Drogba Says France’s Problems Can be Fixed with New Stadiums

By: Laurie | April 7th, 2008

If you build it, they will come.

“It” being a new stadium, of course. Or so says Chelsea and Ivory Coast superstriker Didier Drogba. He believes that if the French put money into new stadiums, they’ll have better success at keeping their young talent in the country.

In the past decade or so, the French ligues have become known as feeder leagues for the rest of Europe, particularly the EPL. In football, France is knows as a great country to be from. They have excellent youth development systems in place, with the ability to nurture promising talent from young ages. Players coming from France tend to be technically and tactically skilled. And they’re frequently looking for the money and prestige they feel can only come from playing abroad.

And so France has become a net exporter of talent.

I guess Drogba might know what he’s talking about, since he himself started out in France, playing for teams like LeMans and Guingamp before being signed by big fish Marseille in 2003. But he stayed with Marseille for only one season before signing with Chelsea in the EPL.

“To keep youngster like Benzema, like Ben Arfa, like Yohann Pele we have to propose new solutions, but which ones? First of all we should improve the French stadiums and make them look younger. It’s obvious. That may not be the reason why young players move abroad, but that is one of the reasons. French stadiums are old fashioned. Just go to Sunderland. Their stadium [pictured] can’t welcome 50,000 fans but it’s simple, welcoming, close to the players, a bit like Caen’s. This kind of venue is the basis in England. There it’s always sold out. There is passion and enthusiasm everywhere.

“Honestly, it’s exciting. Besides, people spend. They make the club’s business work, but the region as well.”

Drogba also briefly mentions the French tax code as another reason for the exodus, since it requires teams to give players a much higher salary than they would receive in the EPL to give them the same takehome pay. But his main focus is on the stadiums.

I’ve been to games in only three French stadiums, and two of them were the big Paris stadiums, Parc des Princes, which is nice, and Stade de France, which was built for the 1998 World Cup and ran like clockwork when we were there.

The third was in Metz, though — a little town whose team has been bouncing back and forth between Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 in recent years. The game experience was a lot of fun, but if the stadium is replicated across the country, Drogba might be onto something. My section of the stadium didn’t even have seats — just plastic, backless butt-cup things to keep you from sitting in your neighbor’s seat. I’ve been in high school bleachers that were more comfortable, and I think I was one of the few tourist at the game.

Obviously, though, we’re dealing with a chicken-and-egg thing here. Do teams lack passionate support because the stadiums aren’t fan-friendly? Or are the stadiums not up-to-date and fan-friendly because the teams lack the passionate support (of the financial variety)? It’s not as if building new stadiums is cheap, and French teams are required by law to operate in the black.

In the end, this is a complicated topic, with no simple solutions. As a Ligue 1 fan, though, I am grateful that Drogba is broaching the topic, because unless sometihng is done, the France teams will eventually be made up entirely of kids under twenty who haven’t moved abroad yet and older players who don’t have the talent.

(For regular posts on this topic, be sure to check out Inara’s blog, Lyon Offside.)