Damien Comolli: How the man who signed Henry, Bale & Suarez is reshaping Toulouse

It isn’t simply younger gamers being poached. Toulouse’s Scottish head of recruitment Brendan MacFarlane left on the finish of final season to hitch Manchester Metropolis.

Comolli discovered his alternative at Leicester Metropolis in Viktor Bezhani.

In truth, few overseas membership presidents know English soccer in addition to Comolli. He labored beneath Arsene Wenger at Arsenal as head of recruitment and was director of soccer at Tottenham and Liverpool, bringing in some outstanding expertise.

So how does he do it?

“I did not discover Thierry Henry, for instance I really useful him to Arsenal,” he explains. “I checked out extremely technical gamers with unbelievable drive and motivation to achieve success and to develop themselves, and who could make the precise choices on the proper time on the pitch.

“That is positively the case once we [Tottenham] signed Gareth Bale when he was 17 and Luka Modric. This was the case for recruiting Robin van Persie [at Arsenal] once we received him for peanuts.

“If you see the drive in these younger gamers who wish to beat up the opposition and enhance day-after-day, plus their determination making, that’s the recipe I used to be searching for on the time.”

On prime of promotion and the Coupe de France triumph, Toulouse additionally beat Comolli’s previous membership Liverpool at residence within the Europa League group stage final November.

He says his two take-aways from his expertise in English soccer are the sense of group and using knowledge and statistics.

“It is fairly easy to elucidate,” he says. “We’ve loads much less cash than everybody else, so if we attempt to do the identical as everyone else with much less cash we’re going to fail.

“My obsession is how one can discover a aggressive benefit out there and that’s through the use of knowledge and numbers once we recruit coaches and gamers, and utilizing knowledge when deciding taking part in fashion and when to relaxation gamers or to coach gamers extra. We use knowledge to optimise our switch price range and wage invoice.”

Since he took over as membership president, attendances have rocketed from 5,000 to typically 30,000 for residence video games. Once more, he took concepts from his time in English soccer.

“I used to be extraordinarily privileged to work with folks like David Dein, who created the Premier League, alongside Daniel Levy and [learned] from Kenny Dalglish, once I was at Liverpool,” he explains.

“I additionally realized what to not do working soccer golf equipment. What I took from English golf equipment is a way of group. I take into consideration what I realized from my time at Tottenham, Arsenal and Liverpool – in different phrases, the footprint of the soccer membership inside the area people.”