The next generation of elite French footballers live in an area so beautiful it is hard to imagine quite what crosses their minds when they first turn in to Clairefontaine.
The exterior is well guarded, but once the barrier lifts and you are waved through, it is like entering some kind of footballing wonderland. A long lane, flanked with greenery in full bloom, flowers as far as the eye can see, birdsong in the air, draws you in. Then you enter the sporting heartland of the place, greeted by a gargantuan model of the World Cup trophy with two gold-star statues (one for each French triumph in the tournament), perfectly positioned on some manicured grass in front of an ancient cedar tree.
A little further on brings you to the facilities — pitches and well-spaced-out buildings — some modern, others in keeping with the countryside. Then there is the legendary chateau, which is home to the national team.
Images of the chateau have been made famous over the years, in films and photographs, or on social media every time the players are called up to play for France and they stop for a wave to the cameras as they emerge from chauffeur-driven cars in their high fashion outfits. It is a version of a football red carpet, or catwalk. Today, it is walked by Kylian Mbappe, Antoine Griezmann, William Saliba and the dramatically haut-couture Jules Kounde.
Tomorrow? That is a question that rests with Christian Bassila, the director of the INF (Institute National de Football), which takes on a class of 23 boys every year who are hand picked because they are viewed as having a better chance than most of becoming the future of the national team. They move into this haven of footballing serenity at age 13 and stay for two years as weekly boarders, with a programme honed to give them the best chance of developing as both an athlete and a person, in order to handle the enormity of the challenge ahead.
Whenever there is a full international match, there is a chance for the boys to see their idols up close. Clairefontaine is like a campus and the main men have some separation from the rest in the chateau, but the boys’ base is very close by, just the other side of the sweeping lawn. They are actually neighbours.
“It is right next door,” smiles Bassila. “When we walk over to the training pitch, sometimes I say to the kids, ‘Don’t look, stay focused on your training. Your dream is to be there, to work hard to get to the French national team’. It’s a privilege to see them and have that goal. My philosophy is not to have dreams for the sake of it. Dream – but with a goal. I want them to think, ‘It will be my turn tomorrow’. When we see the quality of the players at the top in the game today, that’s what pushes us.”
Mbappe, the most modern poster boy for Clairefontaine, is about to take the next step of his quest to add to his personal legend.
Winning the Champions League is a natural ambition and he must fancy his chances of finally achieving that in the colours of new club Real Madrid. The hierarchy at the Bernabeu evidently has a liking for French talent, having already recruited his compatriots Aurelien Tchouameni and Eduardo Camavinga.
A boy from the Paris area, just like those now at the INF, the example of Mbappe resonates with all the youngsters at Clairefontaine. Every single time they go into their building, they see his face. Next to the front doors are supersized images of Mbappe and Thierry Henry, two of the most decorated graduates from this place to go on to win the World Cup, etched into the windows. A motivation? A pressure? Maybe both.
How important is it to have those emblems? “It’s more than important,” Bassila says. “Because we make the boys understand this is the level we will expect. So if you are here, it’s because we want you to be, we hope, at the same level (as those players), if not more. It’s being ambitious in recruitment, in projection.
“The pressure I have as a director is that four players came from here into the squad for the Euros last summer (in addition to Mbappe, the squad included Alphonse Areola, Youssouf Fofana and Marcus Thuram — and it would have been five but for Christopher Nkunku being injured). Tomorrow, as director, I cannot have a lower number.
“That means that we have to detect players who we hope will be internationals and who will compete in international competitions. This is a daily pressure. You have to constantly question yourself, see if that boy has the predispositions for the highest level, if his head only revolves around football, if he has good maturity.
“We are convinced that if they become good people, they can make the most of their potential. We have a motto here for the students – the man makes the footballer and not the other way round.”
The French system operating from Clairefontaine was, not so long ago, a global benchmark for youth development. These things are cyclical – for a while, the Netherlands’ production line was the envy of world football, then it was the French one, then Germany impressed, then Spain, and now Portugal and England are increasing their reputations.
