The thumping bass of French hip-hop blares from the first-team dressing room in the bowels of the Stade Gabriel Montpied. Players, tattoos snaking up their arms, meander along the hospital-green corridors on their way to the gym. It is an unremarkable scene at an unremarkable club. This is the home of Clermont Foot, denizens of France’s second division. They are a side of moderate expectation and limited funds — a football team in a rugby town. Clermont itself is a pretty, quiet place, in the middle of the country but a long way from anywhere, reports The Times.
This season, though, things are different. This season, as their coach says, “it will be impossible to ignore Clermont.” She is right, but perhaps not for the reasons she wants.
Yes, that’s right: she. In May, Clermont’s president, Claude Michy, made a decision. He had been approached by a local agent, Sonia Souid, on behalf of one of her clients: a Portuguese coach by the name of Helena Costa. She had worked for Celtic and Benfica as well as coaching the women’s teams of Iran and Qatar. She had been nicknamed — with just a dash of sexist condescension —“Mourinho in a skirt.” Michy was intrigued. “It seemed an interesting idea, the chance to be a laboratory for the future,” he says. He decided to go for it. His team would become the only side in any major league to employ a female manager.
The announcement of her appointment was welcomed by France’s women’s minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, as a brave new dawn, proof that “giving a place to women is the future of professional football”. A month later, Costa arrived to take training for the first time. Two days after that, she was gone.
In an open letter she claimed that the club were “lacking in respect” and “amateurish”. She had been denied any control over transfers; the sporting director, Olivier Chavanon, had ignored her emails. She had realised she was there merely as “the face of the club”. They had no intention, she said, of allowing her any real power at all. It was all just a charade.
Michy denied the allegations, of course, though he did not help himself by adding that “she is a woman; they are capable of leading us to believe in certain things”. The man, though, was not for turning. He replaced Costa with Corinne Diacre, veteran of 121 appearances for France’s women’s team. If anything, that compounded Costa’s point.
It smacked of a publicity stunt, akin to the Italian side Perugia’s abortive attempt in 2003 to sign Birgit Prinz, the German striker and one of the superstars of the female game. She smelt a gimmick and turned it down. Michy’s response to the accusation that he is doing something similar is more cryptic than might be expected. “I do not respond to that interpretation,” he says. “Everyone is free to think what they want.”
If it was, though, nobody has told Diacre. She is sitting in her office at the Gabriel Montpied, 48 hours after her first competitive game, a 2-1 defeat by Brest. She was presented with flowers by her opposite number before the game. They may have been designed to celebrate her 40th birthday, but it is safe to say that the gesture is unlikely to be repeated anywhere else in Europe this season.
Diacre has a busy day ahead of her team’s home fixture against Auxerre, but she is courteous, patient, forgiving of French drawn straight from Encore Tricolore, despite the clear sense that she is doing this interview through gritted teeth. “There are far too many questions linked to the fact I am a woman, not to the fact that I am a manager,” she says. “It is becoming a bit tiring. It is clear I am making history, but I want people to stop asking questions about the fact I coach a male team and ask instead about the game, the team, about football. I am not a militant feminist at all. I am a woman, but I am a manager. I hope [the focus] will change. Quickly.”
Diacre has a point. Take away her gender and her CV indicates she was a strong candidate for the job. As a player, she was an imposing, commanding central defender, a key part of the French national side for more than a decade: she won 121 caps and in 2003 scored the goal that took her side to the World Cup.
She had always had designs on management, though. She grew up just outside Lille, in France’s industrial north. She fell in love with the game at the age of six as the result of the infectious enthusiasm of her father, a teacher. She started her first coaching courses as an 18-year-old, while taking her degree in physical education and sports science. Playing always came first, though: she remembers failing one qualification to become a PE teacher because, exhausted from an international match the night before, she could not complete a “rescue swim” dragging a mannequin 20 metres through a pool.
Read more of this report from The Times.