Lucas Stassin, it comes or goes – Ligue 1 – J11 – Lyon-Saint-Étienne

It all started with a long night or a short morning, it depends, and a scene that one would think came straight out of childhood, except that the child in question is no longer really one. A morning like any other for ordinary mortals, but for ordinary high-level footballers, it’s one of the mornings of the year where everything can change, where a suitcase can be packed in ten minutes before jumping in a private jet and where a season can take more or less all possible directions, without the footballer in question always having a say in said direction. Thus, on August 30, Lucas Stassin, 19 years old, was woken up by his father, Stéphane, 48 years old, a former pro who displays on his CV a good sixty professional matches with Anderlecht, almost as many with Union Saint- Gilloise, and a little less with Angers. « Lucas, wake up. Westerlo agreed to discuss again! » This is how a summer Friday, which Stassin fils was supposed to end with a Jupiler Pro League match and which was coming at the end of a marathon week, marked by discussions with Sunderland and negotiations with Saint-Étienne, ended up turning out. And the person concerned finds himself at 11:25 p.m. in a completely different country, with a completely different jersey and with a completely new label. Not just any recruit: that of the most expensive recruit in the history of the Greens.

Was this choice easy to make? « Clearly, because I was planning to leave, replies the young striker. Now I had a big start to the season with Westerlo (2 goals and 3 assists in 5 matches, Editor’s note) and if the club wasn’t there, I would have stayed. Either way, I knew my decision was going to be a good one. Afterwards, when the possibility of playing in Ligue 1, at the age of 19, presented itself… » And why Sainté, exactly? « Quite simply because I felt that the managers really knew me. From the very first call, I was impressed. Sometimes, we can talk to you about your stats, or two or three things, without it going very far. There, they talked to me concretely about what they wanted to do with me. We discussed my points of improvement, the club’s project, tactics, my ability to be very effective in relation to my expected goals (9 buts pour 6.7xG, NDLR). We went into detail, the concrete. » Behind, everything happened very quickly: number 32 on the back, chosen in a nod to the telephone code of Belgium due to not being able to take his favorite 76, Lucas Stassin, who first lived at the training center de l’Étrat, was promoted to the pro group and had his first start in his first match, against LOSC. Since then, he has discovered Ligue 1, piece by piece. He is in the game of competition with a completely different profile than his own, that of Ibrahim Sissoko, and has already provided three assists, which makes him the best passer in the squad before swallowing his first derby on Sunday . That’s just a detail. Precious, OK, but a detail, because Stassin goes out on the field to be something else: before being an assistant, this guy has, in the big picture of Football, the reputation of being a killer.

The shaking net

In mid-September, his new coach at the Greens, Olivier Dall’Oglio, admitted to having quickly discovered the character of his new leader: « He is 19 years old, ambitious, he knows where he wants to go. He knows that today, if he wants to be a top striker, he has to run. The first of its qualities is movement. He feels the game, he is very fair on simple things: control, passing. Afterwards, he is an attacker. He is only satisfied when he scores. It’s an obsession. » It’s even something that has devoured him, since childhood. Stassin knew, however, that when he arrived in Ligue 1, he would have to sort out a few things. He says he has already fallen « in another sphere. I was immediately struck by the intensity and the quality of the players. I was with the Belgian Espoirs in October and we discussed it among ourselves. We said to ourselves that we really have to go to one of the clubs of the five biggest European championships to understand what real football is, the very high level. Samuel Mbangula agreed. Everything you do has to be faster, a lot faster. » Probably even more so in the place where Lucas Stassin has lived since he was a kid, in the sixteen meters, an area where his instinct quickly took him, but with which he gradually gained a little more perspective : « Yes, the numbers are important. The stats are what speaks straight away, but today, an attacker must know a lot more things. It goes beyond that. Well, now, the best feeling will always be seeing a net shake. »

Stassin has been moving forward with this feeling since day one. His father describes an image of his son, as a kid, snuggled up with several balls in his bed instead of comforters, who grew up in a family where football was always everywhere. « Beyond my case, there was also my cousin, but especially his grandfather, who played at an amateur level for many years, in D3-D4, smiles Stéphane Stassin. He didn’t play football very well, but he was a real scorer. When I talk about it with elders, they all tell me: “Frankly, your son doesn’t look like you. It’s clearly Guy Stassin, his grandfather.” It’s very true: Lucas is like him, he has a nose for the goal. »

