IThey are the heirs of a certain conception of the beautiful game, often referred to as “Nantes style”, both being emblematic figures of FC Nantes, respectively as coach and player: Raynald Denoueix and Eric Carrière told The Team their disenchantment with current football and its staging.
Both will have been consultants for Canal +: the first gave up in 2011, the second will do so at the end of the season, for lack of finding in themselves enough enthusiasm to continue. Their disillusioned remarks – the coach responding to the footballer from one interview to another – paint a critical picture that is as relevant as it is sometimes biased.
If Raynald Denoueix deplores the regime of punchlines to which commentators submit, he himself has a certain sense of the formula when he says that “the ‘I’ is increasingly replacing the game”. It refers to the excessive attention given to statistics and individual performance, to the point of forgetting that football is a sport of collective essence.
The starification of players, some transformed into global brands whose aura supplants that of their teams, is indeed one of the features of contemporary football media coverage. According to Eric Carriere, “the players have taken over”. Still it is necessary to see there less selfish “attitudes” than the consequence of the deregulations which, since the judgment Bosman in 1995, placed the players in position of force.
“It’s not a show, it’s competition”
Similarly, when the former playmaker disavows Kylian Mbappé’s refusal to participate in promotional operations with the sponsors of the France team, he avoids that the Parisian is not only defending his contractual interests, but also his freedom. not to lend his image to brands and activities contrary to the values he wishes to defend…
This lack of hindsight also goes hand in hand with a rather conservative and poorly defined invocation of “values”. Regarding the dismissal of journalist Stéphane Guy by Canal+, after a modest support for comedian Sébastien Thoen, ousted for having criticized a CNews program, Carrière calls on the imperative of discipline and the fact that, as head of company – he is a wine merchant – he would not appreciate it being criticized.
We can also raise eyebrows when he deplores the contempt for the referees, he who adhered to the editorial line of Canal + consisting in making obsessive re-arbitration, with slow motion, a central content of the broadcasting and commentary of the matches. He who, too, had unreservedly promoted video refereeing. Here again, the analysis of the causes is lacking.
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