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    Hervé Renard Set to Coach France at Women’s World Cup

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    Renard has vast experience in Africa and led Saudi Arabia at last year’s World Cup. But he has never coached a women’s team.PARIS — Hervé Renard, a French coach with vast experience in international soccer but none leading a women’s team, was set to be hired to lead a France squad that will be among the favorites at the Women’s World Cup in July.France is expected to announce Renard’s hiring by the end of the week, just over two weeks after the country’s soccer federation fired its longtime women’s coach, Corinne Diacre, in the face of player revolt.Renard, 54, most recently coached Saudi Arabia’s men’s team but announced his departure on Tuesday, hours after the Saudi soccer federation said it had agreed to a French federation request to end his contract immediately.The French soccer federation made no announcement that it had hired Renard, but the Saudi federation’s president, Yasser Al-Misehal, essentially confirmed a deal was in the works when he told a Saudi sports channel on Tuesday night that Renard had been offered the France post and that the coach “expressed his desire to take this opportunity.”Renard’s arrival could be a welcome breath of fresh air for Les Bleues, as the French women’s team is known, but also for the embattled French federation, which will be eager for a fresh start after a leadership change as well as a series of internal conflicts that were threatening to tear apart its star-studded and trophy-chasing women’s team.Time is short: France’s players will have only a matter of months, and a handful of exhibition games, to adapt to Renard before they run out for their Women’s World Cup opener against Jamaica on July 23 in Sydney, Australia.But Renard also will have only a short window to persuade his players that he can adapt his style to them, and to the women’s game. While he has decades of coaching experience in multiple countries, he has not previously coached women at the professional or international level. At least one prominent player agent said that would not be a problem.“As someone who’s known for leading men, I’m sure he’ll have no problem leading women,” Sonia Souid, an agent who represents several players on the French women’s team, said in an interview last week. Souid suggested that Renard’s transition could be seamless as long as he can make the players believe they can succeed.“The real challenge is that Renard will be expected to have immediate results,” she said. “That’s difficult for any coach.”Renard’s most immediate task will be to heal the wounds of a “fractured” group, as the federation called its women’s team in the communiqué that announced Diacre’s departure. Fissures between Diacre and some of her best players broke for good in February, when several top players, including the team captain Wendie Renard and the Paris-St.-Germain star Marie-Antoinette Katoto, announced that they would leave the team and refuse future calls to international duty amid disagreements with the management of Diacre, which they denounced as “nowhere near top-level requirements.”Wendie Renard announced on social media that she had chosen to prioritize her “mental health” by quitting the French team. Two weeks later, Diacre was fired.Hervé Renard has a reputation as an itinerant leader who extracts results from his players and then moves on. He has never stayed more than four years on the same coaching bench in a career that has taken him to Africa, the Middle East, England’s fourth division, France’s Ligue 1 and to local teams in the Algerian and Vietnamese championships.Sharp-jawed and favoring crisp white dress shirts on the sideline, Renard attracted attention and headlines during last year’s World Cup in Qatar, where he led an unheralded Saudi Arabia team stocked with domestic-based players to a stunning group-stage victory over Argentina.A video of an impassioned speech he delivered to his players at halftime of that game racked up millions of views on social media, but also offered a glimpse into both his methods, his passion and his no-nonsense coaching style.His first look at his new team could come within days: France will gather for a training camp next week ahead of a set of friendly matches against Colombia and Canada in early April.As he prepares for the World Cup, Renard will have to work quickly to merge a new generation of talents like Katoto with an older group of players whose international careers came to an abrupt end under Diacre. That latter group includes not only Renard and goalkeeper Sarah Bouhaddi but also midfielder Amandine Henry, who remains a mainstay of the French powerhouse Olympique Lyonnais Féminin at the age of 33. Henry has not played for France in more than two years, and was left off the national team’s roster by Diacre for last summer’s European Championship in England.That tournament, like so many others, ended in disappointment and frustration for France. Despite its talent, it has never reached the final of a major championship like the World Cup or the Euros or claimed an Olympic medal in its 50 years of existence.Tariq Panja contributed reporting. More

