Dream Team Podcast – “Sport at the highest level of the State”: seven years at the Élysée

4 min read

Pierre Moreau invited me onto Dream Team, the podcast for sports business leaders, for a two-hour episode about my years as the French President’s adviser for sport, the 2024 Olympic Games, youth and the voluntary sector. An unusual exercise for an adviser, whose job is normally to stay out of the spotlight: explaining how sport is approached by a head of state and the government.

• Listen to the episode on the Dream Team website (in French) (also on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Deezer)

From public service to sport

I did not come to sport through elite competition (far from it), but through political engagement. A member of the Parti radical de gauche from 2002, then eight years at the Île-de-France regional authority, and elected deputy mayor of Paris’s 14^th arrondissement in 2014, I joined the office of Thierry Braillard, Minister of State for Sport, that same year as parliamentary adviser, before becoming his chief of staff and then his principal private secretary. In May 2017, the day after the handover, I joined the Élysée.

My interview with Alexis Kohler came down to a single question: what should be done for sport, in light of the President’s programme and vision? My conviction at the time was that sport could be the ideal arena to demonstrate, in one sector, what the President wanted for the country: pride in being French, ambition and renewed confidence in what our nation is capable of.

Sport is never a “small” issue

I have always been irritated by the self-pitying reflex of a sector that sees itself as too small to carry weight. Sport does not only exist when sport is on the agenda: it has its place in a meeting on health, on Covid, on the war in Ukraine, on the budget or on Africa policy. But you have to arrive with a contribution that feeds into other people’s work and, in doing so, serves the public interest.

The work begun in late 2017 on France’s new relationship with Africa, set out in the Ouagadougou speech, was a good example. A lunch held at the Élysée in February 2018, with guests including the FIFA President, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and Kylian Mbappé, helped shape the idea of what would become the Basketball Africa League: a competition designed to build a sports economy on the continent that creates jobs and positive social impact.

The Super League, in two acts

In 2019, at the FIFA Congress held in Paris alongside the Women’s World Cup, the President publicly warned against a plan to overhaul European competitions that could have left French clubs out in the cold and threatened the European sports model; the plan was dropped. In spring 2021, on a Sunday, a phone call told me the Super League was about to be launched. Our response was put together in a few exchanges with the President: a statement sent to AFP ahead of the official announcement and shared with our European partners, the governing bodies and supporters’ associations.

The project would probably have collapsed without us, so poorly was it put together. We helped it collapse faster, in favour of this European sports model to which we must remain committed.

Sexual violence: turning awareness into change

Sarah Abitbol’s testimony was a shockwave. It accelerated structural changes led by Roxana Maracineanu and then Amélie Oudéa-Castéra: the Signal-Sports reporting unit, vetting checks and national prevention conferences. There is still a long way to go. Federations exercise disciplinary powers without investigative powers, alongside criminal, administrative and employment proceedings that overlap. That is the whole point of my recent analysis of the role an independent authority could play.

After Covid, funding demand rather than supply

The health crisis was one of the periods when sport was most present around the table, down to the detail of the rules for lifting lockdown. It was also a moment to rethink public policy: the 5,000 sports grounds plan, thirty minutes of daily physical activity at primary school, two extra hours of sport at secondary school, and above all the Pass’Sport. For the first time, the State funded participants directly rather than organisations, which pushed clubs to rethink what they offer. In autumn 2021, membership bounced back beyond what federations had hoped for.

A fair assessment of the scheme must take into account what it was: one lever among others, never presented as the sole answer to getting more people playing sport. And eligibility criteria that have since become too restrictive.

Professional football: CVC, and what next?

Faced with the Mediapro crisis and the impact of Covid, the State took the view that it was not its place to prevent the Ligue de Football Professionnel from opening up the capital of its commercial company, and never intervened in either the valuation or the choice of fund. With hindsight, the deal helped clubs weather the crisis; the contribution expected from CVC to the running of the league, however, has not been sufficiently visible. The same questions arise, on another scale, with FIFA’s plan for a commercial company.

Paris 2024, and one regret

The President never doubted that the Games would be a success. His role was to align the State behind the ambition led by Tony Estanguet: regular Olympic councils, decisions made, and a genuine risk taken as early as summer 2021 on an opening ceremony on the Seine. My role, in my own position, was to keep things moving between the State and the organising committee.

My regret concerns the 2030 Winter Games. I left on the day the governing parties, meeting around the Prime Minister, settled on Martin Fourcade. Wrongly seen as the State’s candidate, he was in fact the candidate of French sport. In the context that followed the dissolution of the National Assembly, the conditions for trust could not be built around him, and I regret not having managed to convince local stakeholders that it was in their interest.

My thanks to Pierre Moreau for the conversation.

→ Listen to the full episode (in French)