"We had to fight the trauma at TFC", explains President Comolli

TFC President Damien Comolli, October 6, 2020 at the Toulouse Stadium.

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• Representative of the American fund RedBird Capital Partners, Damien Comolli succeeded Olivier Sadran in July at the head of the TFC, relegated to Ligue 2.

• The new management team, which aims for an immediate return to Ligue 1, took the head of a club in full doubt.

• Damien Comolli looks back on the end of the transfer window, during which the use of statistics played a big role.

This Tuesday morning, a few hours after the end of the transfer window, Damien Comolli received

at the Toulouse Stadium.

In office since July 16, the new president of the TFC, representative of the American fund RedBird Capital Partners, took the head of a club traumatized by its relegation to Ligue 2 at the end of a cataclysmic season, claiming from the outset his will to go back to L1.

The native of Béziers (47 years old), passed by Arsenal, Saint-Etienne, Tottenham, Liverpool or Fenerbahçe, made the rounds of purple news.

After the end of the transfer window, does the TFC have a workforce tailored for the immediate recovery?

Our goal of having a competitive team, able to fight for the rise in Ligue 1, we have achieved.

On the other hand, we are not in a sporting or financial emergency.

The life of the club will not be in danger if we do not go up.

But we are competitors, we will do anything for it.

On Saturday, after the match against Troyes (0-0), Patrice Garande hoped to have three more players, one per line.

In the end, only Dutch defensive midfielder from Levski Sofia Stijn Spierings signed on Monday…

When entering the transfer window, there were several issues to resolve.

The workforce was too large in quantity.

Our goal is to start with 23 players, including the three goalkeepers, and promote young people.

Unfortunately, the first Covid transfer window was disastrous in terms of economics and the potential mobility of players.

Some who wanted to leave or who had been identified on departure are still there.

This blocked us at the entrances.

#Mercato ✍️

Midfielder Stijn #Spierings signs with TFC!

Welcome under our colors 😈

→ https://t.co/kw06P68UrS pic.twitter.com/TAXqqRvlYo

- Toulouse FC (@ToulouseFC) October 5, 2020

At the same time, it was necessary to build a competitive team, to have a management concern in mind and to take into account market data.

When you take all of that, I think we really had a good transfer window.

We did everything to strengthen ourselves until the end.

We had to replace Ibrahim Sangaré (who went to PSV Eindhoven), that's what we did with Spierings, a very, very good player.

You have recruited a lot of non-francophones.

Are you worried about integration difficulties?

Not at all.

Recruits have compulsory French lessons two to three times a week.

Spierings signed yesterday [Monday] and in the afternoon he took a French lesson.

We discussed it with the coach [Patrice Garande] this morning, we feel that there is something going on in the team, that the state of mind is good.

It lives, it laughs.

There are players like Moreira, Gabrielsen or even Brecht [Dejaegere, Belgian midfielder recruited this summer], who speaks more languages ​​than I have fingers on my hand… They are the link between the old, the new , young people… Our first selection criterion, beyond physical, technical and tactical qualities, was human qualities, state of mind, maturity in life and in the game, the capacity for integration and concern for the collective.

Keen on statistics, Damien Comolli intends to use the Football Manager game to recruit.

- Frédéric Scheiber / Sipa for “20 Minutes”

Have you selected certain players who could have left, such as Bafodé Diakité or Manu Koné?

I had zero offers, including for [striker] Adil Taoui, despite the articles I read.

The ideal was to lend it to see what it could give.

And we were absolutely not trying to make a transfer for "Bafo", for Manu or for Kelvin [Amian].

Can you tell us about recruiting using statistics, your specialty?

It is said that you could use tools like the management game Football Manager ...

We do not use Football Manager yet, but we will.

There are a lot of clubs that use it.

It will not be an essential recruitment basis in our strategy but it can help.

The size and ambitions of the club have nothing to do with whether or not to use data.

With Damien Comolli, the Big Data revolution will sweep over TFC https://t.co/nPy5EQ6toe

- 20 Minutes (@ 20Minutes) June 14, 2020

Take last year's Champions League finalist teams Tottenham and Liverpool: they were built with data.

