Inside the French coaching course that could propel U.S. soccer into a new stratosphere

In the coaching world, it is known simply as ‘the French Course’, and its reputation precedes it.

First, it’s tough. Alumni share stories as soldiers would badges of honour, comparing their hardest moments, the points they considered walking away, and the moment it all came together.

To the uninitiated waiting to take part, it all provokes excitement and dread.

Often, the mastermind behind the course uses the diamond analogy — you don’t produce them without pressure.

But it is also transformational, not just for the coaches who fly from the United States to France to learn from some of the best in the world, but increasingly for Major League Soccer itself, which began the programme 12 years ago to try to emulate the quality of Europe’s big domestic leagues.

The Athletic went to the Institut national du football de Clairefontaine — French football’s renowned training centre — to watch the latest band of MLS coaches go through the final week of the Elite Formation Coaching License (EFCL) course.

The taxi winds its way along the verdant country roads of the Yvelines district, lined by small historic villages and lush fields, past a picture-book Louis XVI chateau and finally into a valley with a long gravel path and a security hut at the end.

A kilometre further on, with the smell of pine needles thick in the air, you reach the first of Clairefontaine’s 56 acres — the place where arguably the world’s pre-eminent football nation develops its finest talents.

It is also here that MLS sends some of its best coaches to study the secrets of the French Football Federation (FFF) before returning to help improve the game in the United States.

Over 18 months, its latest group have spent two intense spells at Clairefontaine, 50km (just over 30 miles) south west of Paris, either side of a series of gruelling assessment visits across the U.S. and a week at the youth academies of several elite European talent factories including England’s Arsenal, Nantes, Toulouse, Monaco and Lens of France’s Ligue 1 and Germany’s Hoffenheim.

Clairefontaine is 50km south west of Paris (Greg O’Keeffe)

Notable EFCL graduates include current MLS head coaches Nico Estevez (FC Dallas), Luchi Gonzalez (San Jose Earthquakes), Wilfried Nancy (Columbus Crew), and Greg Vanney (LA Galaxy). Four current head coaches in the MLS Next Pro reserve-team league have also completed it.

This most recent crop have battled through the majority of the course to reach its exacting last stretch, which takes place back where it began, here in France.

Their environment at Clairefontaine switches between the glistening, modern, glass building where many of their seminars are held, and the restored chateau where they sleep (at least, in theory, a little) and eat during their stay.

If the visiting students forget just how effective this place is at producing excellence they need only glance at the plaques on the doors of their bedrooms, each listing a French soccer great who stayed there during their rise to global fame — from Zinedine Zidane to Thierry Henry to Kylian Mbappe.

An even more direct link comes in the form of one of their main teachers during this extraordinary course. Jean-Claude Giuntini, now 67, is the former manager of several successful France age-group sides, including winning the European Under-17 Championship in 2015.

Giuntini has guided Kingsley Coman, Dayot Upamecano (both now at German giants Bayern Munich) and Mike Maignan (AC Milan) to name a few. Alongside him on the staff is Jose Alcocer, the current France Under-17s boss (who coached his team to glory in that age group’s Euros two years ago), and Ligue 1 side Le Havre’s technical director Michael Bunel, another highly regarded educator.

The man who brought the team together is former Strasbourg and Le Havre B-team coach Fred Lipka (he of the diamond metaphor), who is now MLS’s vice-president and technical director for player development.

Or in his words, ‘“a rocket engineer”.

Jean-Claude Giuntini (left) and Fred Lipka (right) at Clairefontaine (MLS)

That’s because, aside from producing precious gems, the other go-to metaphor for what happens here is rocket building — pulling together all the elements needed to launch MLS into a new, rarefied stratosphere where more homegrown youngsters play for winning American clubs, while European sides covet the best of their academy-produced talent.

It was a meeting between Lipka and Todd Durbin, MLS executive vice-president for player strategy and relations, in 2012, while the latter was on a research mission in Europe, that started it all. “Todd felt there was something missing,” says Lipka during a pause in sessions. “He felt they were spending all that money but something was missing.”

