A supremacy in peril?

Original text in French by Sylvain Sro, translated by Puchkin

Once again elected the best Academy in France, Stade Rennes is reaping the fruits of years of work, with the massive integration of quality young players into its professional squad. But the award should not let the club forget that behind, the competition is improving.

After 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010, Stade Rennes has won again clinched the title of best academy in France at the end of this season 2010-2011. A reward which certainly isn’t surprising, considering the number of players trained at the club who completed a professional squad heavily rejuvenated by Pierre Dréossi and Frédéric Antonetti last summer.
Mainly focused on the chance offered to young players in Ligue 1, this ranking from the National Technical Direction (DTN) is indeed the reflects of efforts made years earlier. From the most senior (Romain Danzé, Sylvain Marveaux) to the youngest (Abdoulaye Diallo, Dimitri Foulquier), they were all recruited many years ago. In other words, action taken today clearly conditions the results of the future

The Academies, the future of French football

Although Stade Rennes can hope to fly over these rankings for a while longer, the club will also need to consider a reinforcement of the competition. In its communication, Rennes naturally tends to value the quality of its youth training and the trust put by the club in its young players. Some question the viability of this policy, consisting of a perpetual gamble on the future rather than on a clear present project. Without getting into the detail of all the advantages offered by a top-level Academy, it has to be admitted that many clubs are following sensibly the same way.
Because of the financial difficulty faced nowadays by many a Ligue 1 team, youth training remains indeed a safe placement… Even for a club like Marseille, whose reputation certainly isn’t this of an Academy-focused club. “If we are somehow realist about a modifying football economy over the next few years, we will regularly need talented players who will occupy a first eleven position at OM before, possibly, move abroad and bring a consequent amount of money to our club. This is probably the economic model we have to build the club’s future on”, Jean-Claude Dassier explained last January.

Only words ? Possibly. However, the Marseille management has certainly be encouraged by the examples of Samir Nasri and Mathieu Flamini in the past, or by the present emergence of the Ayew brothers. Insisting on the culture of a club spirit (which is always important to the supporters) and giving a positive image, youth training remains a fragile way to follow however, especially for clubs used to big name transfers.

A recent example is the PSG. Often mocked for its inability to retain the many talents growing in the Greater Paris Area [1] The club from the capital seems to have taken a new direction over the last few years, piling up titles and international caps in the youth categories. But the most difficult, yet most important part remains to be achieved: to make space for these young talents within the professional squad. Last year, several players trained at Paris Saint-Germain managed to make a place for themselves in Ligue 1, in the footsteps of an example such as Mamadou Sakho. But in the future, with the arrival of a Qatari investor, which coach would take the responsibility of launching a youngster, rather than give playing time to an element purchased for huge sums of money?
The months and years to come will show whether Paris continues trusting its youngsters, or if the club from the French capital forget about this new policy that early in the process. In the first case, the Parisian club could continue evolving as a heavyweight rival for Stade Rennes, especially when it comes to the recruitment of players from the Île-de-France region.

Nantes survives, Brest patients, Lorient rises

Even among its close neighbours, Stade Rennes experiences a rise of the competition. The former example, having gone through times of distress, FC Nantes has now started to revive its tradition in terms of youth training. This season, Landry Chauvin will be able to rely on a squad majorly coming from la Jonelière. But the FCN has been heavily hit, and the club will struggle to prove attractive again for as long as it will remain in Ligue 2, as the recent departures of Lionel Carole and Loïc Négo illustrate.
With the Nantes example collapsing, Rennes’ success in the field of youth training has become the model to follow for its neighbours and rivals, which Lorient president Loïc Féry admits without a problem. Despite the announced objective of a more regional team, Brest or Lorient have very few players trained at the club among their regular starters. Last year, Jérémy Morel was the only one for Lorient, while Brest didn’t even field a single player trained at the club. The task is huge for these clubs, far from the results of Stade Rennes, and its squad 50% trained on the grounds of the ETP Odorico.

