Faced with the curiosity of journalists, how can you keep your team composition confidential?

Almost before each meeting of the French team, the team composition is already known, to the great displeasure of the coaches who sometimes try to fool the journalists.

‘Griezmann should start against Belgium’. Three days before the Blues’ round of 16 at Euro 2024, The Team already slipped a first indiscretion on the composition of Didier Deschamps’ team. The sports daily is not the only media to reveal the starting eleven of the Blues before their matches. It is even a challenge for some of the special envoys during major competitions, to the point that some redouble their ingenuity to “crack the closed session”, that is to say find a loophole to watch the last training session before the match, generally closed to the public.

This gives enthusiasts and supporters the illusion that they are as close as possible to the field, while providing fodder for debate. But, on the other hand, the coach can no longer really rely on the element of surprise. “One day I told journalists at a press conference with a bit of provocation: ‘You are leaking our information to the enemy. In wartime, you would all be condemned for high treason'”remembers Raymond Domenech, coach of the Blues from 2004 to 2010. This game of cat and mouse has existed for around thirty years when closed sessions were introduced.

“Aimé Jacquet was not obsessed with it, Roger Lemerre was a little more so. Didier Deschamps also tries to enforce the closed session, but he never threw a tantrum”says Philippe Tournon, the press chief for the Blues from 1983 to 2004, then from 2010 to 2018. The current coach is always careful not to fall into the trap of leading questions from overly curious interlocutors. “Do you want me to give you the composition?” is a classic in a pre-match press conference.

In Germany for the Euro, between each match, a training session is open in full to the media, generally the one furthest from the next sporting event. The regular players often do adapted work separately. Others are open for 15 minutes, leaving only time to attend the warm-up and the start of an exercise. This is the case of the highly coveted session on the eve of the match.

For France-Poland, a reinforced UEFA security device was deployed around the Home Deluxe Arena in Paderborn, where a gate that allowed a glimpse of a section of the pitch was completely blocked. This did not prevent The Team to reveal that Antoine Griezmann would be a substitute. Eight days earlier, before the clash against the Netherlands, it was possible to spy on the Blues from a dumpster outside the training ground in Düsseldorf. A young supporter perched in a tree had fun taking the session on video, before sharing it with journalists. This is surely why, despite the fact that France-Belgium is being played in Düsseldorf, the Blues decided to hold their last training session in Paderborn.

More keen than Didier Deschamps on respecting closed doors and perhaps sometimes stung by conflicts with certain journalists, Raymond Domenech has put in place several strategies to prevent his starting lineup from being entirely known to his opponent for more than 24 hours before the match. “What we are already trying to do is to protect the pitch. We were trying to close the stadium. We were putting up tarpaulins. We were cutting down the trees because the journalists were climbing the trees. On the pitch, we were exchanging the chasubles. I varied the options a lot. In theory, you need at least three. [pour créer le flou]”he remembers.

“In Clairefontaine, we spent thousands of euros on tarpaulins. We had decided to put them all over the street that went up alongside the technical centre, but the journalists came in a van and brought a ladder to climb on them. [et observer l’entraînement par-dessus les bâches]”, recalls Philippe Tournon. Before the 2018 World Cup, during closed training at the Blues HQ, while he was driving Samuel Umtiti in a cart towards the treatment room, he remembers receiving a text from a journalist asking him if the injury was serious: “He was probably perched on a tree or on a ladder in the street“.

“At Euro 2008 in Switzerland, the weather was so bad that the pitch was no good. At the last minute, we went to train on another pitch. I was told to warn the journalists and I didn’t warn anyone. They arrived at the end of training“, confides Raymond Domenech, grateful for the “unnecessary provocation“For him, any closed session is necessarily”fictitious“and the fight is lost in advance.”There is always someone who sees things, the stadium guard or someone who has been paid in a building [et qui a la vue sur le terrain]”, he insists, fatalistically.

“The coach is trying to keep things calm, but it is clear that the score of this match is in favour of the journalists, who are even leading by a wide margin.”

Philippe Tournon

at franceinfo: sport

“It’s becoming more and more closed but, at the same time, we’ve never known as much as we have in the last six or seven years. In any case, withdrawing into ourselves is no use. It gives coaches the illusion that they have everything under control. In reality, they have control over what’s happening in their locker room but not what’s coming out of it.”analyzes Vincent Duluc, joFootball news reporter at the newspaper The Team since 1995. Even if the secret of the closed session remains well kept, this does not prevent the circulation of information by other means.

“No one could imagine that Aurélien Tchouameni was going to play against the Netherlands before L’Equipe and Le Parisien released the information the day before. The leak could only come from Tchouameni. He may have said it to his woman, to her agent and in the end, the journalists end up getting the information”deduces Raymond Domenech, who remembers players who called journalists directly after training to give them the team line-ups. When you occupy these positions, you become a little schizo (sic)”. Him-even had been accused of being the mole during the 2010 World Cup when The Team had published its front page with Nicolas Anelka’s insults against him.

“In addition to not making a mistake, the selectors want to be able to surprise. Making the right choice is not enough for them, it has to be the choice that the opponent does not expect. But I don’t think that “It’s decisive in the last four finals, Didier Deschamps goes to the final three times, so it has absolutely no impact on the results.” “We are very proud of our team,” says Vincent Duluc, who is following the French team closely in this Euro. Giving too much importance to the confidentiality of his eleven can even lead the coach to shoot himself in the foot.

“The day before the decisive France-Denmark match at the 2002 World Cup, Roger Lemerre deliberately created a false setup so that the press would not have the right team. But the problem was that his players did not have the right team either. That same evening, a player had gone to the casino of the Sheraton hotel that we shared and he did not know that he would be starting.”says Vincent Duluc.