[ Background in football ]

I’m French, from Nantes, a city in the northwest. It’s a football city with a historic club. I’ve been a fan of FC Nantes for as long as I can remember. When I was 4, they won the league, when I was 9 and 10, they won the cup and when I was 11, they won the league again - we got very used to winning. Now, I realize, it doesn’t happen often! So I grew up with a passion for football, I was always playing and was obsessed with football in school. It was a big part of my childhood.

I moved to a new city for university and stopped playing competitively but I was still watching lots of football. I was very inspired back then by Pep Guardiola and studied his Barcelona teams, trying to understand how they were doing things.

After university, I went to New Zealand on a working holiday visa with the main objective of learning English. I really loved it, it’s an amazing country and was a good way for me to learn English.

[ First steps as a football coach ]

After the year in New Zealand, I got a job in the D.R. Congo as a health and safety manager at a hydroelectric power station. I think this experience and management skills are very important because it’s something I still use with football. Even though we were focusing on health and safety, I think some of the methodologies can be applicable to basically any working environment.

While I was working there I had the opportunity to coach a team made up of the staff from the security company. They needed a coach and I volunteered. We started with one training session a week and kept growing to two training sessions, then three! And we kept going like this for 2 years.

Then I moved to Algeria for the same job. In Algeria, there was no football, just work! Sometimes we’d play in the car park but nothing more. I really started to miss football and after this experience, I decided to ‘reorientate’ myself and do some qualifications and start a coaching career.

I’d heard that one of the best ways to start the diplomas was to go to Australia - the pathways are quite quick and the visa was pretty easy to get. So I went there and started from scratch.

[ Australia ]

I arrived as a tourist and did the C License as a tourist - directly after I arrived. After I had the license, I started to look for a job - other coaches recommended Sydney as there were lots of coaching jobs there. I found a club in the northern suburbs of Sydney - and ended up spending 7 years there!

The club, the Northern Tigers Football Club, was the representative club of the Northern Suburb Football Association, they play in the National Premier League (NPL) and have teams all the way from under 9’s to senior teams. I started with a trial session with their community football school, it went well and I was given two teams for my first year - under 9’s and under 13’s.

Basically every year, I got a new team, until eventually, I spent the last few years as head coach for the U20’s. During this time, I did the B and A coaching licenses. I started the A License just before COVID and just finished a year ago!

I have very fond memories of the 3 licenses I did in Australia and my goal is to get the next one - the Pro License. It’s a great environment and there are good instructors but the group of other coaches is the most important. When you have a good group, you can have very good experiences and learnings, sharing your work and visions about football can be really helpful.

[ Moving to Taiwan and professional football ]

In Australia for 7 years, I learned a lot but in the last couple of years, I probably learned a little bit less - so it was a good moment for me to have a change of environment. My fiancé is Taiwanese and she had found work in Taiwan, so I decided that could be a good opportunity for me to discover a new country and try to find a coaching job there.

When I arrived, I contacted pretty much all of the clubs that I could. Tainan City was looking for a coach and it happened very quickly in the end. I sent my CV out in January, and in between I did a few trial sessions at AC Taipei - volunteering with their under 10’s and watching a little about how they worked. After a few weeks, in late February, I got a call from Tainan. The next day I had an interview and the following Friday, we had our first session.

They had lost their coach at the end of the previous season (after winning the league title) and I think they were in contact with someone but it fell through in the end and they ended up needing someone just a couple of weeks before the start of the season.

[ How did you prepare for the interview? ]

I looked at all the stats I could find from last year and tried to present what I can do this year, in terms of improving different metrics. I watched the match that knocked them out of the AFC Cup last year, picked some clips and made an analysis to show that I’m able to analyze a match.

The boss asked me about my experience in Australia and I already had a bunch of video of my games and my training sessions that I had prepared as part of the A License. So, even though it was on very short notice, I was actually well prepared and I think it worked pretty well!

[ You’ve made a smooth start to your time at Tainan City but it must have been a big adjustment from youth football in Australia and joining without a full preseason, language barrier, etc? ]

I think the first thing was to get as much information as possible. I spent lots of time just observing, asking people about things and trying to absorb everything about the environment from the players, the staff and all the people around the club.