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      France Fires Corinne Diacre as Coach Only Months Before World Cup

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      Several top players had refused to play for Corinne Diacre, and the divide between the coach and her team “has reached a point of no return,” the federation decided.Corinne Diacre, a veteran coach facing a revolt by several of her best players only months before the Women’s World Cup, was fired Thursday as coach of France’s women’s soccer team. The move upended the preparations of one of the world’s best teams four months before women’s soccer’s showcase championship, but it could open a path for the return of several French stars who had said they would skip the tournament rather than play for Diacre.The French soccer federation announced the change, saying an investigation it had commissioned had revealed “a very significant divide” between Diacre and her team. In recent weeks, at least three French players, including the star defender Wendie Renard, had announced they would skip this year’s World Cup because of concerns about the team’s leadership and atmosphere, an unspoken — but unmistakable — critique of Diacre.The situation inside the team, the federation said Thursday, had deteriorated enough that leaving Diacre in her post was now actively harming France’s chances of success. “This fracture,” the federation said in a statement, “has reached a point of no return.”Diacre’s firing came one day after she had complained that her critics were running a “smear campaign” against her and vowed to remain in charge of the team, and a week after she lost a powerful ally when Noël Le Graët, the powerful president of the French federation who had supported her, resigned after a report that was critical of his own management.Diacre, who in 2014 had become the first woman to coach a professional men’s team in France, had led the women’s team since 2017. She led her team to the quarterfinals of the World Cup on home soil and to the semifinals of the European Championship in England last year. But her tenure also was marked by years of private and public disputes with some of her team’s best players — stars like Eugénie Le Sommer, Amandine Henry and Renard — and repeated complaints about her management style.Known as a taskmaster with no patience for mistakes, dissent or defeat — “What we remember is the final result, and nothing else,” Diacre once said — she was viewed as a cold and ruthless force by some who played for her. She would drop players for not being fit enough, and cut others after they criticized her methods or her tactics. Henry, a star for France’s team for years, said she learned she had been cut from the World Cup roster in 2019 in a phone call from Diacre that lasted “14 or 15 seconds.”Wendie Renard announced last month that she would skip the World Cup; her reasons were widely seen as a rebuke of Diacre’s leadership.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut that driving style also had pushed players away, including several key members of Olympique Lyonnais Féminin, France’s dominant women’s team, and its top domestic rival Paris St.-Germain. The goalkeeper Sarah Bouhaddi, for example, has said she will not play for her country while Diacre is in charge, and last month Renard’s decision to skip the World Cup was quickly echoed by two of her teammates, Marie-Antoinette Katoto and Kadidiatou Diani.“It is a sad day,” Renard wrote on social media when she announced she was out of the World Cup, “but necessary to preserve my mental health.”It is unclear if Diacre’s dismissal might lead Renard, or any of the other players who had said they would not play for Diacre, to make themselves available to the national team again.The decision to drop Diacre as coach so soon before the World Cup could upend — or, in the view of Diacre’s critics, rescue — the preparations of one of the favorites in this summer’s championship. France will open the tournament against Jamaica on July 23, and then will play Brazil and Panama to complete the group stage.The team’s next two games, among its final chances to get together before the World Cup kicks off in July, are a set of friendlies against Colombia and Canada in April.France did not name a replacement for Diacre, but it did seem to issue a veiled warning to the team’s players.“The way used by the players to express their criticisms will no longer be acceptable,” the federation statement said, adding that it planned to propose a change in the governance of the women’s team that would introduce new layer of oversight. More

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      P.S.G.’s Star System Has Run Its Course

