“The spotlight is on us,” says Cannes CEO Félicien Laborde on a radiant day on the Côte d’Azur as he reflects on the club’s latest giant-killing win in the Coupe de France. And “giant-killing” is the word for a 3-1 win against Guingamp in the quarter-finals; Guingamp are flying high in the second tier and, despite their once-great past, Cannes are down in the fourth tier. Their spectacular run to the semi-finals, where they will face Reims, has put the historic club back on the footballing map.
The quarter-final was a reminder of past glories. It was also a night that bore unmistakable scars of the club’s tumultuous recent history. There were 9,000 fans packed into the Stade Pierre de Coubertin, but that’s 8,000 short of the stadium’s record attendance, which was set back in 1993 before the north and south stands were dismantled – a decline that coincided with the club’s fall from grace and out of the professional game altogether.
“If we still had those two stands for the quarter-final, they would have been full,” says Laborde, whose task is to awaken the sleeping giant that is famous for producing two of the greats of the French game, Zinedine Zidane and Patrick Vieira. After qualifying for the Uefa Cup twice in the 1990s, it was a vertiginous drop for Cannes. They reached their nadir in the 2014-15 season after a DNCG ruling saw them excluded from the national leagues and banished to the seventh tier. It was a big step down for a club that had been a founding member of the French top flight in the 1930s.
“The job is to help the club be proud again because what the club has gone through for the past 20 years hasn’t been easy,” says Laborde, who occupied backroom roles down the coast at Monaco before joining Les Dragons in January 2024. Naturally, the recovery has been incremental, an arduous climb back up the ladder. But, since the Friedkin Group bought Cannes in June 2023, optimism and ambition have permeated a club that was languishing.
“The club’s objective is a long-term one and it comes through promotions to the higher divisions,” says Laborde. The club now have the financial means to reach those objectives, although the CEO insists their budget is “not a lot bigger” than their National 2 rivals.
But means in football are no guarantee of success. Sébastien Pérez, who played for Blackburn Rovers and Marseille, arrived as sporting director a year ago and “audited” the squad. “There were good players but, for me, the cycle had more or less come to an end, so we had to regenerate the squad by adding quality,” he says.
The club brought in 16 players and a new manager in Fabien Pujo. “It isn’t easy to change 16 players and have an osmosis and a connection between the players,” says the sporting director. And that showed in the opening weeks of the season. More change was needed.
The warning signs were already evident in the pre-season training camp. “We put everyone together and we observed for six weeks and saw what was working and what wasn’t working,” says Laborde. “What didn’t work was the manager’s management. Unfortunately, the leadership wasn’t working; there wasn’t enough of it. In terms of the goalkeeper, we didn’t have that assurance we needed.”
The club changed course: Damien Ott replaced Pujo as manager in October, and they signed the former Birmingham City and Senegal midfielder Cheikh N’Doye – “the missing piece” in Pérez’s words – and the goalkeeper Jérémy Aymes. Ott’s impact has been revolutionary. His predecessor won just one of his seven games in charge; Ott has won nine of his 16 games in the National 2, putting Cannes in contention for promotion, and led them to the semi-finals of the Coupe de France.
If they are promoted, there will not be a repeat of last summer’s mass recruitment. “It isn’t about 16 changes every year,” says Pérez. “We are trying to construct a team that has a strong core that will allow us to make steps forward.” Laborde agrees, adding: “If one day we go up to National 1, the team is already there. We have made a team that is capable of going up and having a lasting impact. Will we have the means to compete and play at an even higher level? Yes. We will.”
The club believe their squad and manager coalesce with a wider Friedkin-instigated philosophy of all-out attack, seen as the key to climbing back up the ladder. “We did a study to find out what kind of clubs make the jump from National 2 to National 1. What came out of it is that we needed to score more goals. Over the last 10 years, clubs that have gone from National 2 to National 1 have scored a lot of goals,” says Laborde.
“When you look at the squad, there are more attackers than defenders,” notes the CEO. “The owners say that we play to win. Sometimes we concede goals but the risk is accepted by everyone and, first and foremost, by the owners who tell us not to play for a draw.” It is no coincidence that their striker Julien Domingues tops the goalscoring charts in the Coupe de France with 11 goals, becoming the first player since Jean-Pierre Papin to hit double figures in the competition.
When Cannes began their Coupe de France campaign in the preliminary stages in August, the plan was to use the competition as a “laboratory” to “test things” and “create chemistry” between the squad. Having beaten Ligue 2 sides Grenoble, Lorient and Guingamp, they believe their ultra-attacking style will translate to the higher divisions.
And while promotion remains the big objective this season, Cannes are allowing themselves to dream in the cup. “We won’t be playing with 11 behind the ball against Reims,” says Laborde. “Now we are here, we want to win it and to go to the Stade de France, but it has never been an objective.”
The objective, as Laborde emphasises throughout, is to secure a promotion that will take Cannes closer to their former identity. “We want to once again have professional status – to be able to reopen an academy, to start bringing through our own players again. That is Cannes’ DNA. We brought through Vieira and Zidane. The goal is to do that again,” says Laborde.
Promotion would provide more opportunities to work with the other clubs in the Friedkin Group. “To be able to collaborate with Roma and Everton, we have to go a bit higher first,” says Laborde. “When we close this big gap, we can think about collaborating together.”
Closing that gap will take place out of the spotlight that is currently shining on the club. “We have the light on us but it will go away again,” Laborde acknowledges. But in a town famed for its film festival, it is fitting that a film producer, in Friedkin, is at the heart of a project to bring AS Cannes back to the big screen for good.
This is an article by Get French Football News