Football's A Love Story, Sometimes

And FC Annecy in France is mine.

So, straight off the bat, this isn’t about tactics. Although, in a way, when you consider the changeable nature of the heart… how you set it up to perform in a certain way… how it has to adapt to challenges… how it… yeah no, sorry, that doesn’t work. This isn’t about tactics. Although now that I think about it there will be some tactics later.

It is, however, about football (and everything else), and how I once came to a really small village in France and accidentally rediscovered my love of it (and everything else).

So, to scene set, the year is 2022 and I am in what Doctors would refer to as A Rut. Professionally, I am coming up to an eighth year in a job I simultaneously feel incredibly privileged to do, but also can’t remember the last time I enjoyed. And personally, I am about as ‘all over the shop’ as those little yellow ‘Reduced!’ stickers.

As for the football, we are weeks removed from Eddie Howe turning Steve Bruce’s bloated, hopeless, Championship-bound Newcastle United into a side that won six of its last eight games and improbably nearly snuck a European place, to the backdrop of an avalanche of think-pieces about what this all means for human rights in a country 4,000 miles away.

Now just to be clear here, the point I’m about to make is not ‘the mass execution of political opponents and persecution of societal fringe groups made it hard for me to enjoy Newcastle vs Norwich :-( :-( :-(‘ . Merely that, when you hope that football can provide some escapism from the fact your own mental health is on the very ocean floor, having it suddenly bundled in with geopolitical handwringing is… challenging, let’s say.

Add to that the fact that 2022 was supposed to be a World Cup summer (yay! great!!!) but isn’t because it’s being held in Qatar in December (no! bad!!!) and truly what even was there to live for.

So I did what any of us would do. I clicked on a targeted advert that appeared on my instagram. Scrolling up after (and I remember this vividly because the sight of it nearly made me close the app on the spot) a photo my friend had posted in the aftermath of what they captioned “Poo-nami 😂 😂 😂 why does nobody warn you how messy your toddler’s bath time can get?? 😂 😂 😂” were the words Visit Annecy.

You’ll have to take my word for this, but after you’ve just seen what was, quite literally, a bath covered in shit, the next words could be Visit Pyongyang, or Visit Mordor, or Visit Sunderland, and you’d find yourself amenable. As it was though, I got Visit Annecy. So I did.

To detour slightly here, nothing melts my head more than the idea that people won’t do things on their own. Having loads of mates you genuinely like and doing things with them is, yes, the entire point of existence, but not doing things because nobody else can/will is insane to me.

I have met people, otherwise entirely normal, who have never been inside of a cinema, restaurant, or airport unaccompanied, and each time they reveal those facts about themselves I feel an entirely unique wave of pity. Like, what is wrong with you?? This is an entirely unprecedented period in human history where this is just so much fucking stuff to do! All the time! That you won’t go on a holiday, or see a Marvel movie, or just eat a steak on a Tuesday night *purely* because Dan or Rebecca or whoever doesn’t fancy it is a derangement.

Homo sapiens (you) have been a thing for about 300,000 years, and for 299,970 of those, budget airlines didn’t exist. The odds of you being alive in the exact window required to jump across Europe for £30 are infinitesimally small, and yet you did it! You’re the first member of your family in 15,000 generations to wield this power, and you won’t do it because nobody in the groupchat could get that week off work? Fuck off. Grow up.

Anyway, yes, all of this is to say that nobody wanted to go with me.

Annecy is a village, or town, or city - I’m not entirely sure - at the bottom of the Alps. It’s an hour on the bus from Geneva airport, and it sits, surrounded by mountains, on the banks of a lake. It also has the single greatest water you have ever seen outside of the Peter Andre ‘Mysterious Girl’ video.

Like, fucking hell. Have you ever seen anything like that in your entire life?

Want, as I am, to wearing garish football tops on holiday I found myself sat outside ‘Le Captain Pub’ when I was tapped on the shoulder by a group of locals who had been trying to work out what club my top belonged to. Across the ensuing conversation I asked what team they all supported to be told, unequivocally, “Les Rouges! Annecy!”.

To my eternal shame it hadn’t even occurred to me that the picturesque lakeside town would have a football team of note (you never see Windemere in the FA Cup third round, do you?) so I asked if they were any good. They replied, and I’m so sorry you’re having to just read this rather than hear it in the most perfect ‘French-Impression-But Actually-French’ voice imaginable “haha non, vee are sheet”.

I was in love.

