Emers Faye before the 2024 Africa Cup of Nations final between Ivory Coast and Nigeria (French)

Emers Faye, a former international midfielder with the France national team, then with the Ivorian national team. During 8 years, he played 44 international matches with the Elephants, and participated in 3 editions of the African Cup of Nations.

He was appointed assistant coach of Ivory Coast when he turned 40, then he became a temporary coach in the middle of the African Championship that his country hosted in 2023/2024, and he succeeded in leading the “Elephants” to their third continental title.

Birth and upbringing

Emers Fay was born on January 24, 1984 in the city of Nantes in northwestern France, to immigrant parents from the Ivory Coast in search of better living conditions.

He grew up on England Street in the small Malakoff neighborhood on the outskirts of Nantes, which includes a large African community, where he lived in simple housing on the tenth floor of the building in which his family lived.

Fay, who holds dual citizenship from France and Ivory Coast, said that as a child he dreamed of being a player or a doctor to please his parents. While football was his passion, without knowing that he would become a professional player or coach.

Emers Faye during a press conference before the match between Senegal and Ivory Coast in the 2024 African Cup of Nations (French)

An early love of football

Between the ages of five and seven, his football talent appeared when he played with his friends in the streets, where football occupied most of their time and kept them out of the house until late at night.

He says about that period, "I was playing ball with the neighborhood people in a gymnasium in the area, and the police often kicked us out of it, and sometimes we would enter it through the ceiling when it was closed in our face."

Fei was a good goalkeeper for his neighborhood team, but he quickly stopped, as he needed money to buy gloves every now and then. After learning the ABCs of playing football in the “Malikof” neighborhood, which was a reservoir of football talent, from which many stars graduated, such as the Guinean “Abdoulaye Toure”, midfielder for the French club Le Havre, and “Mouctar Diakhaby”, defender of the Spanish club Valencia, who led the national team. Their country reached the quarter-finals of the 2023 African Cup of Nations.

The child Fay joined the Nantes Club Academy in 1995, and the people of his neighborhood at that time used to describe him as their pride in the inter-neighbourhood tournaments, because he was the only one who succeeded in joining the aforementioned academy.

For him, football was just fun, but his life changed as soon as he joined his city club, FC Nantes, at the age of 11, where he rose through all the minor groups and emerged as an outstanding defensive midfielder. He was famous for his fighting abilities and the quality of his passes.

He said, "I was serious and did not have any accounts on the field, but it took me 4 years to realize that football was not just a joke," and he began earning a little money when he turned 16.

Faye during the 2024 Africa Cup of Nations semi-final match between Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Associated Press)

Football career in France

The young man signed his first professional contract with the adult team of Nantes, and participated in his first match on July 26, 2003, in the third round of the UEFA Cup.

He played 126 matches with the club during 4 seasons, during which he scored 7 goals, then he lived a period of decline to the bottom of the French League, before being relegated to the second division in 2007.

He moved to the English club Reading, worth 2.5 million pounds sterling for 3 years, but in the 2007-2008 season he was only able to play in 11 official matches, and this was due to the strong competition for the main playing positions in the club, in addition to his suffering from complications. Malaria after his return from Ghana in February 2008, where he participated with his country in the African Cup.

In June 2008, he was loaned for 3 months to the French team Nice, and scored 10 goals in 97 matches, before the team bought his contract permanently in January 2009.

The boy's brilliance did not pass without attracting the attention of the coaches of the young French national teams, as he played for the French national team under the age of 17, and was crowned with the World Junior Football Championship in 2001.

During this edition, the Roosters were defeated by Nigeria in the group stage, then achieved the title by defeating the same team in the final. The French squad at that time included in its ranks Mourad Mughni and Hassan Yebda, players who later went on to play for the Algerian national team.

In June 2004, he won the Toulon International Tournament, alongside the France national team (under 21 years of age), and played some matches alongside Franck Ribery, under the supervision of coach René Girard.

Faye during a training session on the eve of the 2024 African Cup of Nations semi-final match (French)

From stadiums to training

On February 1, 2012, after a 12-year football career, Fay announced his retirement from football at the age of 28, due to thrombophlebitis (blood clot) in the leg.

Before that, he had been receiving anticoagulant treatment since 2008 when he was 24 years old, and he played in his last four years with a blood clot, which almost led to a fatal pulmonary embolism. After 6 months of medical care, he suffered 3 setbacks, so doctors advised him to stop playing football.

The work in training was the window through which Fay broke into the football scene again, and he underwent systematic training until he obtained a training diploma. In parallel with that, he engaged in applied training as an assistant coach within the various technical staff of the teams of the younger age groups of the Nice Club for 3 years, starting in the year 2012.

