Wall Street Journal article

France is back in football hunt

Teams are overcoming inferiority complex in Champions League play; a stronger euro helps

By JONATHAN CLEGG

It's elementary sports psychology: To produce their best in the biggest moments, athletes are advised to recall peak performances from the past.

But as Bordeaux prepares to face Olympiakos for a place in the UEFA Champions League quarterfinals tonight, Laurent Blanc, coach of the French club that's been the surprise of this year's tournament, will focus his team's attention not on the six European matches it's won this season, but the only one it didn't.

In its first Champions League match of the campaign, Bordeaux travelled to Turin to face Juventus, a two-time winner of the competition, still nursing scars of a high-profile humiliation a year earlier. At the same stage in the previous season, the French team was subjected to a four-goal hammering in its opening game at Chelsea, precipitating another early exit from the tournament.

This time was different: Jaroslav Plasil's second-half goal helped secure a 1-1 draw in Italy, and Bordeaux has never looked back.

It was, according to Mr. Blanc, a turning point in the evolution of his side, the moment when his players started to believe French clubs could really compete in Europe's premier club competition.

"We went to Turin with the desire to cause Juventus problems, to play to our strengths and, above all, not feel what French clubs often feel against these famous big clubs," Mr. Blanc says. "In that first game, we managed to lose our complex."

If French clubs had truly developed a sense of inferiority on football's biggest stage, it isn't hard to see why. Before this season, France had failed to produce a single quarterfinalist in the Champions League since the 2005-06 season, and, last year, its lone representative in the knockout rounds, Olympique Lyon, bowed out on the back of a five-goal thumping by Barcelona.

For much of the past decade, European football has been dominated by its big three: England, Spain and Italy have provided 19 of the past 20 Champions League semifinalists. France, the country that invented the European Cup in 1955, was in danger of becoming an afterthought.

"We could not compete with clubs in other leading football countries," says Damien Comolli, director of sports at Saint Etienne. "Over the past five years, the Champions League became almost an English domestic cup, being fought over by the Premier League's top four clubs."

Twelve months on, there are signs of a French renaissance.

Bordeaux can reach the quarterfinals of the Champions League for the first time tonight if it avoids defeat at home to the Greek champion Olympiakos, a team that has never won a Champions League knockout-round match.

Already in the last eight is Lyon, fresh off an amazing win over Real Madrid, the most expensive team in the history of world football.

Although Olympique de Marseille failed to qualify from a group that included Madrid and AC Milan, the group stage's three French teams produced the country's most dominant performance statistically since the Champions League switched to its current format in 2003-04, averaging record highs in wins (3.66), goals (10.3) and points (12).

If Bordeaux progresses tonight, it will be only the second time since the European Cup was rebranded as the Champions League in 1992 that Ligue 1 has sent two teams to the last eight of the continent's most prestigious club competition.

The success of Lyon and Bordeaux has given French fans hope of a sort they aren't accustomed to: They've raised the chance that France could produce its first European champion since Olympique Marseille beat AC Milan in 1993.

"No one believed in our chances, but we've shown what we can do," says Lyon's Brazilian defender, Cris. "People look at us differently now."

There are encouraging signs too in the Europa League: Lille overcame Liverpool in the first leg of its last-16 clash, while Marseille is favorite to reach the quarterfinals following a 1-1 draw against Benfica in Lisbon.

"I think French football is improving," says French forward David N'gog, who left Paris Saint-Germain to join Liverpool in 2008. "We've seen Bordeaux and Lyon doing well in the Champions League, and now the teams in the Europa League too."

Golden eras for French football have typically proved fleeting. France provided one of the finalists in the inaugural European Cup, as Stade Reims fell to a narrow defeat by Real Madrid, but in the subsequent 50 years, that's about as good as it gets.

Saint Etienne triggered a brief revival when it reached a semifinal in 1975 and then went one better the following year, and France provided three successive semifinalists in the mid-1990s, but otherwise success in the competition first conceived by Gabriel Hanot in the 1950s has been elusive. The one notable exception came in 1993 when Marseille beat Milan to lift the European Cup, but it was subsequently stripped of the title following a match-fixing scandal.

For a country that has often blamed its failure to compete in Europe on an inability to compete financially with clubs in England, Spain, and even Germany, the answer is economics. The fluctuating sterling/euro exchange rate has led to a boon from which all of Ligue 1 has benefited: the declining purchasing power of English clubs.

French teams have always struggled to hold on to their leading stars in the face of interest from Europe's top clubs, which can offer bigger wages as well as a bigger stage to play on. But in the early part of the past decade, the flow of talent away from Ligue 1 had come to resemble a flood: French clubs were still exporting talent, and not just top talent at that.

For every superstar such as Thierry Henry and Patrice Evra that left France, there was a John Utaka and Benjani Mwaruwari ready to swap Ligue 1 for teams in the lower reaches of the Premier League, most probably solely in the pursuit of greater riches. Ligue 1 was being robbed not just of its stars, but also its everyday professionals. "Leaving Ligue 1 shouldn't just be a question of money," former Lyon coach Gérard Houllier said in an interview last year. "You must be professional in your approach to leaving."

But the weakened pound and a tax increase in Britain means players are choosing to stay longer in France. In the 12 months before Jan. 1, 2009, the pound fell in value against the euro to €1.03 from €1.36. French clubs have found they can compete on salaries, and players who would have been plundered by Premier League clubs, such as Lyon goalkeeper Hugo Lloris, or Bordeaux pair Marouane Chamakh and Yoann Gourcuff, are staying put.

The results aren't only being seen in Europe, they've also made for a more exciting domestic season.

Strength in depth has long been a feature of Ligue 1—since 1995, France has sent nine teams to the Champions League group stage, while the Premier League has produced just six different qualifiers— but for much of the past 10 years, Le Championnat has been dominated by a single club.

Entering last season, Lyon had won seven straight Ligue 1 titles, many of them in runaway fashion, but its monopoly was broken last May when Bordeaux was crowned champion ahead of Marseille on the final day of a thrilling season. Lyon came in third. A year on, the title race is again in the balance. With 10 rounds remaining, the top six sides are separated by just three points.

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St. Etienne cant even compete with the other French teams. Of all the club presidents to get a comment from, this guy wouldnt be someone I would wanna hear comments from considering how bad his team has been.