Lipka introduced him to the FFF and Durbin hit on a plan to import the French methods of coach-training to MLS. “The idea was that to develop better players, you have to have better coaches,” says Lipka. “If you put genius kids with the best teachers, you can do wonders.”

Durbin realised the American academy system at that time could evaluate talent relative to the wider United States but not measure those youngsters against other 13- and 14-year-olds around the world.

“If you gave me a cookbook from the (gourmet restaurant association) Relais & Chateaux and asked me to bake their chicken cordon bleu,” he says, “I could follow instructions, but it wouldn’t be the same as a Michelin-starred chef who has done it his entire life. That guy knows exactly what it’s supposed to look like.

“We couldn’t see the deficiencies in what we were doing to develop players.”

Enter Lipka, Giuntini and the birth of the French Course.

“I was nervous,” says Durbin of the inaugural course in 2013. “But I’ll never forget, about the third day at Clairefontaine, I must have had four or five of the guys walk over and say, ‘I’m learning more now than I’ve ever learned in anything I’ve ever done with regards to being a coach’.”

Will the U.S. one day produce coaches like Deschamps and players like Mbappe? (Sarah Meyssonnier/Getty Images)

Durbin, a whip-smart, fast-talking former lawyer with degrees from Boston College and the University of Southern California Law School, sensed they had brought the right people together.

“I’ve been around some terrific professors,” he says. “And these guys were as good as anybody. They weren’t just teaching soccer, they were teaching the art of teaching. It was how you assess where a particular person is on the learning curve, how you create an environment where they can discover, and then: how do you reassess at the end that they are taking in the information?

“Then it was their emphasis on the players’ intelligence. That they have to learn themselves — you can’t feed them.

“Stand on a typical sideline of any youth sport in the States on gameday and you’ll see either parents or coaches instructing the kids, ‘Stand over there, pass the ball here’. By comparison, the French coaches were very quiet on game day. They always said gameday is a test. That they just watch and observe and then, based on what they see, they construct the exercises during the (following) week.”

That sort of considered approach seems perfectly suited to Erin Ridley.

The San Jose Earthquakes’ under-16s coach stands out for the clarity and control of the coaching sessions she conducts during the week… along with the fact she is the first woman to take this course. Ridley is also the first female academy coach in MLS.

During her peer-assessed drills with the under-16s squad of Charlotte FC, who are here to provide the willing legs for all these sessions, her 18 years of experience shine through.

Getting to this stage, though, has not been easy. A promising goalkeeper from Chattanooga in Tennessee, her dreams of a professional career were dashed when repeated concussions forced her to retire at 21.

San Jose Earthquakes’ under-16 Erin Ridley at Clairefontaine (MLS)

“I really grieved losing the game at such an early age,” Ridley says.

“My dad was a teacher and I wanted to make my own journey, so (at first) I thought I was never going to be a teacher or anything like that. It turns out that was the thing I fell in love with.

“My concussions really shaped the way I taught it. I was a smaller goalkeeper who would fly into challenges. The easiest thing in the world is to say, when you’re teaching, ‘Just do it like this’. But if I hit the ground, I became symptomatic really quickly. So I had to think about how to teach someone when you can’t show them.”

Ridley progressed from roles as a goalkeeping coach at different colleges to head coach roles, taking both boys’ and girls’ teams. She was an assistant with the USWNT Under-17s before joining San Jose in 2018 and concentrating on male age-group teams.

You sense she has the mental toughness for whatever her career brings, and resilience is part and parcel of the French Course.

It is designed to be pressurised and introspection is vital.

“If you want to teach properly, you have to know yourself,” says Lipka. “Nobody is perfect but you need a clear idea of how you can improve. To develop players who are able to play under a high level of constraints — technical, tactical, physical and emotional — you first have to have coaches who can work in those conditions. They all enter a world where they are evaluated by our experts, they are under pressure, and they need time to adapt.”

Leading the course has even made storied veteran Giuntini grow.

“It forced me out of my comfort zone,” he says. “We speak about the history of French formation and but we needed to adapt that to the Americans. It was a revelation. I’m from (the Mediterranean island of) Corsica, and we tend to speak in very long, complicated sentences, but this forced me to be short, sweet and to the point.

