulouse FC".

 

"Et n'oubliez pas qu'ils ont le Leo Messi du monde du rugby dans leur équipe, aussi", dit Comolli. "Ce sont quelques-uns des meilleurs joueurs du monde". Il faisait probablement référence au capitaine et demi de mêlée français, Antoine Dupont, mais le fait qu'il ait pu également parler du jeune demi d'ouverture Romain Ntamack en dit long sur la force de frappe du Stade toulousain.

 

"Nous voyons beaucoup de synergies, et beaucoup de domaines où nous pouvons travailler ensemble", ajoute le président du club de football. "Nous avons vendu des billets pour les matchs de l'autre et nous pensons même à nommer du personnel pour travailler dans les deux clubs, dans l'informatique notamment. L'équilibre est bon. On dit que la ville est rugby, sans doute, mais la région est football. Il y a six fois plus de clubs de football que de rugby dans la région, et six fois plus de joueurs licenciés. Le football est donc bien ancré ici aussi.

 

"Tous les sports peuvent prospérer dans cette ville. L'appétit est là. La positivité que nous avons connue ici à Toulouse nous a tous touchés, et nous a rendus plus déterminés que jamais à la maintenir. Nous sommes à la table où nous méritons d'être. Là où nous étions avant, en Ligue 2, nous avions tort. Maintenant, il s'agit de maintenir cet élan et et nous établir de nouveau en première division.

 

"Le dur labeur ne s'arrête jamais."

Modifié par Zorglub
  • Top ! 13
Trinita

Trinita

Posté(e)
Posté(e)
Il y a 1 heure, ClarkGaybeul a dit :

Peu (2 joueurs max) VS pas du tout d’arrivées ce sont les deux options restantes pour le club…. 
Tu auras effectivement raison ! :ninja:

C'est surtout par réaction à ceux qui pensent qu'on va encore faire venir 4 ou 5 joueurs avant la fin du mercato.;)

Casimir

Casimir

Posté(e)
Posté(e)
il y a 36 minutes, Trinita a dit :

C'est surtout par réaction à ceux qui pensent qu'on va encore faire venir 4 ou 5 joueurs avant la fin du mercato.;)

Je pense qu’on ne recrutera plus. Ou maxi un joueur. 

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Invité
Répondre à ce sujet…

×   Collé en tant que texte enrichi.   Coller en tant que texte brut à la place

  Seulement 75 émoticônes maximum sont autorisées.

×   Votre lien a été automatiquement intégré.   Afficher plutôt comme un lien

×   Votre contenu précédent a été rétabli.   Vider l’éditeur

×   Vous ne pouvez pas directement coller des images. Envoyez-les depuis votre ordinateur ou insérez-les depuis une URL.

×
Aller sur la liste des sujets
×
×
  • Créer...

Information importante

Nous avons placé des cookies sur votre appareil pour aider à améliorer ce site. Vous pouvez choisir d’ajuster vos paramètres de cookie, sinon nous supposerons que vous êtes d’accord pour continuer.