Get French Football News sat down with former France, Marseille, AC Milan and Chelsea defender Marcel Desailly to talk to talk about the France squad and the current issues surrounding his former club sides.

In this final part of a four-part interview, he talked about the tough season being experienced by all his former clubs.

Three of your former clubs – FC Nantes, Marseille and Chelsea – are all struggling this season. How do you assess their issues right now?

[Laughs] I’m suffering, right?! My four former clubs – well when I was a kid I wasn’t a Chelsea fan as they weren’t a well-known club then – but I was a Nantais who was a fan of Marseille and the club that I supported abroad was AC Milan, so to have played for all those clubs was magnificent, amazing! So yes, I’m suffering a little now.

But those three big clubs – and Nantes too actually – yes, they’re all kind of struggling for the same reason. There are quality players but they’re not sufficiently supported by experienced players.

If you take Milan as an example, looking at Rafael Leão or Christian Pulisic, they’re not players with the necessary consistency to raise the club to the next level. Yes there’s Luka Modrić, there’s Adrien Rabiot. But that’s not enough. They need to be better supported and pushed more.

It’s the same at Marseille. They brought in quality players but where is the experience? Where is the international first choice? At centre-forward they brought in Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang – great, brilliant – but he’s 36, he does a job, but he’s the type of player to follow the waves – it’s not him creating the waves. The same with Mason Greenwood – he’s like Leão – he has great stats, he does the business every now and then but where is his collective discipline? He has 15 good minutes per match, but the rest of the time he vanishes when it comes to defending and he appears intermittently on the offensive side. It’s not enough.

At Chelsea it’s the same. They need first choice internationals. OK, there’s Enzo Fernández. But you have a goalkeeper who is on and off. They have a decent defence but they need experience, international starters – Wesley Fofana isn’t starting for France. The same at centre-forward – they need a renowned international striker who can identify those key moments when the team needs a bit of individual brilliance to make the difference. At the moment they’re expecting Fernández, who is meant to play close to Moisés Caicedo to protect the defensive block, to also be part of the attack in order to cover if a young player like Cole Palmer makes a mistake. He is overworked – and not just occasionally but all the time. And that creates creative chaos in the Chelsea team.

So I mixed it all up a bit but I think you know where I’m coming from. They are clubs that need to work out how to combine young talent with experience in order to create some consistency and regularity within their system.

Marcel Desailly was speaking exclusively to Get French Football News courtesy of Wiz Slots