Leipzig, semi-finalist in the Champions League, is working on data.

Lorient is up, the club has a data manager.

We are no exception.

How does it work in practice?

Recruiters make observations in the field.

Then, they write reports and we check with the data.

Or we query the database, which gives us players according to certain criteria, which we ask recruiters to verify.

It works both ways.

All recruitments made using data confirmed what recruiters saw.

The best way to exploit live recruiting in the field and data is to mix the two.

Back to the results.

You are fifteenth, but you remain on four games without defeat ...

We are a little frustrated, we are missing points.

We should be at least up to Clermont [eighth], with nine or ten points.

In the content, there are a lot of improvements compared to the start of the season.

In Clermont, we came back from 1-0 to 1-1.

Against Auxerre, we lose 0-1 and we win 3-1.

Saturday against Troyes, we play 45 minutes to ten [after the expulsion of Diakité], including stoppage time, against the best team in the championship and we do not lose.

It shows a state of mind, a solidarity.

The team is far from having reached its full potential.

📊 The @ToulouseFC had not known a series of 4 league matches without defeat for 2 years

: 19/08/18: ✅2-1🆚Bordeaux

25/08/18: ✅1-0🆚Nîmes 01/09

/ 18: ✅1-2🆚Guingamp

09/15/18

: ⚪️1-1🆚Monaco 09/22/18: ⚪️0-0🆚Angers # TFCESTAC pic.twitter.com/piVM5tnGUh

- TFC Database (@TFCDatabase) October 3, 2020

On September 26 against Auxerre, the TFC put an end to a series of failures of nearly a year.

Did you feel this screed weighing on the club when you arrived?

There was significant trauma in the team and in the club in general.

We had to fight him.

Patrice has done a very good job of transforming this negativity, this inertia, into positivity.

The new players have brought significant dynamism.

When you play away, they come out of the locker room and say 'guys today we win', that's something our kids weren't used to.

We realized that managing to change the mindset with the same people was going to be difficult.

So we may have recruited more players than we originally planned, with different personalities and characters from those we had in the team.

This mix is ​​taking hold.

Young people are great.

If they are guided by the staff and more experienced players, they will take the right path.

Ruben [Gabrielsen, the captain] is an example in work, in leadership.

The restructuring of the club is not complete.

Arrived this summer, your recruiting manager Didier Faugeron is already leaving.

There is also a question of a sports director ...

Jérôme resigned because he felt a little out of step with our way of working.

He made an agreement with an L1 club a few weeks ago.

But he worked until the last minute of the transfer window and he is still under contract for a few weeks.

It bothers me on a human level that he leaves but we leave on very good terms.

We have known each other since 2004 and we have always stayed in touch.

As for the arrival of the sports director, it is something that we did not want to do during the transfer window.

There are important positions in the club on which we are thinking, this one is one of them.

The others do not concern the athlete.

We are in a global reflection on the organization and structure of the club.

In this period of Covid-19, are you worried about the club's economy, even if ticketing is less essential for you than for a rugby club?

Yes, it is a concern.

But we built a budget with zero euros in ticketing.

So we didn't take any risks.

However, we are extremely frustrated not being able to bring our supporters to the Stadium.

Saturday, we were able to bring in about 170 in relation to the homage to Brice Taton.

We deal with it.

Financially, it will not put us in difficulty, but it does not put us in the positive.

But above all, we want to connect the club to the city, to the community, that is to say the players, the supporters, the media, all components.

But we can't get people to come to the stadium.

There is frustration.

Don't forget where Hugo Gaston comes from .. # toulouse @ToulouseFC @ HugoGaston7 pic.twitter.com/OF0fNTCt2J

- bastien (@ bast97427) October 2, 2020

The TFC has just found a new ambassador with Hugo Gaston, the French hero of Roland-Garros, declared fan of the club ...

He was congratulated after the victory against Stan Wawrinka, then wished good luck before the game against Dominic Thiem.

We invited him to the next match [against Rodez, October 24].

Unfortunately with the sanitary measures, we cannot get it started.

As we have seen that he often trained with the Tef 'jersey from past seasons, we also planned to give him the full panoply of this year.

We're super happy for him.

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