His resolution from last year, to learn how to use a computer, has been swept away by a wave of envelopes. With his feet on his desk, piles of paper surround the switched-off machine. He signs the checks for his association, Foot citoyen (1), on a small, uncluttered beach. “Sorry, rent is late.”
After a thirty-year career, his story is one of a succession of liberating falls. He started from a high place. Didier Roustan joined TF1 at the age of 18 and, at 21, presented Téléfoot. He looks back without suffering: “Football has always been a game for me, which is why I can’t bring myself to look at it seriously, to theorize like other journalists do.”
Handsome dark-haired, dark complexion, velvet eyes, unkempt chic, Didier Roustan was born in Congo, to a Martinican mother who was a journalist at AFP and a father who was the deputy general manager of finances at AES (East and South Africa). He lived in Brazza until he was 3 years old. “I have flashbacks. I remember the atmosphere. When I go back to Africa, I feel at home.” He discovered France in Cannes. This time, it was his grandparents who took care of him. The parents were here and there. Didier was distracted. Fortunately, Didier played and rather well, rather endlessly. At 16, at AS Cannes, he was already training with the pros. What his old coach thinks about it today: “Didier, what a waste, possibilities, but a pig’s character.” Adult Roustan, that makes him smile. He narrows his Chinese eyes and flatters himself that he didn’t play libero by chance. “A friend once told me that I was a revolutionary. Because in the word there is “dream, evolution and air”. And I need air.”
At 17, suspended for insubordination to a coach, he takes the time to look at women, whose importance to him is quickly apparent from the way he avoids the subject. What if girls watched his shows without interfering with football? He feigns again: “Does your wife watch football?” No, she looks at Roustan, he makes her laugh with his jerseys worn backwards, his lyrical flights, his clownish humor, never vulgar. The seducer steals the show but he is secretive.
Didier, an adult, has no job. “I told myself that I was going to be a fisherman, I did that in the summer.” His mother got him a three-month internship at TF1: “I stayed there for thirteen and a half years.”
Didier Roustan’s style is unique. Irreverent, a connoisseur of his sport, happy with the convivial side of his job until the Tapie years, Didier is the king. He is smart in a popular sport with narrow references. He breaks down the barriers of football, mixes rock and Shakespeare with the ball. If he knows the game and the players like no one else, he is the guy who takes everything lightly. Which could have been taken for contempt in France. He knows that in Brazil and England football is a cultural “whole”. Here, without really wanting to, he highlights the old-fashionedness of Thierry Roland and his approximate, trivial comments.
With Téléfoot’s ratings falling, TF1 wanted a “star” presenter. Thierry Roland took over the microphone, paradoxically put back in the saddle by his puppet at the Guignols on Canal. In 1989, Roustan gave in to Canal and Biétry, who promised to share the matches with Denisot. He would not keep his word. He deprived TF1 of Roustan more than he trusted him. In the end it would be Mag Max, a blessing in disguise. 52 minutes, where the sportsman is framed at human height. From South Africa to Latin America, Didier travels and reads. “Not Flaubert or Balzac” but the Cuban revolution, the story of Che. He likes the romance of guerrillas, the exoticism of the fights against dictatorships. Sincere as a high school tract: “I have always been against all forms of injustice, and against those who take advantage of others.” He also takes after Noah: recycling fine reflections that hit the mark on ethics, the philosophy of life, and alongside that he says stupid things as big as himself.
They tell him that he would have made an honest player agent. He retorts that it can’t be. Not so much because of the agents as because of the footballers, who, like magpies, see money in everything. At Canal +, the incestuous relationship between football and television is being plotted. Roustan doesn’t want to fight. He keeps his energy for his ideas. Biétry-la-science bores him. “He’s in people’s heads, he thinks for them.” Roustan has 2,000 ideas/minute, he’s hard to manage, he’s not a fan of stats and performance. But what can I say? Roustan is good and he works.
In 1993, he went to France 2. “I could feel the end of it.” Stade 2, the civil servant excesses of his colleagues, their ties, made him slide towards what he had always aspired to: politicizing football. It would become the world players’ union. A myth that would bring together forty-eight stars, from Cantona to Maradona, from Vialli to Raï. He wanted “players to have their say in the major decisions that concern them.” The union leader led a double life. At France 2 during the day, resisting at night. He exhausted himself defending the rights of billionaires who disappeared as soon as his back was turned. “Three years of suffering.” But the fictitious existence of this union that he had embodied alone would have an indirect effect, the reactivation of Fifpro, a place where players’ representatives would be consulted. Not a panacea but… His union is going down the drain, depression is looming, debts are piling up because footballers don’t meet in PMU bars. He smokes Gitanes and eats at the local bistro. “I was lucky to have people around me who put up with my crazy outbursts. It does damage. When you see your 3-year-old kid, while you’re leaving for Argentina, who tells you: “Stay there.” It’s very hard.” In 1998, all that ended: “I’m a vegetable.”
Roustan is unemployed, wants to be a taxi driver. TV doesn’t seem to appreciate his way of mocking clichés anymore. Roustan goes back to L’Equipe TV, it will be Finally Football. A cult show that is reminiscent of Polac’s Right of Reply and which will lead to his caricature on LCI: On refait le match. Finally Football, it was more Muppet Show, funny but not stupid about a sport that is losing its soul. Four years later, a “savings plan” hits young employees, Roustan pulls out his solidarity and leaves. You don’t break a 50-year-old kid’s toy.
The self-proclaimed “savage” quickly bounces back on a project that may be the culmination of his mission on earth. At Foot citoyen, he opposes violence and racism in football. A tiny company, a hell of a job, for zero euros. He will quickly find an echo in the regions where kids hit the referee, insult each other. It starts in Paca, with the intervention of sociologists, psychologists, technicians, publication of a monthly, etc. Roustan questions the all-business, success at all costs. He wants to make two worlds one, and one that would run smoothly. So smoothly that Sarkozy tracks down this anarchist. That’s how well it works.
Besides, that doesn’t feed a family. So Roustan presents Loto Foot with Basile Boli and comments on matches on TPS. During the World Cup you might hear him humming on TV5 Monde, Serge Reggiani, when the ball grazes the post. “It would take almost nothing… for me to tell you “I love you”.”
photo LUDOVIC CARÊME
(1) www.footcitoyen.org
Didier Roustan in 7 dates
October 1957. Born in Brazzaville (Congo).
1976. Joined TF1.
1989. Join Canal +.
1993. Joined France 2.
1995. Creation of the World Players Union.
2003. Creation of Foot citoyen.
2006. Commentator on TV5 Monde and TPS.
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