In Brest, the club doesn’t even have its own academy. Disappeared with the bankruptcy of the Brest Armorique at the beginning of the 1990s, it was never to be reopened. But finally, the return of youth training in the Finistère is a project that should become reality in 2012. An absolute necessity for Brest, who were forced to let go a player like Mathias Autret to Lorient without having a say, simply for not having the youth training infrastructures and the semi-professional contracts these can deliver [2]

In Lorient, the development of the Academy enters in the logic of making the presence of the club in Ligue 1 durable. In the top flight for the sixth consecutive season, the club from the Morbihan has earned most of its success this far in the managing ability of Christian Gourcuff, and also in its good recruitment. Satisfying, naturally, but not necessarily viable on the long-term.
Highly competitive, the Stade Rennais academy allows the club to constantly feed the professional squad, and rapidly cover for poor recruitments if needed, brushing away the perspectives of relegation in the same time. To achieve the same thing and make up for their delay, Lorient are going through the necessary step of modernising their infrastructures, as Stade Rennes did at the beginning of the 2000s. Alongside the renovation of the Stade du Moustoir, the “Merlus” will soon witness the erection of the “l’Espace FCL”, a complex which will become the training centre and Academy of the Morbihan’s club.

«We are not playing in the same category, but we are growing up»

Of course, the « Merlus » are not planning a mere duplicate of the Rennes project. They are rather taking inspiration, adding a playing touch proper to FC Lorient. On target, the perspective of setting up a common playing project from the youngest categories to the professional, as it is done at FC Barcelona, the reference for Christian Gourcuff. Work is also done on the process of recruiting youngsters, in order to compete directly with the Stade Rennais. “We are not playing in the same category, but we are growing up”, Hervé Guégan, the head of the Lorient Academy affirmed to L’Équipe affirmed in April. I position myself on the recruitment of players also chased by Rennes, which I wouldn’t have imagined doing just two years ago”.
Admired for its playing style, the FC Lorient benefits of a positive image, this of a family-minded club, the ideal environment for the blossoming of young talents. Although the “Merlus” are not yet a true Academy-based club, they are already managing to recruit young players desired by Patrick Rampillon and his team. And this, even for youngsters from the Parisian region. “We want to regionalise the recruitment, as per the advice of the DTN, Christian Gourcuff précises. But we don’t plan to be like the Athletic Bilbao, who only accept Basque players”. So far, few Breton players in L1 have avoided the Stade Rennais.

Directly involved in the recruitment of the youngsters, Gourcuff knows that his club’s ability to train youngsters will be a major issue for the future of FC Lorient. At the moment, the club from Morbihan should prove its ability in the domain, and show that it is capable of turning its youngsters into good Ligue 1 players.
Despite the growing competition, even among clubs that haven’t got an history of young players training, Stade Rennes remains the undisputed reference up to this day, starting in Brittany. But a reference with no time to rest on its laurels over the coming years, or it could fall from its throne.

Footnotes

[1] Amongst other examples in Rennes, Yacine Brahimi and Yassine Jebbour played for the PSG’s youth teams before choosing to continue their training in Brittany.

[2] Without youth training infrastructures authorised by the federation, a club is not allowed to offer aspirant or trainee contracts to its player, which would protect them from external interests. Also, no professional contract can be offered to a player under the age of twenty.

Gambardella 2008, stronger than Gambardella 2003?

Original text in French by Sylvain Sro, translated by Puchkin

Let it be known, 2010-2011 is the season in which the “Gambardella 2008” generation took over at the Stade Rennais. In the stride of M’Vila and Brahimi, will they be able to do better than their predecessors of 2003, led by Briand and Gourcuff? This is what the club seems to think, building an important part of its short-term future on their talent.

Yohann Gourcuff

The same Stade de France, the same triumphant victory, the same joy on the pitch. Five years apart, the Stade Rennes U18 won the Gambardella Cup, the most prestigious national competition for youth teams. 2003 or 2008, each promotion had its stars: Briand, Gourcuff or Faty on one side; M’Vila, Brahimi and Souprayen on the other. And above all, the promise of a golden generation expected to feed the professional squad with both quantity and quality.

The 2003 winners blossomed under Bölöni’s management, and most of them are still making their way at the highest level nowadays. Meanwhile, the 2008 winners are progressively settling in under Antonetti’s guidance, and constitute the base of this young team beginning a cycle, so much vaunted since last July.

Integration to the first team: Draw
Both generations have got one thing in common: Almost all of the players that composed them have turned professional. This is anything but usual for teams reaching that level. As a proof, from the Strasbourg team encountered by Rennes in the 2003 final, only Habib Bellaïd and Éric Mouloungui have remained to professional football.

