Can this man fix the French women’s team?

The banner hangs just below the central staircase of the elegant hotel taken over by the France women’s national team for the World Cup. Hervé Renard wanted to make sure no one in his team could miss it.

The motivational words on it are typical of the kind of positive message teams that gather for major sports tournaments. But for this French side, and for Renard, their well-traveled coach, the words have extra meaning after a period many on the team would rather forget.

“Only team spirit,” it reads, “can make your dreams come true.”

Renard used the phrase the first time he met the French squad earlier this year, just months before the World Cup. That wasn’t long after he was chosen to replace fired coach Corinne Diacre, but even then he knew it was a message that could resonate with a team that even its own federation had concluded was “broken” beyond repair.

“We lacked unity,” Renard said in an interview last week on a sunny terrace in front of the team’s base camp. It was perhaps the biggest understatement in women’s football.

France arrived in Australia this month as a World Cup favorite on the mend. Torn by bitter feuds, it’s been the past few months lost players, she welcomed backand then lost them again. It has changed coaches, changed approaches and changed tactics. And now it has asked Renard, a respected 54-year-old with a decorated men’s World Cup resume but no previous experience coaching women, to make it at least to the semi-finals.

He started the process, he said, by being open about what he didn’t know.

“Everything was new to me because I didn’t know women’s football, how to manage the girls,” he said. “I was lucky, because many people in our staff already worked with women’s football. So I listened.”

What he inherited was a talented team in disarray. The longtime leader, Wendie Renard (who is not related to Hervé), had announced that she would not compete in the World Cup in order to maintain her sanity. Two other stars had followed suit, saying they would not return unless there was a change in the leadership of the team.

There had been previous controversies under Diacre, the coach at the time, but nothing quite as serious or existential. A rebellious mood had turned into open revolt.

Faced with a crisis as the World Cup loomed, the French Football Federation swung into action and, after a brief inquiry, announced that Diacre had to leave. The rift between her and the team, the federation said, had become so significant that it “has reached a point of no return”.

Hervé Renard, enjoying a successful and lucrative hiatus from a touring coaching career in Saudi Arabia, said he acted impulsively when the news broke. He contacted Jean-Michel Aulas, one of the most influential men in French football and a member of the board of the French Football Federation. Renard met him ten years ago, when he narrowly missed out on becoming coach of the Lyon men’s team. He told Aulas that he wanted to be considered for the opening.

It promised a major change of course for his career. Renard said that, until he picked up his phone to message Aulas, he had only considered coaching women once before: a fantasy that came to mind when he watched France play in the last World Cup. His interest, he said, had lasted “maybe just a few seconds.”

But now that his interest in coaching a women’s team for the first time was mutual, he ran into a problem. To accept the job, he would need the permission of football officials in Saudi Arabia, where he was under contract, and would have to accept a significant pay cut. The Saudi job, Renard explained with a smile, paid at least “twenty times” what he would earn coaching French women.

“When you’re in Saudi Arabia, that’s not exactly the reality,” he said. “So sometimes it’s good to get down to reality.”

Months later, Renard said he still couldn’t quite explain why he threw his hat into the ring before looking down at the French emblem on the left chest of his tracksuit. Having coached five other national teams, he said, the chance to manage his native country was clearly a big draw. But even then, some things, Renard said, can’t be explained. “I’m still not exactly sure why I decided,” he said.

Renard is optimistic about his rare achievement of coaching in two World Cups within a year. “The most important thing is not to participate in two World Cups in six months,” he said. “It’s to do something” in them.

Of all the teams Renard has coached, his current side is the highest ranked, ranked fifth in the world – a lofty profile it has maintained despite never progressing beyond the semi-finals of a major tournament. Renard said that is now possible.

“We have to believe in ourselves,” he said.

He is tasked with reaching the semi-finals, he said, a goal he has accepted. “We can’t come here if you’re fifth in the world and say, ‘Oh no, a quarter-final is enough.’ No. We need a very big challenge. So our first goal is to get to the semi-finals. Then we talk about other things.”

Renard has had just months to mend a broken roster, to inculcate the team spirit his banner demands and which he says his players need to win in what he considers the most competitive Women’s World Cup in history.

In his first training camp, Renard told the team that he was not interested in what happened in the past. He didn’t want to litigate past matches, past feuds, past grievances – all the things that had made the atmosphere in the camp so toxic that stars like Wendie Renard said they’d rather not play for France at all. But he couldn’t resist getting into one last pre-tournament controversy.

An experienced and gifted midfielder and a regular in the national team, Kheira Hamraoui was attacked by masked men in 2021 after dining with her club, Paris Saint-Germain. The fallout affected both the club and the national team, with a former teammate from both teams, Aminata Diallo, accused of involvement in the attack, and others angered by Hamraoui’s initial claims that she or people they knew were also involved.

The bizarre episode has shadowed the national team for more than two years. Faced with reviving France’s camp, Renard said he had decided not to bring Hamraoui to the World Cup, telling her in a face-to-face meeting why she would not be selected.

He said he told Hamraoui that she would not start and that a seat on the bench would be distressing for a player of her experience. “I think for this kind of player you start with the top 11 or it’s very hard to be on the bench,” he said. “We can’t get ahead in a league if we don’t have a fantastic team spirit.”

Renard acknowledged that not every choice he makes will be the right one. But he said he was open with his players about what he knew and what he didn’t know.

“I said to the girls, ‘Maybe I’m making some mistakes. If I say something wrong, let me know.” But step by step you learn how to manage,” he said.

His players are currently saying they are hearing the right things. “He keeps pushing us to be the best version of ourselves,” midfielder Grace Geyoro said a recent interview. Said Wendie Renard, “As long as everyone has the same vision and is willing to go in the same direction, we can achieve something great.”

The World Cup is taking place with the sharpest focus on women’s football in the sport’s history, and with teams and players using the platform to push for greater recognition and compensation for their efforts. FIFA, the global governing body of football, has more than tripled the prize money from four years ago to $110 million. The critics have said the new figure doesn’t go far enough, that it should be the same as the $440 million prize pool awarded to men at the 2022 World Cup in 2022.

Hervé Renard acknowledged the progress women’s football has made, especially since the last World Cup. But, perhaps controversially, he said that “women still need to have a little patience” when it comes to pay.

As interest continues to grow, he said, so will the earning potential. But the commercial reality, he said, was reflected in the sport’s differing revenues, and he brought up an analogy to make his point.

“If you have one restaurant with 1,000 evening meals and one with 300, it’s not the same thing,” he said. “At the end of the night in the till, it’s not the same amount. Football, it’s the same. It’s business.”