To use the words of Aimé Jacquet, Stassin has this ease in playing « between the horns of the bull » and he even says that this is what sometimes saved him, notably in his early days at Anderlecht, a club where his father is a youth coach and which Lucas Stassin joined at the age of 9 after being spotted by a training manager. « I really think that if I managed to stay at Anderlecht, it is thanks to my goals, develops the person concerned. I say that because I have a truly unique profile, which does not fit at all into the typical DNA of the Anderlecht player. An Anderlecht player is above all a technical, creative player. At the start, I wasn’t very technically gifted. I progressed afterwards, but my thing was the instinct for placement. » Thierry Siquet, who experienced the devil in the U18 and U19 national selections, continues: « It’s a bit silly to say, but Lucas knows where the goal is, and few players know that. No matter where he is, he knows where he has to put the ball, how to position himself. He has this thing where the ball always falls on him and it can’t be a coincidence when it happens so many times. If we add to that the fact that he also knows how to take responsibility and is not afraid of much… » This gives a trigger who has always stacked goals, among young people and among pros, and whose rating has very quickly climbed.

Micro, Ibiza, podium

In January 2023, Stassin even scored a goal during a friendly match against Troyes, with a microphone on his jersey. Anderlecht decided to hang it on him before releasing the video on the networks, triggering a little buzz around him. What caused a lot of discussion, then, was above all the man’s choice to leave his training club during the summer to join Westerlo, just after having finished, at 17, on the podium of top scorers in D2 with the Anderlecht U23. His entourage may have told him to be patient, but Lucas Stassin was only looking for one thing: playing time, at a high level, even as an understudy, which Anderlecht never really offered him. It is justified: « When you’re young, I think you have to play and that’s all I wanted, to be at the highest level, to grow. It wasn’t easy because in Anderlecht, I knew everyone in the locker rooms, the offices, but I felt that it was the time to leave, to live alone, to get through this stage. It was a very good idea, because at Westerlo, I discovered real football, even if I had to adjust in terms of mentality. I’ve been on the bench, the injuries, the good times… It toughens you up. » On site, the native of Braine-le-Comte, which is also the town of the Hazard family, to which the Stassin family is close, also did as always by getting closer to the old members of the group, starting with Nacer Chadli, with whom he went to Ibiza on vacation this summer. There is the idea, here, of a 19-year-old guy who prefers to kill time with fathers, playing cards or watching football, rather than doing anything else.

« The real difference that his season brought to Westerlo, in my opinion, was what it offered him on a physical level, analyzes Jonas de Roeck, the Antwerp coach, who was Stassin’s coach at Westerlo during the first months and knew him at Anderlecht. We knew he would bring his face to goal, that he could play with strong pressure, but his body has finished forming. It filled up. Before, he was really skinny. If he continues to mature on this and if he remains smart, intelligent, always proposing solutions, everything can align and he can succeed in Ligue 1. » Football has changed, the striker has moved back, with a lot more to do. Lucas Stassin, for the moment, continues to work hard. His learning of French football is underway, he who has been pushed around quite a bit since his arrival (only four shots attempted in 300 minutes), but who wears down the defenses and increasingly refines the connections within a squad where he was very quickly taken responsibility. Too fast? Maybe, but the ASSE project wants it. « Not long ago, we watched Anderlecht-Westerlo together and he said to me: “Damn, I have the impression that the players play while walking,” laughs Stéphane Stassin. The intensity of Ligue 1 is different, and it’s normal that he needs time to adapt. » The Belgian, however, quickly wants to realize a dream: to trigger a “descent” behind Geoffroy-Guichard’s goals, where he promised himself, in the event of a package, to go one day to immerse himself. In the meantime, a derby in Lyon is on the horizon. A good evening to find what Lucas Stassin has so far managed to climb the steps for: the sniffing shots, the goal, the shaking nets. The life of a fox, that’s it.

For Jessy Moulin, there is no need to be “a purebred Stéphanois” to understand the importance of the derby