In the 2018-2019 season, the Nice club management appointed him as head coach of the youth team (under 17 years), then coach of the youth team (under 19 years). In 2020, he obtained a football coach certificate, and during the 2021-2022 season, he became coach of the reserve team of the French club Clermont Foot.

Football career with Ivory Coast

The former French player chose to represent the first team of his native country, and officially joined it in 2005 until his retirement in 2012. During this period, he played for the Elephants shirt about 44 matches, during which he scored a single goal against Switzerland on May 27, 2006, two minutes after entering the field.

The Ivory Coast international appeared for the first time in his country's victory over Benin in the World Cup qualifiers, on March 27, 2005, and then participated in three editions of the African Cup of Nations in 2006, 2008 and 2010.

The former star of the French club Nice was part of the golden generation, along with the brothers Kolo, Yaya Toure, Didier Drogba and Kanga Akali, who reached the final of the African Cup of Nations in 2006 in Egypt.

Fay is the third national coach who was able to win with his country in the African Cup of Nations (French).

In April 2022, he took charge of the national youth team, which failed to qualify for the U-23 Africa Cup of Nations in Algeria.

The Ivorian Federation retained him until the end of the season, before he permanently joined the Elephants’ technical staff, as an assistant to veteran French coach Jean-Louis Gasquet, during the qualifying matches and the first round of the 2023 African Cup of Nations, which his country is hosting.

Ivory Coast started the 2023 tournament among the candidates for the title, and beat Guinea with two clean goals. But it collapsed in the next two matches, losing to Nigeria by one goal and to Equatorial Guinea by four.

The "Elephants" team needed the results of other teams to achieve its goal, and it took 3 days of painful waiting until the end of the group stage matches before the qualification matter was decided.

This was achieved after Mozambique tied with Ghana 2-2, then Morocco gave Ivory Coast a gift by defeating Zambia, so the “Elephants” qualified among the top 4 teams occupying third place.

By that time, French coach Louis Gasquet had been dismissed, and the Ivory Coast national team was hoping to obtain the services of its former coach, Hervé Renard, on loan from the France women's national team to complete the mission, but his request was rejected.

In a moment of crisis, the national team announced on January 24, 2024, that it would complete the rest of the continental tournament, under the temporary leadership of Emers Fay, and this coincided with his 40th birthday.

Reclaiming the lost dream

Faye led the Elephants at a time when he had to prepare for the round of 16 match, without enough time for the players to absorb his tactical idea.

But he became a national hero to the extent that many described him as a “savior,” and it was said that he came in a state of emergency, putting the entire African continent in a state of emergency, and the “Elephants” journey continued under his management to achieve the “miracle.”

However, the young coach stressed that “the miracle did not fall from the sky, but was created by the players,” when he created a different version of the “Elephants” battalion in the middle of the continental tournament, and showed amazing mental fortitude in defeating teams that were candidates to win the title.

Fay is the first interim coach to lead his country to win the African Cup of Nations (French)

While most of the optimists of Ivory Coast's brilliance did not expect them to pass the eighth round, after the disappointing first round, the reality on the field had a different opinion, and Ivory Coast became the first host country to win the title in 18 years after Egypt won the 2006 title on home soil.

The coach - whom the press called “exceptional” - completed the mission by ascending to the continental throne on Sunday evening, February 11, 2024, at the “Hassan Ouattara” stadium in the capital, Abidjan, with a final that was the most watched in the history of the tournament, as it was broadcast across 173 regions around the world.

The young man "Fai" succeeded in the 2023 edition of the tournament, while he failed in it when he was a player in 2006. He was crowned, as interim technical director, with the continental competition title for the third time in the history of his country's national team after the 1992 and 2015 editions.

Before this historic achievement, the former midfielder had one goal in mind, which was to do better, after he inherited a “dead team,” as he described it after the defeat against Equatorial Guinea, and he admitted, saying, “We went through difficult days psychologically and mentally and we passed through the back door.”

Returning from hell, as described by the local and international press, gave the Ivory Coast national team moral motivation and great mental strength, and Fay is credited with his success in infusing a new spirit into the players inside the locker room, so that they became stronger in terms of fighting and playing until the last minute, and dealt intelligently at the level of substitutions.

Thus, “Fay” became one of the architects of the renaissance of the Ivorian team in the African Cup of Nations, and he became the first coach to win the title without starting the edition as coach of his team, and the owner of the third consecutive title achieved by a national coach with his country’s national team, after the Algerian Djamel Belmadi in 2019, and the Senegalese Aliou Cisse. Year 2021.

Source: websites