France’s status as a fine creator of talent started with the establishment of Clairefontaine in 1988. As is often the case, the push to refine youth development was triggered by some navel-gazing. Les Bleus did not qualify for the European Championship that year (albeit only eight countries did back then), and then missed out on consecutive World Cups in 1990 and 1994. The people running the federation had a long, hard look at the situation and decided they needed to build a national centre, a hub for best practice to develop everything from the senior national team down, including coaches’ education and all forms of the game.
They wanted somewhere not too far from Paris.
Clairefontaine is breathtaking. Had it not been taken over by the FFF, it could be a stellar option for a luxury-escape chateau and spa, nestled in the Foret Domaniale de Rambouillet national park, 40km (around 25 miles) south-west of the capital.
Ten years after launching their programme to unify ideas and fast-track elite development, France were world champions, Zinedine Zidane’s face illuminated the Arc de Triomphe, and football became a vast and important expression of national pride and French multiculturalism.
Basilla sits down to talk about the demands of educating the creme de la creme of French football.
It’s a technical, social, philosophical puzzle with many elements. He is quite well placed to understand what goes through the minds of the chosen boys. He grew up in Paris, with a family background from Congo in central Africa. He had a nomadic career including spells in England with West Ham and Sunderland, and also played in Germany and Greece. He has a worldly experience to lean into and is a calm, kind person to be a figurehead in charge of exceptional young footballers.
Clairefontaine, Basilla says, has to be like a family for these boys who feel they have to control their destiny in an ultra-competitive environment. “This notion is important because they leave their family when they arrive here. This is the next step. We consider them a bit like our children, we see them grow up — but they are not our children,” he says.
“At some point, we will let go of their hand. That’s actually the idea, it’s about people who become autonomous and who can walk on their own. At the beginning it’s hard, and that’s why I think the federation was smart, because they realised that one of the first factors of failure was family distance. Now it is half here and half with the family.”
The weekly schedule starts when the boys arrive here on a Sunday evening. From Monday to Friday, they train every day, and are also bussed to a local school. Then they head home again at the weekend, when they play for their own clubs. There is no actual team that plays out of Clairefontaine, although the group have representative matches against their counterparts at other similar satellite centres also run by the FFF.
Where once the best from all over France came to Clairefontaine, now it only hosts young players from Paris and the surrounding region. There are 15 elite centres across the country running the same course, so all the boys get to have that shared-care, split environment between home and their FFF academy base. Each has its pool of players. Recently, for example, the youngsters from Ajaccio, on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, spent a week at Clairefontaine and the two groups played matches and spent some time together.
“It’s really interesting,” Bassila says. “Our young players go to the four corners of France. It is a preparation for their next step as players. After Clairefontaine, maybe our players will go to join Monaco or Strasbourg, and it is important to do these tests to print a little of the state of mind of the region. It is like in England — London guys are not the same as people from Sunderland. We have to deconstruct this state of mind a little so that they can adapt quickly in the club, understand the history of the club, to understand the philosophy of the club, and so that they can express themselves, express their potential.”
From day one, coaches try to open up the players’ minds to their very specific reality. “When you work with young players it is difficult to make them aware of things,” Basilla says. “They arrive with a lot of dreams, a lot of nonchalance. They are boys. Football for them is not yet their job, it’s more passion. They must learn to take pleasure in work. We have to change their mentality.
“Thierry Henry said, ‘Il y a un difference entre faire du foot et jouer au foot’. In other words, there is a difference between playing football and being a footballer. When they arrive here, it’s this change that we make.”
Their daily routine goes something like this: on a normal day, they wake at 6.45am, have breakfast at 7am, and take the bus to school in time for 8am. Some days they are at school until 3pm but more often they are back by midday and spend the afternoon either training or engaged in sports studies. In the evenings, after supper, they have some free time. They can rest, hang out, play games, and they will no doubt tune in to the Champions League as it returns for a new season this week, see how the Clairefontaine alumni now spread across Europe get on. “That’s where we let go of the pressure,” Bassila says. “Then it’s lights out at 9.30-9.45pm.”
