In the conference room of a smart hotel in the center of this port city, four Frenchmen were talking loudly over one another and gesticulating toward a flip chart in front of a row of empty chairs.
Bob Bradley, the recently appointed coach of the city’s second-tier soccer team, Havre AC — more commonly known as Le HAC — sat nearby. Bradley was awaiting the arrival of his players for a team meeting before that evening’s league match against Paris FC, the French capital’s second team.
As the voices of his four assistant coaches rose, Bradley drew half a soccer field onto the flip chart — free hand, but with perfectly straight lines — before writing the names and numbers of his players and their possible opponents in different colored pens. He quietly checked the names and spellings with a translator.
At the top of the flip chart, he carefully wrote the words “Corners Defensifs” before sitting down and waiting with restrained impatience as the Gallic-style argument among his coaches continued.
At last, Bradley had heard enough.
“Look,” he said loudly and suddenly, stopping the argument in its tracks. With a few swipes and arrows drawn with his pen, he issued instructions as to how his players should defend corner kicks when the match began in two hours. “It’s football,” he said finally. The coaches nodded in agreement.
Bradley does not speak French. At least not yet. But then, language has not been much of a barrier to success.
After he was fired as coach of the U.S. national soccer team in 2011, Bradley guided Egypt’s national team to within a game of the World Cup and led the small Norwegian club Stabaek into the Europa League. Now he has landed at Le Havre, France’s oldest soccer club but one that has been generally absent from the country’s top tier in recent years.
It is here on France’s north coast that Bradley has come to teach a new group of players, and to continue the pursuit of the kind of job — the big job — that he really wants, the one that some suggest his résumé has earned.
“I’ve accepted challenges to prove myself,” Bradley said of his recently meandering coaching path.
Referring to a riot in 2012 that killed more than 70 people after a match between two Egyptian clubs, Bradley said, “When I was in Egypt, after Port Said, people asked me: ‘Why are you still here? Why didn’t you leave?’ Then I went to Norway, to this small team, and people would say, ‘Why did you come?’”
It is a question, Bradley conceded, that he hears regularly.
“What it amounts to is, this part of you — on the inside — wants to show people what you can do,” he said. “You want to prove yourself. You want a chance.”
A native of New Jersey, Bradley, 57, spent the first three decades of his coaching career in the United States, in college, in MLS and, finally, with the national team. In 2011, after a disheartening loss to Mexico cost him his job, Bradley and his wife, Lindsay, moved to Cairo before the January 25 Revolution, and before the riot in Port Said, one the worst soccer stadium disasters in history.
His Egypt team lost just once on the long road to the 2014 World Cup, but that was enough to spoil its dreams of qualifying. “It was a disappointment,” Bradley said, that “sticks with you forever.”
A few months later, he arrived in Norway to take charge of Stabaek, a small, recently promoted club that was only just emerging from a financial meltdown. Bradley spent two years there, taking the team to a cup semifinal, a third-place finish in the league and, with it, a qualification spot for next season’s Europa League.
Yet despite Bradley’s successes, he faced an employment landscape that offered few opportunities for him in top European leagues.
“In England, they talk about having Premier League experience,” Bradley said, “and, to be fair, I don’t have it.”
His assistant Pierre Barrieu puts it more plainly. “I am 100 percent convinced if he wasn’t American he would have got a big job somewhere,” he said. “There is this U.S. tag on his back.”
Lacking a direct path to a job in a top league, Bradley concluded that Le Havre offered just what he needed: the chance to earn one through promotion. Last year, Le Havre had been acquired by the American businessman Vincent Volpe, who was on the lookout for a new coach when Bradley’s agent contacted the club.
“My first thought was, I think our search is over,” Volpe said.
Three days later, Bradley arrived to discuss the position. “The only reticence was how would he do with the language,” Volpe said. “But we thought about the fact that he did a great job in Norway, and a great job in Egypt. It clearly wasn’t an issue.”
Shortly before leaving for the match against Paris FC on Jan. 15, the Havre players filled the empty seats in the hotel conference room as Bradley gave his team talk. He spoke to them through Barrieu, an assistant during Bradley’s U.S. national team days who has rejoined him in France.
“Be proud of the colors and the club,” Bradley told the team. “Show no fear. Play the game. Enjoy it.”
Afterward, the players filed out quietly, onto a bus that would take them to the match.
At Stade Océane, a modern facility wrapped in a translucent blue shell reminiscent of Munich’s Allianz Arena, Havre supporters were still surprised to have a coach who has led a team at a World Cup finals.
“We have never known such a good coach in Le Havre,” Yann Simon, 39, said in the supporters’ bar under the stadium. “But we don’t know if he’s a good guy for Le Havre. We will know at the end of the season.”
Promotion is the aim. That would be a rare foray into France’s elite for Le Havre, but it would also deliver the coaching job in a top European division that Bradley has coveted. Both goals are within reach: Le Havre beat last-place Paris FC, 2-1, to temporarily move into third place in the league — and into one of Ligue 2’s three automatic promotion spots.
Early the next morning, he would be off to Oslo to sort out the last paperwork he needs to complete qualification for his UEFA pro license, which is now a prerequisite for any top job in Europe. If the season ends as well as it has begun, he will need it.
“I am the same with every job: I put my heart and soul into it and show what I am all about,” Bradley said, adding, “If you keep working, someone, somewhere along the line will work it out.”
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