"Julien Fournier can no longer stand the word 'project'." "Everybody has one, I can't stand it anymore," says the OGC Nice director of football. He prefers to talk about a ‘development plan’ to explain about the evolutions of INEOS’ Gym. If there is one term he is not scared about, it is ‘competition’, which is encouraged at every level of the club. This Saturday saw Nice take centre stage in the traditional Tour de France in the daily sports paper L'Equipe. Two pages devoted to Les Aiglons where the director of football assures that the Rouge et Noir mercato is "90% or 95% completed" after the seven summer transfers (Kamara, Bambu, Daniliuc, Schneiderlin, Gouiri, Lotomba, Rony Lopes) and the return of Ndoye from loan, and insists strongly on his "two obsessions" since his return to the club: "improving the team but also improving everything around it (...) We now have two doctors and a full-time nutritionist. The players were complaining about the pitches being too hard, so we've rebuilt all the pitches and taken an Englishman to take care of them. I'm even in the process of changing the ball boys and girls... Everything outside the sporting results, we have to perfect."

For Julien Fournier, "if there was one thing we lacked last season, it was the mental aspect (...) We put so much emphasis on the intelligence of the game and the technical dimension that we forgot the more intrinsic values of football: aggressiveness, hard work, ambition, seriousness, grinta. That's something we have to take into account in our recruitment. I am instilling this competitive mindset on a daily basis. That's all I talk to them about.”

The sporting goal? "To start competing with the big guys," sums up Jean-Pierre Rivère. "There will be Paris, Monaco, Lyon, Marseille, Lille, Rennes, probably another club. I want us to be with these seven teams who are going to fight for European qualification, to be in the competition all the way to the end.”

The full article, which includes a focus on Hicham Boudaoui and an interview with Dante (available here), will be on newsstands this Saturday, and online on lequipe.fr for subscribers to the newspaper.

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