Marked for Robert Masson
From our football correspondent
Uneasy
Match4 Sep 2032
The wait goes on for AS Nancy
8 without a win now, and the ground has developed the special quiet of a crowd that expects the worst. One scrappy 1-0 would cure most of it; that is the maddening part.
Squad6 Sep 2032
187 appearances across 11 seasons in one shirt. Nobody builds a career like that on purpose any more; it happens to a certain kind of footballer at a certain kind of club.
Squad6 Sep 2032
“I was told what my role would be, and I signed on that basis. It has not happened.” A grievance with a date attached is the hardest kind to settle.
Market6 Sep 2032
“I have ambitions, and I would like the club to share them.” Nobody has asked to leave and nobody has been shown the door — but a player chooses that sentence carefully, and a boardroom hears it exactly as it was meant.
Squad6 Sep 2032
Faitout Maouassa was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Squad6 Sep 2032
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Robert Masson is 18, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Player ratings6 Sep 2032
Successful dribbles: 18. There is a particular sort of despair on a full-back's face by the seventieth minute, and it was on display.
Match4 Sep 2032
Nil-nil, and few chances worth the name. Toulouse FC came to defend and left with exactly what they came for.
Market6 Sep 2032
Every press conference now starts and ends the same way: with Xavier Mandza’s future. The manager has run out of new ways to say nothing.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Uneasy
Squad9 Aug 2032
“I was told what my role would be, and I signed on that basis. It has not happened.” A grievance with a date attached is the hardest kind to settle.
Squad9 Aug 2032
Faitout Maouassa was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Squad9 Aug 2032
Robert Masson is a better footballer than he was
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 18 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
From our football correspondent
Uneasy
Boardroom7 Jun 2032
Pressure builds in the AS Nancy boardroom
The directors have stopped offering the manager public warmth. In football that is usually the stage before the short statement.
Market7 Jun 2032
“I want to be playing for trophies while my legs still let me.” Nothing in that sentence is a transfer request, and nobody at AS Nancy heard it as anything else.
Squad7 Jun 2032
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at AS Nancy this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Boardroom7 Jun 2032
Valenciennes will keep picking him until June and will get nothing for him after it. Dayann Linyon has pre-agreed a move to AS Nancy, and the only people who lose in that arrangement are the ones who let the contract run down.
Squad7 Jun 2032
Bálint Vécsei falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
Market7 Jun 2032
Robert Masson is 18, and AS Nancy have signed him for the player he will be rather than the one he is. The first team can wait; the point of a deal like this is the years it buys.
Squad7 Jun 2032
“Some decisions take a long time. This one took ten minutes, and most of that was finding a pen.” Quentin Carpentier and AS Nancy agree another 3 years.
Squad7 Jun 2032
The manager makes an example of Quentin Forget
“If you cannot run for the shirt, somebody else will wear it.” No name was used and none was needed; every player in that room knew who it was for.
Boardroom7 Jun 2032
AS Nancy pull $9.6M back off the table
The money that was there in the summer is not there now. Nobody upstairs calls this a change of ambition, and everybody downstairs reads it as one.
From our football correspondent
Steady
Squad1 Sep 2031
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Toulouse FC have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
Squad1 Sep 2031
Andrija Živković was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Squad1 Sep 2031
Cristian Cásseres falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
Player ratings1 Sep 2031
There is a version of this player everybody suspected was in there, and on this evidence it is. 8.24, and no argument anywhere in the ground.
Squad1 Sep 2031
The one version of being left out a player cannot argue with, and the one he takes worst. Somebody else has been better and the team sheet says so, in public, every week until it changes.
Match30 Aug 2031
1‑1, and both dressing rooms will call it two points lost. A draw that asked plenty of questions and answered none of them.
Market1 Sep 2031
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Toulouse FC know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
Player ratings1 Sep 2031
Successful dribbles: 12. Every time he got the ball somebody had to make a decision, and every time the decision was wrong.
Market1 Sep 2031
The window shut and Alexis Vossah is still in the building
Toulouse FC spent a month trying to move him and nobody rang back. He trains with a squad that has told him where he stands, and both sides start counting down to the next one.