Vive King Éric Roy as Brest’s song for Europe grows ever louder
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Coach’s epic journey from unwanted one to special one as club’s fairytale run in Champions League continues. At the very end of 2022, Éric Roy was convinced the ship he had hoped to board had sailed a while ago. How could it be otherwise? He was now in his 57th year, and his last – his only – coaching assignment had ended more than a decade previously.
He had resigned himself to carrying on working as a pundit for French television, as he had done since 2012, with a three-year spell as sports director with first Lens, then Watford from 2017 to 2020 sandwiched in between. The irony of the situation was not lost on him: he was better qualified now than he had been when, in March 2010, his home town club, Nice, had called on him to manage their first team. He had accepted the role despite having no managerial experience whatsoever – and no coaching badges either.
Nice, where he had worked as head of communications and sports director after retiring as a player, needed someone like him. Le Gym was facing relegation to the second tier, had no money to speak of – Sir Jim Ratcliffe would acquire the club nine years later – and had to turn to one of its own to try to engineer an unlikely survival. There was no one who better deserved to be counted as one of their own by the club than Roy.
He was born in Nice. It was in the southern French city that his father, Serge, a French international and a French league and Cup winner with Monaco, had ended his playing days (the son still speaks to the father, now 92, after every game). It was in Nice Serge had met his future wife, a Niçoise herself. And it was with Nice Éric had started and finished a 16-year professional career that also took him to Lyon, Marseille and Sunderland.