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      Even with Messi, Mbappé and Neymar, the French champion is a Champions League also-ran once again. Is buying local the way forward?Nobody at Paris St.-Germain seemed particularly upset at being knocked out of the Champions League. Christophe Galtier, the coach, made all the right noises, of course. It was a terrible disappointment, he said. A great shame, because this is a competition that really means a lot to the club. Very sad for all concerned.Kylian Mbappé, meanwhile, came across so phlegmatic that he seemed almost detached, as if the whole thing had happened only in the abstract. He had promised that P.S.G. would do the best it could in the Champions League, he said. So it must logically follow that being eliminated by Bayern Munich in the round of 16 was the best it could do. “That is our maximum,” Mbappé said.Certainly, there was none of the fury or frustration that has typically greeted P.S.G.’s shortfalls in this competition over the last decade. None of the club’s executives tried to barge into the referees’ room to complain about a decision. There was no boiling indignation or bubbling sense of injustice. Just as it had on the field, P.S.G. slipped from view without rage or rancor.It would be easy to attribute that meekness to familiarity. After all, failing in the last 16 of the Champions League is kind of what P.S.G. does: Writing in L’Equipe, Vincent Duluc referred to it as the club’s “culture.” It has lost at this stage in eight of the last 10 seasons. It still hurts, of course, but it does not hurt as much, not when you are steeled for the blow.New cast, same ending.Andreas Schaad/Associated PressThere is, though, a kinder diagnosis. After a decade in which they have spent an obscene amount of state-supplied money putting together one of the most expensive, star-spangled squads ever conceived — gathering immense, unchecked political power and dangerously distorting the financial landscape of European soccer in the process — the power brokers at P.S.G. have, belatedly, started to wonder if they are doing this whole thing wrong.The club’s Qatari leaders have realized that what they would call their “squad-building model” has left the club with an unbalanced, ill-fitting sort of a team, one that any manager would struggle to forge into a cogent unit.They have heard the long, consistent complaints from the club’s fans that they cannot identify with a motley collection of superstars, picked up and plucked down with little apparent rhyme or reason beyond how many followers they have on Instagram. And they have, at last, decided to do something about it.There is, within the club, a desire to repurpose the squad this summer so that it has not just a more French flavor, but a more distinctly Parisian one. The French capital has, after all, been the most fertile proving ground in world soccer for years. It has long been absurd that it has had only the dimmest reflection in the city’s only top-flight team, not least because a team stocked with local talent is effectively a shortcut to a genuine identity, one that fans appreciate and cherish.That will mean, as the plan runs, more opportunities for players from the club’s youth system. It was telling that P.S.G. finished Wednesday’s game with two teenage prospects on the field in Munich: defender El Chadaille Bitshiabu and midfielder Warren Zaïre-Emery, neither of whom is old enough to rent a car.El Chadaille Bitshiabu, a 17-year-old defender from the Paris suburbs, made his Champions League debut on Wednesday.Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut that kind of reconstruction will also require the club to repatriate some of the prospects who eluded its grasp in the recent past, the players whose successes elsewhere effectively function as an ongoing rebuke of P.S.G.’s failure to make the most of the talent on its doorstep.That will not be a cheap endeavor. Marcus Thuram, the Borussia Mönchengladbach forward, may be out of contract this summer, but his club teammate Manu Koné is not. Neither is Randal Kolo Muani, the France international currently with Eintracht Frankfurt. Koné and Kolo Muani have been identified as prospective recruits for this new-look P.S.G. The club cannot expect a discount for buying local.That is not the only point at which the theory — logically sound though it may be — collides with an unhelpful reality. It is not really possible to “overhaul” a squad, not in the way that the news media presents it, fans understand it and executives tend to mean it.It is all very well that P.S.G. wants to add more Parisian players to its ranks, but what does that mean for the squad that is currently in situ, the one made up of highly decorated internationals on generous, legally enforceable contracts?While it is vaguely feasible that Lionel Messi will take one decision, at least, out of P.S.G.’s hands by electing to move back to Barcelona, or back to Argentina, or by deciding to fill the only gap on his glistening résumé and spend a couple of years being taught the finer points of the game by Phil Neville in Miami. (The fact that P.S.G. would ideally like both to rip up its squad and start again and extend Messi’s contract is an irony the club appears not to have noticed.)Kylian Mbappé, Neymar and Lionel Messi remain, for now, the centerpieces of an imperfect team.Sarah Meyssonnier/ReutersBut while Messi, like Neymar, draws much of the focus, they are not really the problem. Far more complex are their teammates, the ones earning P.S.G. money and playing Champions League soccer who would have to be persuaded to forgo at least one of those things to allow the club to