At 56, Christophe Galtier became the new coach of Paris Saint-Germain to give a new face to the team, which had become very dull during the passage of his predecessor, the Argentinian Mauricio Pochettino. With a thunderous start to the season in the league, only hampered on Sunday evening by Monaco (1-1), the native of Marseilles quickly won unanimous support among supporters. His management of a star-studded workforce is praised internally and externally.
Exclusively for Europe 1, Christophe Galtier confided in Jean-François Pérès and Jacques Vendroux for a good twenty minutes on the show Europe 1 Sport presented by Lionel Rosso. His adaptation, his discovery of the club and the players, his management method, his assistant Thierry Oleksiak but also the club’s debut in the Champions League, on September 6 against Juventus of Turin… Exclusive interview with a now essential personality French football.
Since your arrival, there is the impression that you are unanimous. Do you agree ?
“I try to protect myself from that. The first thing is that I’m very happy to be the coach of Paris Saint-Germain. I’m very happy, my family too and that’s it. the most important. Then, obviously, there were a lot of things said about my choice. It was legitimate. But I’m fulfilled here, in Paris. There’s a lot of expectation, a lot of exposure and I have to do very careful about that. But the first happy person is me.”
We have the impression that you have made Paris Saint-Germain more human…
“I don’t know. I think it would be really pretentious to believe that. Me, what I discovered from the inside as soon as I arrived is that I’m dealing with a very human group and good people. Serious players, friends, accomplices, ambitious, certainly with personality, but personality is needed. The feeling you have is perhaps the fact that I am simply a French coach and that I I find it easier to express myself with you, the media, with people from the outside. But internally, I discovered an extraordinary group and a club where everyone is listening.”
It’s a club that obviously carries a lot of fantasies. What surprised you the most between the image you had of Paris-Saint-Germain as a coach of opposing teams and what you are experiencing today?
“You are right about fantasies. When you are from the outside, you listen to and read a lot of things. The first thing is that an epiphenomenon is made into a cataclysm, an earthquake. In all the locker room and in all the teams, there is always something going on. That’s how it is, it’s the human being who is like that.
I discovered a very organized club. But I had no doubts about that and I discovered players who work like great professionals, who are respectful of each other, respectful of the staff, respectful of the staff, the medical staff and the players who have a great ambition to have a great season. Are we going to get there? I think being ambitious is not being pretentious. We must have this ambition. Afterwards, it’s up to us to put all the ingredients on our side in the preparations for the match and on a daily basis, in the sessions, in the requirements before the sessions, during the sessions… It takes a lot, a lot of requirement. “
PSG is another dimension?
“Yes, by exposure. You have to weigh the pros and cons of a decision because you know it will be commented on, amplified, often distorted. And also, as with you journalists, be very careful in speaking on a public level because you are observed and scrutinized. A sentence, a word, it is multiplied by 100,000 when you are the coach of PSG.
As a child, did you dream of being with these players?
“A dream? No. I never dreamed of that. Coaching players like Kylian (Mbappé) like Neymar, like Leo Messi or like Sergio Ramos, I wouldn’t have imagined it. But as my career was advancing, from the path I was able to have, it was an ambition. It was no longer a utopian dream, it was an ambition. Was it going to happen or not? I didn’t know. But obviously, I am very proud and very happy to train these players, these profiles, these world-class players.
But we must train them in the same way as others, with a look or a surely different attention. They need demands. I’m not a strict person, but they need to be demanding. In the dialogue, in the human relationship, these are players who are much more comfortable in the face-to-face, than to express themselves in front of a group.
When you see Neymar, who seemed sad and who was still sending bad signals a few months ago, having fun on the pitch, shining, doing everything he has achieved since the start of the season, you say to yourself: ‘I do well my job?
“My goal is obviously to make people happy. The happier a player is, the better he performs.”
Is it a credo?
“Yes. But it’s in everyday life. An unhappy employee is never a successful employee for his company. A happy player is always an added value to the team. To get there, I work from very simply: there cannot be anything left unsaid, you have to have a direct, frank dialogue, with a lot of respect Whatever the player and whatever the career profile and age of the player, always have respect, but there can’t be anything left unsaid. The player has the right to tell me everything. Once we’ve evacuated all this unsaid, we put everything flat. I have to manage to do so that the player can flourish within the collective, within the group, so that he is really an added value to the team.”
PSG conceded their first draw of the season on Sunday against Monaco (1-1)… Good or bad thing?
“We needed the truth. Monaco was the first big meeting of the season on a national level, Monaco is the third in the championship last season. It’s a team that is used to the European Cup. They are international players. It’s a good level. We haven’t fallen asleep compared to the great previous performances. Simply, we had a much higher level of adversity in terms of individual value, in terms of collective values, in terms of intensity and it took us a long time to respond to that level.”
The Champions League begins in just eight days against Juventus Turin, a legendary club…
“Obviously, it’s a big meeting for the club. It’s a meeting for the players, for me. We have the ambition to go as far as possible in this competition. You, the media, make Paris Saint-Germain appear as the favorite of that group. I don’t think so. If you ask the question, whether it’s Benfica or Juventus, they will tell you that it’s a group very open where these three teams have the possibility of qualifying. Afterwards, there will be the truth of the match. Everyone wants to win, everyone wants to go as far as possible. This is a singular season in the history of the football with the World Cup in the middle, with European Cup matches every week, which is very rare.
It will be necessary to make sure to have an optimal state of form to be able to be efficient too. We work a lot there with our medical, performance and physical unit to always present a high-performance team in a very busy schedule. There will be a cut after our match in Lyon on September 18, there is a cut for three to four players because all the other players in the squad will be in selection. They will not have a break so until November 13, and then they will leave for the World Cup. That’s why I talk so often with my players about agreeing not to start a game and agreeing to leave during the game because it can be a season with 70 games and a season with 70 matches this long, it’s the first time.”
How is Kylian Mbappe? How do you find him on a daily basis, both on and off the pitch? He is a fundamental player for PSG and the Blues less than 3 months from the World Cup…
“Very good! Already, I was very happy that he stayed at Paris-Saint-Germain and even more when I was appointed coach. His preparation was not truncated but it was different because there I also had this obsession with winning the Champions Trophy. He had been suspended, he wasn’t there. Then afterwards, he was a little upset by a small problem in his hip too. For this young player… He don’t like it when I say that (smile)…
When you call him “young player”?
“He is a young man. But very mature. He is someone who is very intelligent, very structured mentally and intellectually. Like it or not, when you make the decision to stay in Paris with all that this generates, I think that behind, there is a little decompression and that it is difficult to leave.”
What is the role of your partner, Thierry Oleksiak?
“He’s someone I’ve worked with for ten years. The advantage of having such a loyal, competent assistant is that at a glance, he knows how to approach me. And that’s is very important. He is also the one who absorbs a lot of the discussions or the frustration of the players. He brings me up at the right time, at the right timing, in the right way what I need to know about the situation of the players. So obviously , he is a faithful, very competent but who knows me perfectly. I think he knows me much better than some people in my family.”
What is happening around Paul Pogba has shocked us all. With Luis Campos (the sporting director of PSG), is the problem of the entourage of players something that has concerned you for years? Do you take this into account when it comes to establishing recruitments?
“It’s part of the basics of reflection, automatically. The family environment, the professional environment, the psychology of the player. It’s already so difficult to find the right profile, we must automatically not carry out a neighborhood survey, but there are a lot of questions asked about the environment of the player. But 20 or 30 years ago it was already more or less the same.”