The shirt in question, approx five minutes before the above events

I immediately wasted the last two days of my holiday starting what would become the greatest Football Manager save of my entire life. Eight seasons at FC Annecy, two promotions up from the French third tier, Championnat National, and eventually establishing them at the top end of Ligue 1. A first piece of major silverware in the club’s history arrived in the shape of the Coupe de France, followed by an incredible run to Europa Conference League glory.

To my amazement I still have some photos on my phone.

Meanwhile, in your so-called “real world”, FC Annecy were beginning a fairytale of their own. An unlikely promotion to Ligue 2 was somehow overshadowed by them beating Marseille - Alexis Sanchez, Dimitri Payet, Mattéo Guendouzi, Eric Bailly, no big deal - on the way to the cup semi-finals.

They were then five minutes away from taking eventual winners Toulouse to extra-time, and I’m reliably informed large-swathes of France were “very into it”. I followed it all through Sofarscore notifications.

Anyway my legacy in the Haute-Savoie secured with that 0-0 over Sevilla (have you ever won a massive Football Manager trophy on penalties?? Absolutely nothing like it), I resolved to somehow try to win the league title before this summer was over. After some extremely shrewd dealings in the transfer window (convincing Alexsander Mitrovic there was one big job left to do before he retired) I came second behind a PSG team that went unbeaten all season. I went back to the drawing board, and began 28/29 with this.

Maxine Delcroix, Robin Koch, Lucas Torreira and Willy Gnoto you’ll probably be familiar with. Théo Ndicka, Claud Adjapong, and Martin Paulmbo you probably won’t. Cosic, Adriazola, and Salazar (on the bench there) were possibly the three best new-gens I’ve ever managed, and I broke the bank replacing the ageing Mitrovic with an Evan Ferguson who had everything to prove.

Ross Barkley, also on the bench, was 34 and needed his minutes managed accordingly. You’d start him against teams in the bottom half and he’d run riot, but you could also give him 20 minutes as a sub when chasing a game to pull a lapine (rabbit) out of a chapeau (hat). Conor Coventry once got four red cards in like 16 starts.

The TV preview doesn’t do it justice either, but that system eventually became entirely lopsided. Cosic played centrally with Gnoto, while Salazar’s emergence at left-back meant he basically played the entire side on his own. Almost exactly like the main tactical innovation in the Premier League this season? Three years ahead of its time? Making me a genius? Not for me to say, obviously, but yes.

And it worked.

About a week before football recommenced in earnest in 2022, I won the French footballing title with a third division side from the bottom of The Alps. I’d had the single nicest holiday of my entire adult life, and owing to a chance encounter with a table of strangers over a garish football top, it had given me a lifetime connection with a team I’d otherwise never even have heard of.

As I write this, I’m three years older, now working in a dream football job I cannot believe I’m lucky enough to have, and sitting at the exact same table outside of the exact same bar. The temptation to download FM24 and do it all over again is suffocating, and tempered only by the fact I spoke to Sports Interactive about FM25 a fortnight ago and I’m literally not allowed to talk about the reasons I will absolutely just wait for that.

This morning I even walked up to the ground for the very first time, despite it being comprehensively closed to the public. The Parc Des Sports outside the town should feel like it’s ruined by the inclusion of a running track, but sat as it is in full view of the mountains and full of actual trees it’s one of the most unique footballing arenas on the continent.

That will all be knocked down in 2029 to make room for the 37,000-capacity Stade Clery, but seeing it in real life surrounded by the literal Alps and under an impossibly blue sky invoked a feeling in me you just don’t get in any other sport. I have never attended a single game of football in this stadium that wasn’t taking place entirely within the confines of my laptop’s graphics card, and yet it felt overwhelmingly like home.

Anyway, I think my point is this. Football’s a very easy thing to fall out of love with. The money, the corruption, the “discourse”, the noise, the relentless feeling that you’re actually just the consumer of a faceless corporate entity that dresses itself up as a treasured institution of your youth in order to shake you down for the highest possible percentage of your disposable income… the Robbie Savage and Rio Ferdinand commentary pairing, it’s really rough out here.

But helpfully it’s also a very easy thing to fall back in love with, and three years ago FC Annecy did that for me. Without this club - for whom I have never attended a single game, never sung a single song, and couldn’t even find the shirt in my size to take home - I can honestly say I would not be working in football right now. I would never have filmed a single video. And you would not be reading this article.

Normal service here on 87 Minutes resumes this month, but it’s been nice to remind myself why it’s worth doing all this. Bonne journée, mes amis.