Surprisingly third in Ligue 1 after nine rounds, FC Lorient is the thrilling team at the start of the season.
At its head, we discover Régis Le Bris (46), whose first experience on a professional bench, after ten seasons at the head of the Hake training center.
20 Minutes
took a long look at the Le Bris method by interviewing several former players from the Lorient reserve team.
Lorient supporters were able to take advantage of the international break to savor this historic ranking for them in Ligue 1 every day. A third place with already 19 points at stake, before welcoming Losc on Sunday (1 p.m.).
Last season, they had to wait… February 6 to reach such a total, in a most gloomy year with Christophe Pélissier.
How can the Breton club, saved in extremis in the top flight last May (16th), find itself on the podium at the quarter of the championship, with Stade Rennais (0-1) and OL on its list? (3-1)?
Do not look for a revolution in the workforce: there are only three recruits (all defensive) in the starting 11 (Mvogo, Talbi and Kalulu).
No, the real turning point is on the bench, with a French coach who has just graduated, and author of a sensational professional debut.
Namely Régis Le Bris (46), whom the general public will discover for good with his UNFP trophy for best Ligue 1 coach in June 2023. Most of the young hake faces who are revealed this season, from international hope Enzo Le Fée to Julien Ponceau, via Théo Le Bris (nephew of) and the prolific Malian striker Dango Ouattara (4 goals and 5 assists in L1), are familiar with the surprising method of the former director of the training center of the FC Lorient, also coach of the reserve team from 2015 to 2022.
A record start to the season for @FCLorient and Régis Le Bris 👏🏆 pic.twitter.com/wKA8lMfRBi
— Ligue 1 Uber Eats (@Ligue1UberEats) September 26, 2022
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“Régis never brought us the solution”
"Régis, you have to know him over time for it to really work with him," said Jocelyn Laurent (26), who worked with him for several seasons at the Lorient training center.
The current left back of AS Vitré (N3) remembers his first meeting with his former mentor as if it had just taken place: “Régis only spoke to me for 1h30, never to my parents who were by my side.
His first approach was special, I felt like I was having a job interview.
He asked me what I thought I could bring to the club.
When you're unprepared, it's very disturbing, especially since he intentionally leaves blanks that seem to last forever.
He wanted to see how young people reacted to this silence.
A first symbolic impression of the character of the character, described by several of his former players as "very discreet" and even "of rather cold appearance".
The major precept that has guided a decade of Régis Le Bris with the Merlus lies in the empowerment of young players.
Jocelyn Laurent:
Régis never brought us the solution.
He expected us to reflect between us without deciding who was right or wrong.
He kept repeating that there was no right or wrong answer.
He wanted to listen to everyone and let us decide, like a player democracy.
Even in some matches, we had the feeling that he had the solution to help us, but that he deliberately did not give it to us.
We had to find it on our own, it was part of our training according to him.
»
Atypical recruitment in National 2
Post-formed at FCL as a midfielder, Maxime Etuin (27) completes: “By the time the solution comes from the bench during a match, there are sometimes already 1-0.
In Lorient, we had the freedom to modify things ourselves, according to our feelings on the ground”.
A choice that bears fruit in National 2, where its young workforce quickly adapts to the opponent and successfully juggles between different tactical schemes in the same match.
While so many professional reserves are fighting to avoid relegation to N3, Régis Le Bris ranks in the Top 7 five times over his seven seasons in N2 (and even 2nd in 2022).
To achieve such results, the former right-back of Stade Rennais (33 games in the elite from 1994 to 1999) breaks the codes by recruiting a few experienced captains, specifically for the reserve team.
This was the case of Tristan Boubaya (ex-Saint-Malo in N2), who was 28 when he signed in Lorient in 2017: "It's often hard for the pro reserves in the league because the workforce is made up 100% young apprentices.
There, Régis wanted me as a relay because he knew that the young people were shy at the start.
I was there to supervise them, then they expressed themselves little by little in the locker room ”.
Because the basis of the work of Régis Le Bris in Morbihan is based on a reflection to be developed collectively in the locker room.
"A builder and a performance guide"
Already under his orders at Stade Rennais in national U19s, Maxime Etuin has seen his evolution: “In Rennes, he gave three instructions, with and without the ball, to each player before a match.
