The club has found the elite for the first time since the end of the 2013-2014 season. He owes it, for a large part, to his coach, in post for eight years.
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Since the descent of the Sporting Club of Bastia in 2017, Corsican football had disappeared from Ligue 1. He finally found himself a lighthouse, with the Athletic Club Ajaccien (ACA). The club, which has been playing in Ligue 2 since 2014, once again tasted the games of the national elite on Friday August 5 against Olympique Lyonnais (2-1 defeat). Sunday, August 14, he will play his first game of the season, at home, against Lens.
This return to the foreground was not obvious. Displaying the twelfth budget of Ligue 2 last season (8.5 million euros), Ajaccio has foiled the forecasts by finishing Dauphin de Toulouse. “I see this rise as a reward for the seriousness of this club at all levels”, welcomes Didier Rey, historian and specialist in Corsican football, who adds that in spite of several back and forth between Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 since 1998 “Descents have never been disasters, because there has always been a development policy”.
The ACA “Form of players and remains very careful in the choice of reinforcements. It is a wise and building club”, continues Didier Rey. And if the club “harvests the fruits today” of this policy again, it owes it for a good part to a man: Olivier Pants, his coach. At 55, the latter knew everything in Ajaccio: he was a player there (between 1994 and 2000), physical trainer, assistant coach, then principal coach.
“He is very very human”
The fifties with shaved skull has totaled more than four hundred games on a professional bench since 2009 – the vast majority in Ajaccio. Because, if he went to train Tours, this infidelity was very brief (one season, in 2013-2014). It allowed him not to know the throes of a descent with the Ajaccian club, but, on the contrary, to be able to boast of having been to the controllers of the last two lifts in Ligue 1 (at the end of the 2011-2012 and 2021-2022).
This longevity and its results were notably rewarded by four nominations for “best coach” at the UNFP trophies, who reward each year the actors of French professional football (2011, 2018 and 2022 in Ligue 2, 2012 in Ligue 1 ). However, do not wait for olive pants that he seeks to draw the blanket. Because, if it is a word that characterizes this former midfielder, son of teachers, it is “humility”. We can add another: “Humanity”.
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