Paulo Fonseca is now doing ‘extraordinary’ work at Lille after missing out on the manager’s job at Everton, Newcastle United and Tottenham Hotspur, Premier League legend Thierry Henry tells Amazon Prime Video.
Les Dogues have come a long way since August’s 7-1 home defeat to Paris Saint-Germain. Six months on, Lille ended another Ligue 1 clash with the capital club without a point to their name. But the contrast, between that humiliating late-summer thrashing and Sunday’s Parc des Princes thriller, was stark.
PSG needed a last-gasp Lionel Messi free-kick to see off a Lille side who outplayed the champions for long spells on their own soil; going 2-1 and 3-2 up before a late fightback.
After a difficult start, Lille are now playing their best football since that dramatic title win back in 2021; a triumph which – ironically enough – came under the man now in the PSG hotseat. One Christophe Galtier.
“What the coach is doing is extraordinary,“ Henry says of Fonseca; the flexibility and complexity of his tactics catching the eye of the former France international.
“A four-man defence which turns into a three-man defence. Timothy Weah, who gives width on the left side, (Jonathan) Bamba on the right. They play, they press, they score.
“But (in the defensive side), they were monsters. When the monsters wake up, it’s a little harder (for the opposition).”
Paulo Fonseca’s Lille taking Ligue 1 by storm
After being overlooked by a host of Premier League clubs, Fonseca may have felt as if he had point to prove in his new Stade Pierre Mauroy home. He’s certainly going about it in the right way, Lille scoring goals for fun and chasing Champions League qualification despite the recent departures of Sven Botman, Amadou Onana, Burak Yilmaz, Zeki Celik and Renato Sanches.
Fonseca was close to taking over at Newcastle United before the inspired appointment of Eddie Howe (Guillem Balague). The former Shakhtar Donetsk boss held talks with Everton’s majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri on numerous occasions too, while Tottenham also opted to go in a different direction.
Their loss is most certainly Lille’s gain.
“The agreement was done,” Fonseca told The Telegraph. “But things changed when the new managing director (Fabio Paratici) arrived. We didn’t agree with some ideas and he preferred another coach.
“I have some principles. I wanted to be coach of the great teams. But I want the right project and a club where the people believe in my ideas, my way to play, and this didn’t happen with the managing director.
“It’s what the chairman (Daniel Levy) and the sporting director (Steve Hitchen) asked for; to build a team who can play attractive and offensive football. I was ready for that.”
‘Attractive’ and ‘offensive’; two attributes not readily associated with Antonio Conte’s Spurs side. Who knows, with the Italian’s contract expiring this summer, maybe Fonseca’s phone will be ringing off the hook again sooner rathe than later.
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