VIDEO. “It’s a sport where you need a lot of rigor and lucidity,” testify the players who took part in the French table Football Cup near Toulouse.

“I do scales to warm up before the next match. I’m in destructive mode. It has to become automatic. If you like a certain sequence, if you’ve repeated it a lot, then you don’t think.” Cyril, in his fifties, practices scoring goals with his forward players in the old Suzanne Lenglen gymnasium in Castelmaurou, north-east of Toulouse, which hosted the French table football Cup this weekend, 49 teams from the whole of France competing for 320 competitors.

“It’s the pleasure of winning”

Cyril comes from the Kremlin-Bicêtre club (Val-deMarne), he learned table football in bars, like many people of his generation, then the “winning virus” infected him. “I followed the path of competition, it became a question of ambition. Sport then goes beyond leisure. It’s like at work, we want to be good everywhere, so we give ourselves the means to do so. arrive. We have a club of 35 licensees but with 90% competitors.

Castelmaurou, the cradle of table football competitions

But how do we cross the barrier of an activity which is initially a leisure activity between friends to take the plunge into competition. Maxime Blin, probably one of the best table football players of the moment and also president of the French Table Football Federation, has his explanation. “In the 1990s, people just wanted to organize tournaments,” he says. “For the record, there were tournaments here in Castelmaurou, I even found archive photos. There were also this weekend players who were already there thirty years ago. At the time, the Federation was in Toulouse and the first tournaments took place in Castelmaurou, Blagnac.

Occitanie has 170 licensees

Since then, the French Table Football Federation has 90 clubs and more than 1,800 licensees. This shows the enthusiasm that surrounds the discipline which combines several intrinsic qualities. Occitanie has seven clubs and 170 players.

“The Coupe de France is the only team competition, which brings together all the table football clubs, which can present training of players who have both a leisure license and a competition license, confides the president of Toulouse table football (TFT ) Clémentine Thomar We all started in university, and before that in middle school, high school and also in cafes. This is where we discovered our attraction to table football and if we took the plunge to go. in a club, then we evolve inside. It’s a sport where you need a lot of rigor and lucidity, something that you easily lose in competition.