accommodate the reinforcements.How many teams are there, for example, who would both be willing and able to match Marco Verratti’s salary? And how many of those clubs would Marco Verratti actually want to join? Or would P.S.G. find itself with a squad caught between two eras: half-stocked with young Parisian players, restored to the hometown club that scorned them, and half-filled with the remnants of its flawed, futile past?That is the issue, of course, with trying to impose an identity on a team, rather than allowing one to develop organically. And regardless of the provenance of the players, that is precisely what P.S.G. would be trying to do: turn the club, overnight, into a sort of high-status Athletic Bilbao, just as it has spent a decade trying to craft an image of Barcelona-en-Seine.It would not be authentic, not in any real sense. It would simply be an identity that can be assumed for a while and then discarded whenever it is convenient, just as all the others have been. It would, effectively, be nothing but a rebranding. And it is difficult to believe that it would lead to any other destination to the one that P.S.G. knows so well: the one where the disappointment is so familiar that it no longer hurts the way it once did, where defeat is borne not with anger but weary resignation, where everything has to change but nothing really will.Two Bad OptionsPhilippe Diallo said he was left with no choice except to fire France’s coach, Corinne Diacre.Jean-Francois Monier/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCorinne Diacre can take pride, really, in lasting this long. She was, eventually, dismissed from her post as coach of the French women’s team on Thursday. But her position had been untenable for the better part of a year, if not more.Senior players had complained about her methods, her managerial style, her selection choices, her approach to communications — basically anything and everything you could possibly think of — before last summer’s European Championship. An ever-growing number of her squad had publicly refused to represent their country as long as she was in charge.In the end, then, the only surprise was that the French soccer federation, the F.F.F., waited so long. “I was confronted by an unease that had already existed for several years,” said Philippe Diallo, the federation’s interim president. “It is up to me to decide it, but I did so by choosing between two bad options.”In speaking to the players, he said, he had been told of “a difficulty between the coach and a certain number” of the squad. He decided he had no choice but to “follow their recommendation,” not least because there is a World Cup in a few months and France would, presumably, want to have most of its best players available to play in it.But while the strength of the players’ feeling is not in doubt, what lies at the root of it is less clear. Diacre is known to be cold, brusque even. She gives the air, certainly, of being an unforgiving, vaguely old-school sort of a coach. She is not, in the words of one colleague, a “natural communicator.”Those are all flaws, of course, but flaws are not the same as fireable offenses. (There has never been a suggestion of anything more untoward at the heart of the French players’ complaints.) It is not necessarily the coach’s job, after all, to be liked by the players. It is not necessarily in the interests of the federation that the players feel empowered to remove any coach that they do not agree with professionally.Diallo, clearly, felt he had no choice but to remove Diacre in the hope of ending the impasse. He is probably right to worry, though, that the precedent is not an encouraging one. More

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      France’s Corinne Diacre Is Not Interested in Your Opinion

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      Coach Corinne Diacre set a high bar for France at the Euros. But tying one’s fate to results works only when they’re good.ROTHERHAM, England — Corinne Diacre punched the air, allowed herself a cursory smile of satisfaction, and then turned on her heel. She managed to dodge the first couple of staff members rushing past her on their way to join the celebrations on the field after France’s quarterfinal victory, only to find her path blocked by Gilles Fouache.Fouache, France’s assistant goalkeeping coach, is not an easy obstacle to avoid: broad-shouldered and shaven-headed and with the air of a kindly bouncer. Diacre, a redoubtable central defender in her playing days, quickly recognized there was no way past. Fouache swept his manager up in a brief bear hug, and then she sent him on his way, too.Once she had done so, her smile melted away. She sought out her Dutch counterpart, offered some words of congratulation and condolence, and then made her way to her players. A handful received a pat on the back. Others were offered only some immediate performance feedback. She had come to Euro 2022 on business, not pleasure.By some measures, that victory against the Netherlands last weekend was enough to ensure Diacre had done her job. France had never previously made it past the quarterfinals of a European Championship; Eve Périsset’s penalty, deep into extra time, finally ended the hoodoo.Diacre, though, arrived in England with slightly higher expectations, and so did her country. France, after all, is home to two of the most powerful women’s soccer clubs, the reigning European champion Lyon and its great rival, Paris St.