Crises are conducive to questioning. The one caused by the coronavirus pandemic is disrupting the economy as a whole. Football, an industry in its own right, is no exception. While it is stationary, the model it has been built on for years is being roughed up. The world has decided to question some of its actors on the management of the current crisis, what it reveals, how to get out of it and, perhaps, the changes to be made. At 65, including thirty-eight years spent on the sidelines, Christian Gourcuff, trainer of FC Nantes, takes a critical – and therefore quite rare – look at the excesses of the football market which it links to those of current capitalism.
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In an interview at West France Monday, you say that it would not be a drama "if football reduced its lifestyle by 50%". It’s a pretty rare word in your community.
If we cut wages in half in football, nobody will be on the straw. An average Ligue 1 player can earn 80,000 euros per month [94,000 euros gross, according to a recent estimate of The team]. We have something to see coming. Since then, an agreement has been reached between the clubs and the players' representatives to postpone the deferral of wages according to the different income groups. It's good, but it was the least I could think of.
When you were a player in the 1970s, salaries were more like those of senior managers.
And again, I don't even know if it was. I thought at one point to study engineering. At the time, I would have been much better off in terms of salary than in football. For a long time, in Lorient, it was my job as a math teacher that allowed me to live. Today, we are already seeing an escalation on 16-year-old players who must be given incredible salaries if you want him to sign pro at your home after their training.
You have been saying this for years, but you say that this crisis shows how much football is linked to the excesses of an unbridled globalization. Is it even more sensitive today?
Yes, I think we live in an economic model that cannot continue like this. The planet lives on credit, consumes more than its available resources and football is part of this logic. It follows this drift in the economy and operates on speculation. We live on loans and when we speculate, we don't always win. Football will have to return to a real economy. If he was spending the money he had, I would say why not. But this is not the case. We go into the wall but we refused to see this wall. This crisis reminds us of this.
