EXCLUSIVE | Jérémie Aliadière: ‘There are egos in a squad and that is hard to manage.’ | OneFootball

Get French Football News sat down with former Arsenal, Middlesbrough and FC Lorient striker Jérémie Aliadière to talk about how some of his former teams are faring this season and to look forward to this summer’s World Cup. In this second part, we discussed the positives and negatives of France’s wealth of attacking talent for the upcoming World Cup.

Moving on to France and the upcoming World Cup. You were a striker and France have a wealth of attacking talent. Who would be in your squad and who would start?

It’s such a complicated question. I think that there are safe bets in the squad, like Kylian Mbappe, Ousmane Dembélé, Désiré Doué, and Michael Olise. Those players are guaranteed, they play for the biggest clubs in the world, help them to win titles – the Champions League in the case of Dembélé and Doué, Mbappe is the captain and the best player in the world. So you’ve already got them.

But then, in terms of who plays and in what system, that’s very tough because there will be players who will have to adapt to a system which isn’t what they’re used to in their club and to a position which isn’t necessarily their favourite. So it’s for Didier Deschamps to find the best system and to work out whether all those players can start at the same time. Some of those players may have to start on the bench and that is an important factor in a World Cup and in an international squad.

I remember the 1998 World Cup that France won. I heard lots of people talk about the players who weren’t playing and the influence that they had on the squad. There was no negativity, there was no ‘I’m not playing so I’m unhappy’. They knew that the common goal was to win so it didn’t matter if they weren’t playing; what mattered was winning the World Cup.

But there are egos in a squad, and that is hard to manage – when you’ve got Dembélé – Ballon d’Or – you’ve got Mbappe – best player in the world – you’ve got Olise, who is playing brilliantly at Bayern Munich – Doué, who is the new star. Everyone wants to be the star, everyone wants to score goals, and everyone wants to be the best. But they can’t all do that at once. So it’s for Deschamps to explain that to the players individually to get them to buy into the goal of winning the World Cup.

But everyone will have their role, and everyone must have an impact both when they play and when they don’t play. When they don’t play, they must help to ensure that there is a good, calm atmosphere within the squad. It’s totally different to playing for your club – in a club you’re mates, you see each other every day, if you don’t play this weekend, you play next weekend. But when you go to a World Cup for a month, it’s crucial that the squad gets on. We’ve seen it before with France squads in the World Cup, where it has gone really badly, under Raymond Domenech. There wasn’t squad harmony, players weren’t happy, there were clashes between players, clashes with the coach, and it was a catastrophic result.

But Deschamps has the experience, he has won it as a player and as a coach, he knows exactly what ingredients are needed in the team to go all the way, so I’m sure he’ll make the right choices.

Jérémie Aliadière was speaking exclusively with us courtesy of Gambling.com who rank new casinos in the UK

GFFN | Jeremy Smith