Vive King Éric Roy as Brest’s song for Europe grows ever louder | Brest

At the very end of 2022, Éric Roy was convinced the ship he had hoped to board had sailed a while ago. How could it be otherwise? He was now in his 57th year, and his last – his only – coaching assignment had ended more than a decade previously.

He had resigned himself to carrying on working as a pundit for French television, as he had done since 2012, with a three-year spell as sports director with first Lens, then Watford from 2017 to 2020 sandwiched in between.

The irony of the situation was not lost on him: he was better qualified now than he had been when, in March 2010, his home town club, Nice, had called on him to manage their first team. He had accepted the role despite having no managerial experience whatsoever – and no coaching badges either.

Nice, where he had worked as head of communications and sports director after retiring as a player, needed someone like him. Le Gym was facing relegation to the second tier, had no money to speak of – Sir Jim Ratcliffe would acquire the club nine years later – and had to turn to one of its own to try to engineer an unlikely survival. There was no one who better deserved to be counted as one of their own by the club than Roy.

He was born in Nice. It was in the southern French city that his father, Serge, a French international and a French league and Cup winner with Monaco, had ended his playing days (the son still speaks to the father, now 92, after every game). It was in Nice Serge had met his future wife, a Niçoise herself. And it was with Nice Éric had started and finished a 16-year professional career that also took him to Lyon, Marseille and Sunderland.

Coaching badges or no coaching badges, Éric took the job and won his first three games. Nice escaped the drop, but performances soon faded soon and his assistant, Bruno Marsiglia, replaced him 17 months later. Roy would have wanted to carry on.

He embarked on a private European tour to seek advice from the best managers of the time: Arsène Wenger, Pep Guardiola, Carlo Ancelotti, Didier Deschamps. He took notes, studied their training routines. He sat the exams; he got the badges; but the call would not come. Yes, that ship had vanished over the horizon.

Then, out of nowhere, the phone rang. It was Grégory Lorenzi, the young technical director of Brest, who had been looking in vain for a manager for three months. In 2023 Brest were in a similar situation to Nice in 2010. Money and hope were in short supply and Roy’s mission was to save the Breton club, then 17th out of 20 in Ligue 1. He would not be allowed to bring any staff with him. His contract would run for six months. Very few coaches would have accepted such conditions, but this was the chance he had thought would not come again. “The adventure with Brest happened at a moment when I did not believe it could happen any more,” he says.

Saying yes was easy and, to everyone’s surprise, the side that had won twice in the 14 games preceding his arrival lost twice in the last dozen rounds of the season, one of them on the final day when Brest could already celebrate their survival.

A year and a half later, here they are, the same no-hopers, with one of the smallest budgets in Ligue 1 at €48m (£40.4m), less than half of Lille’s, whom they pipped to third place on the last day of the 2023-24 league season), one win away from qualification for the second phase of the Champions League, with participation in the playoffs all but guaranteed. They play Shakhtar Donetsk in Gelsenkirchen on Wednesday.

Roy will readily admit that there is “something irrational” about their success, only to stress this “something” applies to himself as much as to his club and that this brings them even closer together.

They were the team of the year in France last season and are close to being the team of the year in Europe this time around. Roy, ridiculed in Brest at the time of his appointment, is now a local hero – King Éric, no less – one of the few French managers ever to be celebrated in song by his home supporters, to the tune of Dany Brillant’s 1996 hit Quand je vois tes yeux. “When I see his football/I’m in love/When I hear his voice/I love Éric Roy”.

Roy does not claim to have a secret. The words he uses the most when he is interviewed, an exercise in which he excels, are “work”, “humility” and, above all, “emotion” (“I manage emotion” is how he describes his job).

“I may come from the south,” he says, “but I share the same values [as the Brestois]. I’m attuned with their idea of football. People here savour the present. They know it might not last. You must realise how lucky you are, how lucky I am to have an extraordinary job.”

According to him, if there is a secret, it is that everyone – manager, players, fans, club executives and owner, the Brest-born businessman Denis Le Saint – share the same “emotional stability”, “whether the club goes through a complicated phase or a beautiful moment”, and enjoy nothing more than a dogfight against the bigger beasts of French and European football, something many of their opponents over the past couple of years will have realised to their cost.

There is also a sense Roy and his men are fuelled by a sense of injustice. Brest have not and will not play a Champions League games in their own home, the Stade Francis-Le Blé, which Uefa has judged unfit so Brest moved to Guingamp’s Roudourou, more than 100km away, to host PSV and the others.

The Roudourou, however, will fall short of Uefa’s requirements when the knockout rounds start. “Those competitions are organised for the big guys,” Roy told a local paper. “The ones who have the big stadiums. There is no longer room for the small guys.”

There was no rancour in his voice, more something like “we’ll show them”, a “we” that also felt like an “I”.