Jean-Baptiste Sarrazin / Photo credits: Frederick FLORIN / AFP
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8:25 p.m., April 20, 2023
Recruited on the Strasbourg bench on February 14 to try to keep the club in Ligue 1, Frédéric Antonetti has previously trained several other clubs in France. Exclusively in “Europe 1 Sport”, the technician has drawn up a list of players who have marked him the most during his career.
Since 1994, Frédéric Antonetti has seen players pass through the French championship. From his debut on the Bastia bench in 1994 to his recent arrival in Strasbourg last February to keep the club in Ligue 1, the 61-year-old technician has given no less than 150 players a chance in France. A power partly due to his coaching position that the latter mentioned exclusively in Europe 1 Sports (every evening from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. live on Europe 1): “It was somewhat linked to the club profile in which I was. Average clubs where you had to take them out of young people, recruit young people elsewhere to make them start in one.”
But if there is a club in which Frédéric Antonetti has worked the most among young people, it is at Stade Rennais. “In Rennes, I started 22 players. The academy produced a lot of players. So there are 22 who started including (Yann) M’Vila or (Yacine) Brahimi”, recalled the former Messin coach. But the 61-year-old technician was also marked by a few players. He drew up a list at the microphone of Jacques Vendroux: among them are “(Michael) Essien, (Hugo) Lloris, Ederson, (Anto) Drobnjak, (Karim) Ziani, (Yann) M’Vila, (Franck) Jurietti, or (Ľubomír) Moravčík”. For Antonetti, this Slovak player “could have played in the biggest European clubs, but he was a bit crazy.”
References from coaches
Frédéric Antonetti also has his list of reference coaches in mind, those who inspired the experienced technician when he started out. “I would say the most talented was Jean-Claude Suaudeau,” commented the man from Corsica. Jean-Claude Suaudeau has spent his entire coaching career on the bench of FC Nantes, from 1982 to 1988 then from 1991 to 1997. “Aimé Jacquet” is also a name that often comes up in the mouth of the Strasbourg coach. Finally, “I really liked Guy Roux”. For the Strasbourg coach, the great quality of the Auxerrois, “was the constitution of the workforce.”