INTERVIEW | Racing Club de France manager Guillaume Norbert previews Lille cup clash | OneFootball

Racing Club de France were one of the early pioneers of French football, having been one of the founders of the first professional league in the country in 1932. They have two league titles and five Coupe de France wins to their name – the last of those cup wins, though, came in 1949.

Since then, the club has been plagued with multiple liquidations, stadium moves and rebrands. Tonight’s Coupe de France round of 32 clash against Lille will be Racing’s highest-profile game in three decades.

Guillaume Norbert – a former Arsenal youth player – has managed the first team since 2019, having initially joined the club in the wake of his father Patrick’s takeover. He led the club to promotion up to the 4th tier National 2 in 2022, and came close to clinching a spot in National last season.

Ahead of this evening’s game, Norbert spoke to Get French Football News’ Raphaël Jucobin about the high-profile tie and the club’s long-term ambitions of being fully professional.

This must have been a busier week than usual!

Every week is busy! I coach in the mornings and I run a construction company as well, so my day is packed.

What’s the mood in the Racing camp ahead of the match against Lille?

I’d say there’s excitement, we can’t wait for it. Obviously it’s very exciting to be playing a Ligue 1 team, one who’s fifth and regularly in Europe – but for ourselves, we also have a shot at qualifying for the last 16. That’s what we’re most looking forward to, not just because we’re taking on a top-flight team. There’s a lot at stake.

A big result could also spur the team on in the race for promotion

That’s true, it could give us some strength. I think this Coupe de France run has already helped us, as we’ve been able to play on a regular basis instead of having gaps in our schedule. Unlike the teams around us, we didn’t have to schedule friendlies, we were able to keep playing competitively. We ended the season well, and the last 64 win over Chambly [a 2-1 win in the last round, thanks to substitute Lilian Ricol’s last-minute winner] saw us carry that good form over.

Of couse, no one would be surprised to see Lille go through – they’re the clear favourites. But it’s eleven football players against eleven football players. We’re going to give it our all.

There’s also a nod to the club’s glory days, given the club won its last two Coupe de France titles by beating Lille in the final

Yes, there’s a lot of history, and aso the fact that we hadn’t gone this far in the cup for 30 years. There’s some history between the two clubs as well – we’ve won five titles, and across the competition our two teams have actually met quite often [Racing also beat a previous iteration of Lille for their second title in 1939].

You’ve been with the team for six years now, how has the club progressed in that time?

There have been a lot of improvements. It’s my fifth season as head coach now. When my father took over, it was late in the 2017/18 season, and the team was struggling badly in the [5th-tier] National 3 and they stayed up on the final day. The following year was the first one where we could set some things in place, and we nearly went up after fighting for top spot for much of the season. It’s at that point that I took charge of the team. Then you had the two Covid years – in the first one, it was Versailles who went up as they were top when the season was stopped, even though there were a fair amount of games still left to play.

The season after lasted until November, and there was no promotion nor relegation as not enough matches had been played. The following campaign, we finished top and went up to National 2. We then finished second last year, and we found out not long ago that the champions Rouen shouldn’t have been allowed to go up by the DNCG [French football’s financial watchfdog]. Now we’re in a transition year.

So there’s a sense that the club has progressed – we’ve gone from fighting for survival in National 3 to being in the upper reaches of  National 2. In terms of the youth teams, a lot of competent coaches have come in and we have a new sporting director in Baïla Dia. We’re in at least the top regional divisions for every age category. It really feels like there’s a structure to things now.

At the beginning, the first team was training three times a week in the evenings, since all the players had jobs on the side – nowadays, that’s the case for very few of them and we have sessions every morning. We’ve got a physio, a goalkeeping coach, and new sponsors that have been coming in – it really feels like we’re on the right track.

We’re also lucky to have a stadium – the Yves-du-Manoir [in Colombes, western Paris] – which is going to host the field hockey for the Paris Olympics, and is being completely renovated. Right now it’s a disadvantage since we don’t have a stadium, but once we have the stadium it’ll be important moving forward – we’ll have a lot of pitches to help us develop our youth teams. So there are a lot of things being done in order to bring this club, which despite its history is not where it should be.

So the goal is to go fully professional

That’s what we’re going for, yes. I myself have experience in the world of professional football. I was recruited by Paris Saint-Germain at the age of 11, then at 16 I went to Arsenal, and then I had a professional career in France [Lorient, Angers, Nantes, Le Havre]. So I’m trying to draw on that, that’s why we now have training sessions in the mornings, that’s why we’ve switched things up in terms of the way the staff is organised. We often discuss the direction we need to be taking for our youth teams, to allow them to be as competitive as possible. The idea is to be able to take in as many kids as possible, and then as you go up the ranks be increasingly competitive.

That’s why it’s important for us to have the U17 team playing at national level now – a lot of players would leave for other clubs to play at that level before coming back later on, for us the goal is to hold on to them.

You could say that the youth development policy is really a part of the club’s identity, given its impressive record in that sense [William Gallas, Louis Saha, Steven Nzonzi…]

Exactly, I think it’s essential. We can’t focus exclusively on the first team – of course, it’s very important, since it’s the club’s locomotive. The higher the first team is, the more people will talk about the club – we’re seeing that now with our Coupe de France run, and when we first went up to National 2. The first team is the most-watched, but on the side we also have to develop the youth facilities. We need to develop players so that they can then go off to youth academies – as long as we don’t have one ourselves – and represent Racing at the highest level. In the long-term, we’ll be able to hold on to those players ourselves.

GFFN | Raphaël Jucobin

Photo credit: Racing Club de France Football