P.S.G.’s Star System Has Run Its Course
Corinne Diacre can take satisfaction, actually, in lasting this lengthy. She was, ultimately, dismissed from her publish as coach of the French ladies’s workforce on Thursday. But her place had been untenable for the higher a part of a 12 months, if no more.
Senior gamers had complained about her strategies, her managerial type, her choice decisions, her strategy to communications — mainly something and every part you would probably consider — earlier than final summer season’s European Championship. An ever-growing variety of her squad had publicly refused to characterize their nation so long as she was in cost.
In the tip, then, the one shock was that the French soccer federation, the F.F.F., waited so lengthy. “I was confronted by an unease that had already existed for several years,” mentioned 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 talking to the gamers, he mentioned, he had been informed of “a difficulty between the coach and a certain number” of the squad. He determined he had no selection however to “follow their recommendation,” not least as a result of there’s a World Cup in a number of months and France would, presumably, need to have most of its finest gamers obtainable to play in it.
But whereas the power of the gamers’ feeling isn’t doubtful, what lies on the root of it’s much less clear. Diacre is thought to be chilly, brusque even. She provides the air, actually, of being an unforgiving, vaguely old-school type of a coach. She isn’t, within the phrases of 1 colleague, a “natural communicator.”
Those are all flaws, after all, however flaws usually are not the identical as fireable offenses. (There has by no means been a suggestion of something extra untoward on the coronary heart of the French gamers’ complaints.) It isn’t essentially the coach’s job, in any case, to be favored by the gamers. It isn’t essentially within the pursuits of the federation that the gamers really feel empowered to take away any coach that they don’t agree with professionally.