Jimmy Briand

In Rennes, thirteen of the fourteen players used during the final eventually turned pro [1], with midfielder Fabien Dugaz the only exception. Even better, nine of these professional careers have been launched at the Stade Rennais, with four of the dropped players looking for their fortune elsewhere, such as Sébastien Le Toux in the United States. Naturally, all of them did not manage great professional careers, including those kept by the club: Only four made a real impact in the professional squad (Bourillon, Briand, Faty and Gourcuff), two more being limited to moderate success with the “Rouge et Noir” (Mvuemba et N’Guéma) while the last three failed to deliver (Jonathan Bru, Chaigneau and Arthur Sorin).

On this aspect, the 2008 generation seems to follow a very similar way. Out of the fourteen players used at the Stade de France by Laurent Huard and Régis Le Bris [2], eleven have turned professional in Rennes, one did it elsewhere (Louhoungou) and two were force to abandon, at least for some time, their dreams of professional football (M’Laab and Pivaty, both gone for CFA teams)

Several new professionals have already left the club however (Lasimant, Le Marchand, Le Tallec and Petit), and the Rennes future of two other remains uncertain (Caro and Pajot will see their contract expire at the end of the season). At this moment, only five of them have made their way to Rennes’ professional team (Brahimi, Camara, M’Vila, Souprayen and Théophile-Catherine), not far over their 2003 predecessors.

Gambardella 2003 : A lukewarm success
What summary could be done, in terms of the generation 2003’s contribution? It was very important, and highly frustrating at the same time.

2002, the club is in full doubt, still bogged down in the monumental and costly recruitment errors made during summer 2000. Christian Gourcuff’s spell was a complete failure, and Rennes was struggling to deal with its nouveau riche club image, setting European targets but fighting against relegation. An obvious fact is raised: The Academy, which already produced very good players during the previous decade, is under-used. François Pinault made the choice to offer it a quadrupled budget, and the club’s objective clearly became to lay the foundations of the professional squad on it, with a policy aiming to see 50% of the playing staff trained at the club’s Academy.

Laszlo Boloni

For that purpose, the 2003 victory arrived in ideal time: Even though the players in this generation were all recruited before 2002 and therefore not the result of this new policy, their victory was making their integration in the professional squad even more legitimate. Recruited in part for his ability to launch youngsters, Laszlo Bölöni had full latitude to launch a new cycle, quickly based on this wave of youth. The rise of this generation remained progressive however: Although Faty and Bourillon were soon used to starting in Ligue 1, it took a bit more time for the others, such as Briand, or in a lesser extent Gourcuff.

In the latter’s wake, this generation’s input reached its summit between 2006 and 2007, without managing to reach anything else than UEFA Cup qualifications. At the end of summer 2007, only one of the players remained at the club: Jimmy Briand. The 2003 generation had given a great contribution to the revival induced by Bölöni, but the club failed to gain full profit of it, as Gourcuff’s rushed departure to Milan AC symbolises.

Gambardella 2008 : A slower emergence
As opposed to its 2008 successor, the team that won in 2003 had already gathered much experience. During the 2002-2003 season, Philippe Bergeroo and Vahid Halilhodzic had not hesitated to throw Grégory Bourillon (21 games in L1), Jacques Faty (9 games), Stéphane N’Guéma (5 games) and Jimmy Briand (1 game) at the deep end.

Damien Le Tallec

In 2008, nothing like that : Sure, Damien Le Tallec has already been a professional for a year, but none of the players involved has been given any competitive experience in “senior” football. This would not stop the Rennes team to manage its game to the perfection, just like M’Vila, already displaying his serene leadership at midfield.

The following season, while Bölöni had decided to rely on the rising generation, Guy Lacombe left it completely on the side of the road. In 2008-2009, only Théophile-Catherine made a bit of a breakthrough in the professional squad, with two starts in the Coupe de la Ligue. Camara and Lasimant were also offered a few minutes in the season’s last match in Marseille, as the manager’s departure had already been confirmed.

To Lacombe’s credit, he was not facing the same context as his predecessor. Bölöni, searching for a competitive team, could easily take the time for tries and introduce youngsters to Ligue 1. In 2008-2009 however, Rennes was a well-oiled formation, able to manage 18 consecutive games without a loss, and therefore not as easily modifiable. The patience of Rennes’ youngsters was severely tested, too severely for one of them, Damien Le Tallec, who decided to quit Rennes’ Reserve to join Borussia Dortmund’s

The loans as an indicator
One could think that Frédéric Antonetti’s arrival, in June 2009, was opening the generation 2008’s era. It is both true and false. In 2009-2010, only two players were introduced to Ligue 1: M’Vila, who appeared immediately as a future international to Antonetti, and Théophile-Catherine who, as under Lacombe’s management, was only offered limited time on the pitch. Nothing too exciting at first sight.