“What remains is: what we do more than what we say. It’s not all about philosophy. We had to get them to trust themselves. American society is stressful and we had to encourage, but in other moments be quite directive and hard. It is a human adventure every time we start a new course.”

FC Cincinatti MLS Next Pro Head Coach, Tyrone Marshall (MLS)

For all the understandable reverence around the French method — it has yielded two World Cups and two European Championship trophies for the men’s senior side in the past 40 years, along with a conveyor belt of stellar players — there is no arrogance from Lipka and his colleagues.

“France was not the big soccer nation in the ’70s,” he says. “Our first victory (at a tournament) was in 1984 but before that we were soft. Now we have an entire county organised and mapped, good player development and, on top of it, the resource — which is the kids playing the game across France. Immigration is a part of it, too.

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“The U.S., which has not got a historic soccer culture, was able to say, ‘Well, if they can build it, why can’t we build it?’. They just needed to see an established model to show them the way.”

Part of that is not obsessing over winning competitions in the youth groups.

“Trophies are not the most important,” adds Alcocer. “If you asked me if I preferred major trophies with the under-16s or under-17s but none of them get into the French team, or lose (in youth tournaments) and find my players in the team, it is always the second option. It has to be the same for MLS.

“We had the generation I won with (the under-17 Euros in 2022) and, sure, it was great, but the next generation (this summer’s tournament), we lost in the first round (finishing third in their group). I have done the same job, but two different results. For that second generation, the kids learned a lot.

“Victory is good for the ego and might give the directors a chance to pat themselves on the back but it is a long race. We are here to build the rocket and we will build every stage gradually before it leaves Earth. It might not get off the ground straight away, it might go sideways first, but eventually it will blast off.”

One of the presentations on ‘the French course’ (MLS)

In one annexe of Clairefontaine’s main administrative building, where the coaches have been presenting PowerPoint sessions on everything from the future of the game to the importance of teaching players how to scan the pitch, is a corridor with a series of quotes up on its white walls.

One is from the French philosopher Albert Camus: “Tout ce que je sais de plus sur a propos de la moralite et des obligations des hommes, c’est au football que je le dois” — ‘Everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe to football.’

It touches on the wider human themes the participants keep returning to.

“Everyone goes through an existential coaching crisis,” says Ridley. “It’s that reflection of, ‘Is this really for me?’. No one really wants to admit that, because we’ve come in as some of the top coaches in the country. But then you start figuring out everybody’s thinking the same thing.”

The course, in her words, “smashes you”. It breaks coaches down and builds them up better.

Adam Wells is one of the course’s British brigade. An ebullient academy coach for FC Dallas, he hails from the rural fringes of Merseyside, where has had trials as a youngster with local Premier League side Everton before moving to America to work in coaching.

Life delivered its own brutal beat-down on Wells during this year’s course, which left him struggling on two fronts.

Wells was struck down with a mysterious autoimmune condition that triggered excruciating rheumatoid arthritis, and meant he missed a chunk of the course. He has almost caught up by the final visit to Clairefontaine, but it was not easy.

“During the summer, I couldn’t get out of bed some days,” he says. “I was doing anything to reduce the inflammation and my pain was worst at night. I had 16 days at one stage where I had about 30 hours’ sleep.

“I nearly didn’t come to France this time, but it’s an expensive course and I have never quit on anything. I thought if my work wasn’t good enough they’d tell me. Even if I failed, I am so different now than when I started. But I’ve got great feedback.”

Adam Wells is an academy coach for FC Dallas (MLS)

Wells laughs ruefully when reflecting on the long hours and the lack of sleep the coursework involves. He has just finished his final presentation and was up until 2:30am before his 7am slot annotating video clips in his room.

“When we first came here, everyone was an anxious mess. They were very strict, very stoic and very unpredictable,” he recalls. “You’re learning and have to do it their way. Everyone is getting rinsed.

