Football first. Ten years old, a ball, and the certainty that nothing else would ever matter as much.
Angoulême, France, 1991
Ten years on, I had not changed my mind. I had just earned my first coaching badge when, at twenty, a road brought it all to a stop. A crash, months in a wheelchair, several operations, rehabilitation without end. And the sentence, delivered as fact: you will never play football again.
I did not believe it. Not out of bravado, out of optimism, faced with one diagnosis among a thousand. Those months on my back left me time, a great deal of it, and my love of the game intact.
I got back on my feet. I played again, in the district second division. The verdict had been wrong.
So I left. Spain, England, Malta. A job at a sports-betting company, and one morning when the only clear thing was that I had no business being there. I resigned that same day.
I had seen an academy on television where children played barefoot, in Côte d'Ivoire, under Jean-Marc Guillou's method: the beautiful touch before the scoreline. I wrote to the man who ran that worldwide network. The letter was enough for a meeting; the meeting, for what came next: a few weeks later, I joined one of those academies, in Thailand.
Thailand, a world apart. Among the sugarcane fields, an academy run by Éric Decroix, a former professional, a French champion. A bird perched on a buffalo's back, in a rice paddy. Another rhythm, another way of living. We trained barefoot, morning and evening. The touch, the feel, and the result only after. I was in my element, in a frugality that lacked nothing.
When the JMG chapter ended, I was training with a Thai third-division side and poisoned myself on water drunk at training; a month laid low by fever in a Bangkok room. It was there, lying down, that I wrote my own project. The wheelchair, then that room on Soi Sukhumvit 81: twice over, it was the halt that set me in motion.
Nothing came together at once. Rejections in Thailand, the support of a few friends, then a trip around the world, literally: Australia, Mexico, the United States. A meeting, at last, in France: Nadine Marchand, of the ENGIE foundation, who believed in the project. I went back. Acadena was born in the Klong Toey slum, in 2015.
There, on the concrete, I learned what I truly know how to do. See, project, bring people together. A boy nobody wanted, with no confidence, who had no idea of his own worth: a single touch of the ball was enough to know he was made for this. He became the program's finest success, and a good man. Behind him, a leader from the slum followed me, and I was given the keys and the trust to take my small group where I had promised, toward a better life.
My craft is not to train, it is to see. To recognize, in a single movement, what a life can become, above all when everything around it says otherwise. The same refusal as in my wheelchair, turned this time toward others.
Bird, Acadena program, Klong Toey, 2015
The conviction came at the end of the Acadena boys' program. An intuition, first: where the women's game still has a whole technical territory to claim, I saw a vast opening, and room for a football no one has seen. The year is 2018.
There is the gap at the start. Women's football begins further back. It is the outsider, the one with the most to prove, and therefore the most merit when it makes us dream. A girl from a modest background who rises through beautiful play: a story that carries, because it comes from as low as it gets.
I understood that I held a thesis, not a cause. Today, women's football is seen as the shadow of the men's game, a paler reflection. I refuse that place. A player in motion, pure technique, carries her story through her body, and what she gives us to see, no man ever will. Not a pale copy, not second billing. A woman shown as she has never been shown, a football that belongs to her.
The intuition called for proof, and I went far to find it. First to La Carpio, a slum in San José, Costa Rica, a first program for girls. And oddly, it was that thread that led me back to Thailand and its football federation, then to Janista.