The coach of the French women’s soccer team, Corinne Diacre, was dismissed yesterday, five months before the start of the World Cup, due to disagreements with several of the team’s most important players. Diacre, who had a contract until 2024, will leave her position and a commission will be in charge of finding a replacement with an eye on the city in Australia and New Zealand between July 20 and August 20.
The coach, who has led the French team since 2017, has been on the fence since the captain, Wendie Renard, withdrew from the team in disagreement with her work, a path that she followed with other of her teammates. The crisis broke out on February 24, when Renard, charismatic captain of the national team and Olympique de Lyon, announced that she was ending her international career due to disagreements with the situation in the national team, although she did not mention Diacre. “I cannot give my endorsement to the current system that is very far from the demands that the highest level requires,” said the player, who in the past had had many frictions with the coach.
Subsequently, it was the PSG footballers Marie-Antoinette Katoto and Kadidiatou Diani who followed in his footsteps by assuring that their participation in the national team was on hold.
The interim president of the French Football Federation (FFF), Philippe Diallo, had commissioned a report on the situation of the women’s team whose conclusions revealed “irreversible dysfunctions”. “In view of these elements, it has been decided to put an end to Corinne Diacre’s mission as head of the women’s team,” the FFF said in a statement.
unacceptable ways
The commission commissioned by Diallo, which carried out several interviews over the last few days, also with Diacre herself, found that there is “a very important fracture with key players and has revealed a distance from the demands of the high level ”. This fracture, they explain in the Federation, “has reached a point of no return that harms the interests of the selection”; all this, admit in the institution, despite Diacre’s total involvement in his work leading the team. The FFF will also hope that the way in which several players show their disagreements with the selector, through social networks, “is not acceptable”, so it will create a mediation instance for the future.
Diallo, who took over the reins of the team on an interim basis after the recent resignation of Noël Le Graët, accused of sexual harassment, wants to take advantage of Diacre’s replacement to give “a new global ambition in favor of women’s football” and the , with an eye on the next World Cup and the Olympic Games in Paris in 2024. The commission, in which the presence of Jean-Michel Aulas, president of Lyon, women’s European champion, stands out, will have to interview different candidates for the position and recommend an appointment to the president.
Diacre, who was interrogated by the commission last Tuesday for more than two hours, broke her silence yesterday and, faced with rumors that her dismissal was imminent, she surely felt like the victim of a “settlement of personal accounts.” The 48-year-old coach, the first woman to sit on a bench in the men’s first division in France, at Clermont, complained that her sporting balance was not taken into account in her criticism, with 52 victories and only six defeats in the 64 games directed.
His record includes three wins in the modest France Tournament, but in major competitions his best performance was the semifinal of the last Euro Cup, to which are added the quarterfinals of the previous one (2017) and the 2019 World Cup played in France.
The French case is reminiscent of the resignation a few months ago of 15 soccer players from the Spanish soccer team, whose functions were very similar to those of Renard and company. The substantial difference with the Spanish case is that the national coach, Jorge Vilda, remains in office while the players have not yet returned to a call-up with the national team.
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