In Lorient, he stopped giving instructions in order to fully integrate the participatory dimension”.
Longtime friend of Régis Le Bris, and regional technical director of the League of Brittany, Yann Kervella describes "a brilliant and Cartesian mind", holder of a thesis in biomechanics.
"Régis built the Lorient training center from A to Z for ten years," he says.
He is a builder and a performance guide.
He planned with great consistency the principles of play that were built over ten seasons.
Its success is that everyone feels important and involved in its project.
He encouraged the players to write a common story with him and the club, which allowed them to develop a strong sense of belonging.
»
Claude Fauquet has a key role by his side
The turnaround of Enzo Le Fée, who wanted to leave Brittany this summer before the appointment of Régis Le Bris on the bench of the pros, is a telling example.
Because the 22-year-old player has become a flourishing conductor in "light zones", a 100% "Lebrisian" concept to describe the spaces between midfielders and opposing defenders.
Among the tips of the Morbihan guru who marked the residents of the Lorient training center, we note in bulk:
Secretly give a precise tactical instruction to a team in training, the opponent having to guess this instruction to then know how to thwart it.
Organize hot debriefs after the matches during which he did not intervene.
He wanted his captain, then each player, to give his analysis of the match in front of the whole group, just after the shower, even if it meant "it's a bit annoying sometimes".
Provide for interventions by leaders outside the world of football, such as the former DTN of the French swimming team Claude Fauquet, close to Régis Le Bris and also an initiator of participatory methods.
Break the routine thanks to cohesion days with, for example, excursions on sailboats.
Gamers turned into video analysts
And above all, there is his very long-standing attachment to video.
All the training sessions of the reserve team were thus filmed, then analyzed the next morning during a daily video session of about twenty minutes.
Unheard of in National 2… even in the professional world!
Régis Le Bris even asked his young players each week, in turn, to play the video analysts of the weekend match for the rest of the team.
Currently in Concarneau (National), Maxime Etuin explains the
process
to us :
“The player retrieved the match on a USB key, and he found himself sequencing the images of our attacks and defenses on the Longomatch software, before showing and commenting on his montage in front of the whole group the following week.
Before starting the season, some guys didn't even know what a placed attack was… We sometimes wondered what we were doing there.
But bringing video into our daily lives has made our collective expression much faster.”
"It made us mature at a crazy speed"
Came to Lorient last season to participate in the superb season of the reserve team (2nd in N2), the side Alexandre Leroyer (27 years old) smiles: "I thought it was crazy that we made so many videos, it hurt the head of some beside the course!
But there was so much work that it paid off on the ground.
And as soon as the match was over, Régis Le Bris took advantage of the bus trip to dive back into it and prepare a personalized montage for each player, with the + and - of his individual performance.
This is where we touch on the other facet of the trainer Le Bris, spiritual son of Christian Gourcuff in Lorient: the requirement, again and again the requirement.
Jocelyn Laurent describes how he lived this exercise perceived by some as "breaking".
For a long time, his + and his - were not weighted, so that a missed touch had the same importance in his debrief as a goal scored.
And on Tuesday in training, we were entitled to the general classification of the entire workforce in + and -.
I remember being slapped in the face after a bad match at Saint-Brieuc: I was the captain, I was supposed to lead by example and I found myself last in this ranking.
But it made us mature at a crazy speed to have to learn to manage such ratings, with the perpetual questioning that it imposes.
»
"A sense of analysis worthy of a coach"
"Less in the human" than his Lensois counterpart Franck Haise, who was a trainer in Rennes then in Lorient at the same time as him, Régis Le Bris was on the other hand seen at the training center as "more tactically sharp".
His players sometimes relied on their video analysis of Pep Guardiola's Manchester City ball outings to organize a training session on the pitch.
“Régis leads his players to question themselves every day about the game, so that it becomes natural, summarizes Maxime Etuin.
He changed my view of football.
Before, I was going to play and respect the instructions of a coach.
Today, I systematically focus on my opponent's tactics.
Even on television, I can no longer watch a match just like that, I have to analyze City's pressing.
For Yann Kervella, "the boys come out of Lorient with a highly developed football culture, and with a sense of analysis worthy of a coach".
See you in 2040 to treat us to the hake bench, Enzo Le Fée.
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