Twenty-five years after hanging up his crampons, Jean-Marc Ferreri makes this observation tinged with bitterness: “The great regret of my career is that I was born in 1962, four or five years too early. » Given a few years, the 1984 European champion could have benefited, like many generations of players after him, from the Bosman ruling to export his talent beyond the borders of France.
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Adopted in December 1995 by the Court of Justice of the European Communities, this decision, which puts an end to the quota of three foreign players per squad, will revolutionize the world of football. Jean-Marc Ferreri only took advantage of it late, at the twilight of his career, to play a season at FC Zurich (Switzerland), in 1997. Today, he observes, with a touch of regret, that young talents go through the borders, sometimes barely adults: “With the gift I had at 18, I would also have left very early for a big European club. »
Like him, 19 of the 20 players on the French team, European champions in 1984, played for a club in France. In this old world, only Michel Platini, Italian champion with Juventus, is an exception. “For a foreign club to come to you, you had to be very, very goodremembers Manuel Amoros, French defender in 1984. At the start of our career, we didn’t even imagine being able to leave France. »
The exodus of summer 1996
An unattainable dream four decades ago, playing abroad is, today, the norm – or almost – for French footballers, even an essential step towards an international career. Among the 25 Blues who are competing in the Euro in Germany, since June 14 and until July 14, 17 are playing outside France.
In the 1984 Blues squad, Didier Six is the other player to have tasted, in the past, the charm of neighboring championships. “French players were not popular on the market, because we did not have reference elements unlike the Brazilians or the Argentinesnotes Alain Giresse, member of the “magic square”. We had never won anything before. We knew that we were not in a championship and major football. »
However, the requests exist. In the summer of 1983, Inter Milan approached FC Nantes and its sporting director, Robert Budzynski, to try to recruit Maxime Bossis. “He spoke to me about it eight months later, to tell me that he had not followed upremembers the defender of the Blues from 1984. It is a great regret. We were excessively dependent on the managers because no player, apart from Michel [Platini], had no agent at the time. »
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