But this time, the solution was to loan. For the 2003 generation, that strategy had been used in diverse ways, to relaunch N’Guema, to offer Arthur Sorin some playing time, or to try and sell Mvuemba or Chaigneau.

Encouraged by Sow’s spell in Sedan, the management made a massive use of loans in Ligue 2. A successful strategy, which allowed the youngsters to gain experience without fighting the competition in an overcrowded squad, which only M’Vila’s talent and maturity could overcome without resistance.

Yacine Brahimi

The five loaned players (Brahimi, Camara, Lasimant, Le Marchand and Souprayen) totalled over two hundred games played in one season. A good inspiration, especially since the strategy also helps defining which of the five could become key players in the first team. In summer 2010, Brahimi and Souprayen had become candidate to starting slots, Camara was left in stand-by provisionally, while Lasimant and Le Marchand, not as convincing during their respective loans, where left to find a new team. Vincent Pajot, on loan at Boulogne this season, knows ehat he has to do in order to cement a place at the Stade Rennais next year…

Today, in terms of high-level experience (Ligue 1 or Ligue 2), the 2008 generation has nearly caught up with his 2003 predecessor. Cleverly, Stade Rennes also managed to avoid a sometimes difficult period of integration for its young players. Arnold Mvuemba or Florent Chaigneau could witness of the difficulties inherent to professional beginning. The first took years to affirm himself, before finally blossoming in Lorient, the second sought completely after a string of catastrophic games.

Note : The graph above represents the evolution of the number of games played by the two generations over time, after their Gambardella Cup victory. In 2003 (blue curve), some players had already gathered some professional experience. The progression in the number of games is consistent, before gaining in intensity in 2005-2006 (2 to 3 years after the final). After Gourcuff’s departure, the curve returns to normal, before lowering strongly at +4 years, when Bourillon and Faty quit Brittany, leaving only Briand behind them.

In 2008 (Red and Orange curves), the arrival in the first team is happening later, with the players only reaching in Summer 2010 (+2 years) the total already played by the 2003s. A misleading assessment: By including all the Ligue 2 games played during their loan, the players have nearly caught up, in one year, the experience that their 2003 predecessor had acquired in three seasons. The projections made (in dotted lines) according to the number of games played since the beginning of the season, show a constant increase, and nearly equal to the 2003 players’ best score (2005-2006 season). An increase which is destined to be accentuated even more, if Souprayen or Brahimi were to become regular starters.

An difference in emergence, as a good omen?

Yann M'Vila

Finally, except for the only M’Vila, players from the 2008 generation are playing their first full season at Stade Rennais in 2010-2011. An emergence that comes with a two year difference with their from 2003 launched very (too?) early in the first team. If Stade Rennes manages to keep its youngsters – and the club did work this way by extending most of their contracts until 2014 -, they should only be giving the full measure of their potential next season, or during the 2012-2013 season.

Older, and strenghtened by one additional year of Ligue 2 experience, they give much more guarantees than their predecessors. Samuel Souprayen, who is still to complete his breakthrough in the first team, had already shown that he could be a key player in Ligue 2. Enough to create relation of mutual trust between the player and the club, which would have been difficult to instate if he had remained with the reserve squad for one more year.

« I think we are reaching a real turning point, Jérôme Leroy affirmed on 21st December. The potential is there. […] If you keep these youngsters, they are the future at Rennes. Look what Lille has done, they have kept a lot of players since three-four years, and they have become key-players”.

Off to a good start in the League during this 2010-2011 season, everything seems to be shaping up well for Rennes and its «Gambardella 2008» generation. Better, it seems that this generation is far from having shown all its potential yet. A sign, maybe, that glorious tomorrows are well on their way…

Footnotes
[1] The squad for the 2003 final: Chaigneau, Le Toux, Macé (Sorin, 84’), Bourillon, Faty, Dugaz, Mvuemba, Bru, Briand, Gourcuff (Benchenaa, 75’), N’Guéma (Stanger, 84’).

[2] The squad for the 2008 final: Petit, Théophile-Catherine, Louhoungou, Souprayen (cap), Le Marchand, M’Vila, Pajot, Brahimi (Caro, 77’), Lasimant, Le Tallec (Pivaty, 86’), M’Laab (Camara, 64’)

With thanks to the very kind people at Stade Rennais Online who have allowed us to reproduce this wonderful piece.