Get French Football News sat down with former FC Nantes, Manchester United and Cameroon midfielder Eric Djemba-Djemba for a fascinating chat on his experiences as a footballer and since retirement.
In this second part he talks about this season’s two relegated clubs, sparing some kind words for FC Metz but being more scathing about his first club, Nantes, and their owners Waldemar and Franck Kita in particular.
Let’s talk about FC Nantes today. It was a nightmare season – only my team, FC Metz, had it worse – and they have been relegated. I feel like this has been coming for a while, but what is your read on the situation there?
Well let’s talk about FC Metz first – hats off to them because they have welcomed some great Cameroonians in the past. There is Jacques Songo’o who played there. And Rigobert Song. And the striker, Hervé Tum. When I was at Nantes we had some great matches against Metz. They had a superb left-footed captain called Frédéric Meyrieu – a great number 10 with the ponytail! It was a very good team at that time. And when I was still a youth player they had the captain Sylvain Kastendeuch – a defender who played 700 matches and had hardly any yellow cards!
I watched Metz because I was still very young when Rigobert Song went to Metz, his first club in Europe, after the 1994 World Cup and Metz have brought so many African players to Europe – Emmanuel Adebayor from Togo, Sadio Mané from Senegal, Lamine Camara who is now at Monaco. They have a very great history, and had a great president [Carlo Molinari], but today those who follow football will only talk to you about Paris Saint-Germain or Olympique de Marseille. It’s sad when you look at the Metz of today.
And Nantes too – their season was catastrophic. Catastrophic! I was watching matches, I almost had tears in my eyes. As an ex-player I have access to tickets for home matches but I struggled to accept them as it was so painful to see the team of my heart in such trouble. And this is not new. As you said, we’ve seen this coming from a long way out. You could see that there was a split between the club and the supporters. Ten, 15 years ago there was a fusion between the supporters and the players. We knew that, when the fans were behind us, we could transcend ourselves.
But today, you see this crack between the fans and the players, the management, and it’s really difficult for a big club like that, a club renowned for youth development. Today, they are struggling to bring players through from their youth system and on top of that, with the directors, I don’t know what’s going on over there. So I don’t know how we’re going to get back up next season, I don’t know which coach we’re going to have, I don’t know if Vahid Halilhodžić will stay.
It’s very, very difficult to work in this environment, where there’s no stability, where it’s hard to know who does what, who doesn’t do what. It’s a bit of a shame. It’s a bit of a shame and I hope we’ll get back on our feet quickly. It would be good to go straight back up but even if we do but then keep everything as it is, we won’t stay in Ligue 1 for long. I think that everything must be changed, everything must be swept away, to start again on a good basis. Even if it will hurt, we need to lance this boil and start again little by little to start from a solid base.
It is the Kitas who still run the club, who have the majority. I don’t know how it works – they know better than me. But when everyone starts criticising you, telling you all the things that are going wrong, at some point, you have to let go. You have to say to yourself “OK I’ll pass that baton to someone else. If I love this club and I don’t want to see this club sink, I’m giving my control to someone else to that he can continue the work that I have started”. But as things stand, we find ourselves in Ligue 2 and maybe we could end up even further down. You know, it’s very difficult to build but very easy to destroy. In one minute, they destroyed everything.
Eric Djemba-Djemba was speaking exclusively to Get French Football Weekly courtesy of World Cup Betting
