Stade Malherbe Caen has finally formalized the arrival of a sports director. The lucky one is called Reda Hammache. He arrives from Red Star with the difficult mission of quickly finding players capable of successfully maintaining the Ligue 2 operation.
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This is the end of an open secret. SM Caen has just announced the appointment of Reda Hammache as new recruitment manager. He arrives from Red Star where he resigned to join the Mbappé project in Normandy.
News of his collaboration with Stade Malherbe leaked just before Christmas. It sparked controversy because the technician is suspected of having worked for the Norman club while he was still in contract with its Parisian rival in the race to remain in Ligue 2.
Moreover, he would be anything but foreign in the choice of Bruno Baltazar as replacement for Nicolas Seube. The same goes for the recruitment of Gabonese central defender Eric Moussounda, recruited from Aris Limassol on January 2.
Born in Saint-Denis, Reda Hammache is a trusted man of the Mbappé family. Recruiter at AS Monaco from December 2012 to August 2013, he contributed to the signing of young prodigy Kylian in the principality club, after the door to the SMC training center was suddenly closed due to a relegation to Ligue 2.
His professional career began at the age of 23, in 2005 at Stade Rennais, where he worked as a recruiter for three and a half years. He then went to Lens for the first time and stayed there for a little over three years. After a short Monegasque interlude of around ten months (see above), he returned to Artois to take care of youth recruitment.
In 2017, he was poached by rival Lille, recently taken over by the sulphurous Gérard Lopez. He contributes to very high quality transfer windows with the recruitments in particular of Nicolas Pépé, Thiago Mendes, Luiz Araujo, Gabriel Magalhaes, then Rafael Leao, Jonathan Ikoné, Jonathan Bamba and Zeki Celik. These young prospects with high potential who will be sold at a high price.
At the end of 2019, he joined Nîmes while the Gard club was in bad shape in the championship. President Rani Assaf entrusted him with the role of sports director, a first. Despite some interesting arrivals in the winter transfer window (Meling, Eliason, Cubas), the Crocos go down to Ligue 2 at the end of the season. Hammache will remain in Gard for two more seasons, without the club managing to get involved in the fight to climb back into the elite. He leaves a few months before the descent into National.
He then bounced back to Red Star when the Audon club was taken over by the American investment fund 777Partners. Multi-owner of clubs such as Standard de Liège (Belgium), Genoa (Italy), Vasco da Gama (Brazil) and Herta Berlin (Germany), the group goes bankrupt in the fall of 2024.
Sportingly, on the other hand, Hammache is at the origin of the revival of Red Star. Back in Ligue 2 after a high-flying season and the National champion title, the team is in the thick of the race to maintain itself.
In all the clubs he visited, Reda Hammache often recruited players from abroad. Then in Nîmes, he declared to Midi Libre that he wanted “working with people with an international outlook“, arguing that “lhe quality-price ratio is often more favorable outside our borders. The very good emerging player in France, he is already too expensive for us“.
What was valid four and a half years ago in a club with limited finances is just as valid currently at SM Caen.
Its new recruitment manager still has two weeks left to prove himself for the first time, while the Norman club is stuck in the red zone, with a gap behind the first non-relegation teams.