“They put you on the spot and ask you to do things in short turnarounds. You’re losing sleep. I thought my session was good in Colorado (at that assessment visit), and it wasn’t. In the feedback session at the end, I gave them pushback and they said, ‘We just don’t think you’re at this level’, so I stormed out. I just got in a taxi and went to the airport and thought, ‘This just isn’t for me’.

“Between Colorado and (the next gathering in) Columbus, it just sort of clicked that if I was going to continue, I needed to open my mind, be vulnerable and more collaborative. I became more open to feedback and listening. It was altering my emotional control and planning. It’s honestly changed me as a person too — as a parent and a husband.”

The support from the other students as he played catch-up was vital. “There is amazing camaraderie,” Wells says. “I’ve made friends for life in the group. Other cohorts all have their WhatsApp groups too, and they all speak daily.”

After the last full day, on Thursday, the group eat together and then flop onto couches in the lobby. Someone produces an acoustic guitar and begins to strum a few Oasis songs, as the tired group join in with the singing.

It is still a vivid memory for 2024 MLS Cup-winning coach Nancy, who completed one of the early courses. Two of his Columbus colleagues are fellow alumni: general manager Issa Tall and technical manager Marc Nicholls.

“In a game (as a player), you need cues to trigger the pressing,” Nancy says. “For me, the EFCL course was the trigger to connect everything I had in my mind about football and really understand my vision.

“It allowed me to understand the coach I am today. I think journalists get bored of hearing this, but my vision is not the most important part. It’s how to lead people and manage them — that’s why the course showed me the correlation between a player and a human being and connecting the two.

“I was worried the course would be very instructive: ‘You have to do this and shut up’ — which was how it was when I got my diploma at 18. But this was about taking care of people and helping coaches to get better.”

New England Revolution U14 coach Liam Connors takes a session at Clairefontaine (MLS)

Elevating everyone. It keeps coming back to that when you talk to the alumni as they prepare for their certificate presentation on Saturday.

“You are not a high performer unless you make other people better,” is how Ridley puts it.

MLS is already seeing the benefits of 12 years of sweat and toil. More, Lipka says, will follow.

“In five years, we should see more young players in MLS,” he says when the conversation turns to Philadelphia Union’s Manchester City-bound 15-year-old starlet Cavan Sullivan. “We will see more young and homegrown players in the top 16 most useful players in the (MLS) squads.

“Then it’s how many we sell. I want to hear clubs in Europe coveting good players in MLS. The U.S. and Canadian national teams are good barometers too — so how many of their rosters have been developed in MLS?

“Then there’s results, and quality of play. On the men’s side, we don’t have the results we should on the wider stage. It is getting more difficult to play the U.S. but we are not quite there yet: whether it’s finding the player in one versus ones, or the creativity you need.

“We need to improve that creativity and the ability to finish while also producing players who can defend tough. We are a bit soft in how we defend in the U.S., compared with other nations such as Argentina, Brazil, England or France.”

For all of the French coaches, the American pay-to-play amateur youth soccer model remains a problem. “You need to make the game affordable for the masses,” says Giuntini. “For the Latinos (in the U.S.), football is in the blood. But as long as you have this financial barrier, you will have less choice of quality young talents.”

Football, then, must overcome obstacles in the U.S. — but they all think it will get there.

“North America will become a leading force in world soccer,” says Lipka. “European scouts tell me they are following our young players, which wasn’t always the way. Then the job is to keep building the league, until we can keep some of these kids as well to build out our own league.”

That is not just hyperbole. A taste test of Durbin’s ‘Cordon Bleu’ metaphor arrives on the Saturday morning, when Charlotte Under-16s, fresh from their week with all the course’s coaches, beat their Paris Saint-Germain counterparts, 3-2, in a friendly.

“The most important thing is our head coaches and sporting directors believe in what we are doing and put the kids on the field,” concludes Lipka. “We are only a part of the rocket — the engine if you like. But the last bit is actually putting the kids out there.”

If they ever need convincing, there are 25 coaches freshly back at their MLS clubs ready to produce young players good enough to make it a no-brainer.

Just let them get a good night’s sleep first.