EXCLUDED – Antoine Kombouaré back on the FC Nantes bench: “With the president, we put our egos aside”

Romain Rouillard (comments collected by Jacques Vendroux) / Photo credit: LOIC VENANCE / AFP 2:12 p.m., March 25, 2024

In Nantes, there is danger at home. Sixteenth in Ligue 1, just two points behind Metz, first in relegation, the Canaries remain on three consecutive defeats in the championship and their retention in the elite of French football seems clearly threatened. To ensure this rescue mission, the club ended its collaboration with Jocelyn Gourvennec, who did not survive the setback at home against Strasbourg ten days ago (1-3) to turn to a former member of the house : Antoine Kombouaré (60 years old). 

The Kanak technician, also formerly with PSG, sat on this bench between 2021 and 2023 and led the Canaries to the fourth French Cup in their history, won at the expense of Nice (0-1) in 2022. Before to offer FC Nantes a European epic last season, finally completed, without merit, against Juventus Turin in the Europa League play-offs. But the beautiful story, which was notably written in the Coupe de France, will ultimately be shattered in this same competition. A scathing 5-1 defeat, in the final of the 2023 edition against Toulouse, will cost Kombouaré his place... who is therefore making his comeback in Loire-Atlantique. 

️Philippe Diallo, president of the French Football Federation, announces exclusively on @Europe1 at the microphone of @JacquesVendroux that a minute of silence in tribute to the victims of the attacks in Moscow will be held tomorrow evening before the match between France and Chile: pic.twitter.com/dNgcYTRghl

— Europe 1 Sport (@Europe1Sport1) March 25, 2024

His return to FC Nantes: a “surprise” 

“I come back with a lot of energy, I come back fresh,” proclaims the person concerned at Jacques Vendroux’s microphone. Guest of the show

, Sunday evening, Kanak assures that this break “did him good and made him take a step back”. Even if, he admits, the choice of FC Nantes to turn to him was “a surprise”. It must be said that the relations between the technician and the Nantes president, Waldemar Kita, are rather frosty, at odds with the harmony which had been established with Franck Kita, the son of the boss, and deputy general director of the club.

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But the two men knew how to communicate on good terms, believes Kombouaré. “With the president, we put our egos aside,” he said on Europe 1. And added: “It is not the relations between President Kita and Antoine Kombouaré that are important. We must work to maintain the FC Nantes in Ligue 1,” he concludes.

The hatchet even seemed to have been buried a few days earlier. In an interview with the newspaper

on March 12, Kanak admitted that his experience on the FC Nantes bench was the "best of his career". While sending his thanks to Waldemar Kita. “This is going to sound strange, but I thank Waldemar Kita every day. Because the guy, you tell him no once, no a second time, he could have said: “He’s getting out!” But no, I don’t know not what got into them, they came back anyway. So I say thank you to them because they gave me the opportunity to experience my most beautiful sporting emotions,” he declared.