It was a difficult preseason because it was short and we had a lot of players leaving for the national team and university competitions. We ended up doing most of the preseason with only 12 or 13 players. Fortunately, I had a lot of experience in this situation from my time with the under 20’s in Australia where we often only had 12 players at training, so I was ready for this.

We had a few trial games, only one against a team in the first division. Then the week before the season started, we got everyone back. So there wasn’t much time for everyone to prepare together and everyone was at different levels of fitness and preparation.

[ What does the rest of the staff at Tainan City look like? ]

We’re a small team. On the management side, there’s the president and technical director and we have a manager based in Taipei. On the coaching side, I have an assistant coach with me every training session and we have a fitness coach - Ms Lin (林純玉) - she’s quite famous in Taiwan for fitness training and was the fitness coach for the table tennis national team. She helps us twice a week with fitness sessions.

Another interesting part I’m responsible for is scouting players and presenting them to management, or putting them in touch with the agent. It’s a new thing for me, very interesting but also very time consuming!

[ Are you scouting inside Taiwan or also looking around Asia/the world? ]

I’ve tried a little bit of everything! We signed 3 players from outside Taiwan - one French player, Mouhamed Sakkouh - whom I got in touch with through a mutual friend - and two Brazilians, one (Matheus Porto) who had been playing in Hong Kong and another (Toninho) who was in Brazil.

In the Taiwan Premier League, we are allowed 6 foreign players on the team sheet - 5 from anywhere plus one Asian player. For the AFC Challenge League, there is no limit.

[ How do you prepare for your matches in the Challenge League (Shan United from Myanmar and Young Elephants from Laos) - is there a lot of data and/or video footage available? ]

We try to prepare as much as possible and there is a lot of footage on YouTube. Like the Taiwan Premier League, Laos and Myanmar are very accessible, there’s lots of video - so we can get some information about the opponents. Otherwise, we prepare like we would for every other game. We don’t have much time off between our league matches and the Challenge League but the preparation is similar.

It’s a 10 day trip and there’s a lot of administrative stuff to work out in terms of visas and travel - making sure we bring all the equipment we need. So we have to prepare everything beforehand.

[ Expectations at Tainan City ]

The club's objective is clearly to win the league and to qualify for the Challenge League. That's something that's been very clear from the start of the season - winning is the only objective at the club.

At the beginning, I was on a ‘trial’ period (like a probation period) where I knew it was a possibility that they might hire another head coach. My contract (I don’t know the details of the other coaches) and 99% of the players in Taiwan are on one year contracts. So every player is a free agent at the end of the season!

I think that’s part of the development that can be done here in Taiwan because if you have good players and manage to sign a longer contract, you might get transfer fees at some point as well.

[ How was the adjustment from youth football to senior football? ]

Look, obviously, the higher up you go in age groups, the more complex it is. When you work with 7, 8 or 9 year olds, you just ask and they do. The more they play, the better they get - it’s very straightforward.

I thought that the adjustment would be harder, that the difference between U20 and senior level would be bigger but I haven’t seen that huge difference. Of course, when players get older, their football knowledge is higher and to get them to buy into your methods and ideas, what you say needs to make sense! Now I work with some very experienced players and that’s helped me adapt to the environment and integrate myself with the team and Taiwanese football.

[ Are you connected with the youth teams at the club? ]

At the club - and most clubs in Taiwan, the under 18 and under 15 teams are mostly affiliated school teams. So the connection between the youth teams and the first team is not so strong. It’s starting to change and I think in the future more clubs will set up academies. Currently, AC Taipei is the best example of a club operating in a ‘European style’ system but most clubs are working with schools for their youth teams.

[ Future plans ]

For me, the challenge is important. I want to work at clubs that really have a vision. If it’s possible, I want to go as high as I can, I’m still young and there’s plenty of time. I like to win and that’s a big part of what I like about senior football, it’s all about winning. Developing players (at youth level) is great but I like winning more.