-Germain. Diacre had an unrivaled pipeline of talent from which to create a squad.To her, and to French soccer, it felt reasonable to declare reaching the final the team’s “stated ambition.” On Wednesday night, it failed to meet it. France might only have fallen narrowly to Germany, by 2-1 in their semifinal in Milton Keynes, England, but it fell nonetheless. And that, unfortunately, gives Diacre a problem.Corinne Diacre and France have never reached the final of a major tournament.Molly Darlington/ReutersA couple of weeks after Diacre, 47, and her players arrived in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, the small town in rural Leicestershire where France’s national team has taken up residence for this tournament — that it chose a spot with a distinctly French name is, apparently, coincidental — a journalist from a French magazine contacted the team’s press officer to ask why no local junior team had yet been invited to watch a training session.Such outreach initiatives are a staple of major tournaments, a fairly simple public-relations maneuver designed to thank the community for its hospitality. France, by contrast, had made no contact with amateur sides in Ashby. The team, the journalist was told, was not in England to make friends.It is a tunnel vision that is characteristic of Diacre’s management style. She veers between distant and acerbic with the news media, despite employing a P.R. “teacher”; she has admitted that communication is not her strong suit. She makes no secret of the fact that she does not enjoy the public-facing aspects of her job.With her players, too, she has not always fostered the most conducive relationships. One of her first moves after taking charge of her nation’s team five years ago was to strip Wendie Renard, France’s totemic defender, of the captaincy.Wendie Renard, surrounded by celebrating rivals once again.Carl Recine/ReutersSince then, she has contrived to alienate a number of players from Lyon, the country’s dominant women’s team, to such an extent that Sarah Bouhaddi, the goalkeeper, claimed she had inculcated a “very, very negative environment.” Bouhaddi has subsequently said she will not play for her country while Diacre is in charge.Another veteran, Gaëtane Thiney, was dropped for criticizing Diacre’s tactics, and a third, Amandine Henry, was dropped after she had described the French squad during the 2019 World Cup as “complete and utter chaos.” The call in which Diacre broke the news lasted, Henry said, “14 or 15 seconds; I will remember it all my life.” More remarkable still was that Henry had inherited the captaincy from Renard; her banishment meant that Renard was restored to the post.Diacre’s biggest gamble of all, though, may well have been her squad for this tournament. Diacre was already without both Kheira Hamraoui and Aminata Diallo, a legacy of the assault scandal that has roiled French soccer for much of the last year, but she also chose to omit both Henry and Eugénie Le Sommer, France’s career goal-scoring leader.The manager defended the moves, citing the need to protect and preserve the “mentality” of her squad. Early results bore her out. There was no sign, in France’s month or so in England, of club enmities poisoning the atmosphere among the players. The longstanding divide between the Lyonnaises and the Parisians seemed to have evaporated.Besides, it was not as if Diacre did not have players of impeccable quality to replace them. The depth of talent at her command was such that she could juggle her team for each of France’s first four games of the tournament with no apparent diminution of quality.France became the first team to put a ball in Germany’s net at the Euros, but its score was officially credited as a German own goal.Rui Vieira/Associated PressThe issue, though, was that making those calls turned Diacre into a martyr of outcome. Had France met her aspirations, and reached Sunday’s final against England, she would have been vindicated; leaving Henry and Le Sommer at home would have seemed like a masterstroke, proof of her bold conviction.That France did not means it is all but impossible not to wonder whether the outcome might have been different had two of the key players on the best club team in the women’s game been on the field, or even on the substitutes’ bench, available to call on in an emergency.In truth, the border between those realities is slender, and blurred. It hinges on a moment, an instant: Had France remained attentive when Svenja Huth picked up the ball on the edge of the penalty area, rather than assuming it had drifted out of play, then perhaps it would still be in the tournament, and Diacre’s call would have paid off.It is the manager, though, who made that bargain, who made it plain that the gauge of success and failure was what she did, not how she did it. France came to Euro 2022 with a destination in mind. Now that it has fallen short, it cannot claim credit for the journey. More