The boys share rooms, and there is a housemistress who looks after them and keeps them in check along the corridors. The boys stay in a building that is functional, not flash. There are classrooms downstairs, and upstairs are dormitory areas and spaces to hang out and play table tennis or table football. It feels like the interior of the building has not changed much over the decades. The boys are not coming into a luxury environment as if they have already made it.
What about mobile phones? “Not all the time. They have a time for it, but not all day,” Bassila says. “We’re trying to limit their phone time because there’s a lot to do. Also, on the one hand, we have to overprotect them and on the other hand, outside there is a world that is real we have to prepare them for. Before, we didn’t have direct access to people’s feedback. With social networks, someone can immediately make a comment on the spot and they can see it. There are violent words that go directly to the players. Before, we were protected. Today, we are no longer protected. Unfortunately, that can impact on development.”
Most of the boys come from the Paris suburbs, or banlieues, which have been such hotbeds of talent for generations. Bassila believes they are fertile territory for young footballers because of the mix of cultures and opportunities which make football like glue in local communities.
“It’s cultural, it’s social, it’s commitment to sport,” Bassila says. “France invests a lot in young people and sport in the cities. The development of amateur football, with municipal pitches, allows this blossoming.
“I lived in Germany, where that aspect is not as developed. I lived in London, in Canary Wharf, and there wasn’t a pitch for young people. The particularity of France is that, very early on, we had access to street football. We all started playing football, either at school or with friends in the neighbourhoods, because the cities allow it. In large megacities, there is very little room for green spaces.
“So it is all this alchemy between street football, amateur football and professional football which is well managed by the federation, which means that a city like Paris, with many inhabitants, can be football-centric.
“The second particularity is the melting pot. It means that we have football of all cultures. It is this immigration, this cultural melting pot, which brings diversity to the Paris region. Today, for example, there is a phenomenon called ‘la CAN des quartiers’.” It is a brilliant competition, more or less the Africa Cup of Nations for neighbourhoods, in which different districts host matches between locals with roots from all African countries.
“Because there is immigration, which brings all cultures, we discover a football which has richness, each country will bring its footballing characteristics. The Paris region is an enormous breeding ground. In amateur football in France, there are 13,000 clubs. You can play everywhere in France, in every town.”
Still, the odds of making the quantum leap from the banlieue to Clairefontaine are minuscule. Just getting here is one thing, succeeding sufficiently to have your face on the wall of graduates on the far side of the building who have gone on to play for France is another.
The selection policy for the intake each year is very carefully considered. The players must have more than raw talent. Temperament and mentality are measured, too.
“They have to have the qualities and potential to succeed,” Bassila says. They have a performance pathway mapped out but putting the highest calibre people onto it is critical. “I believe that if Clairefontaine has real know-how, it is in recruitment. It’s a bit like in the kitchen: when you have good ingredients, it inevitably results in a good meal in the end.
“The idea is also that the player who will leave the INF makes other young people want to want to play football. Mbappe and Henry transmit this desire. That’s why this institution is known and recognized, because its best ambassadors are the players – they go out and inspire others.
“The other key principle is there are boys who will succeed in football, and there are boys who will succeed elsewhere and that’s why we are also giving them an educational background, making a real investment in them. We can say to the boys here, ‘Either you become a footballer, or you have the backup, because you continued your studies, to be able to do something else’. The French system and the training course is designed to leave nobody behind.”
There is another building on site, a little further along the path, which represents a new dimension to France’s approach to youth development.
It is the centre of excellence for girls, which has been running for two years. It is the home from home for 20 more teenage footballers who are on their own road, hopefully to eventually represent their country at Women’s World Cups and so on, but otherwise to become well educated and rounded enough to make a success of their life in a different way.
Clairefontaine is the base for France’s first youth development specialist programme for girls, and the FFF intends to roll out the programme to the regions, echoing its system for boys.
Even for the best in the race to create the best footballers around, it is important to never stand still.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
