The Melancholy of Yoann Gourcuff

Arguably the biggest Ligue 1 enigma of recent years is Yoann Gourcuff. Practically unplayable on his day, particularly in leading Bordeaux to the title in 2009, those days have been too few and far between during his time at Lyon.

As recently as last month, matchdays 28 to 30 provided a resumé of Gourcuff’s whole Lyon career in microcosm: superb against Montpellier, laying on two great assists; missing from the squad to play Marseille with a mystery knock; starting against Nice, feeling a strain mid-match and walking straight off the pitch without waiting to be substituted.

Our friends at Cahiers du Football recently published an excellent article by Nora C. entitled The Melancholy of Yoann Gourcuff. Jeremy Smith, our full-time Gourcuff fan (and part-time melancholic) has translated Nora’s article.

All he wants to do is play football, but everyone expects a lot more from him. Reluctant star, sometimes brilliant, sometimes unwieldy, Yoann Gourcuff is a creative character. With everything that that entails, for better and worse.

At the end of the season, Yoann Gourcuff will complete the fifth year of his contract at Olympique Lyonnais. And it is likely to be his last, as an extension between now and then seems unlikely. Soon, then, he will leave, and then one can question whether he had actually been there during all that time. Because the paradox of Gourcuff is accepting that his time at Lyon was marked by several injuries, but feeling that his real absence was elsewhere.

Here and elsewhere

Indeed, it is when Gourcuff was present that he was most missed. Not for one moment, or at least very few, did he ever seem totally invested in his belonging to OL. He was called haughty, cold, a loner, arousing incomprehension from his coaches, the public and pundits. Some called it the Gourcuff “mystery”, others preferred the word “malaise”, as a pretext to generate articles or analysis. Either way, our understanding progressed no further and we all remained mute in the face of his strange case. In the end, we resigned ourselves to the fact that we would never know.

The only certainty is that, once he’s gone, Gourcuff will leave behind enormous regrets for the Lyon fans who will feel that they benefitted too little from an undoubted talent. It may well be that, because he could be at once brilliant and troubling, because he is never where you want him to be, both in terms of his attitude and the chasm that seems to separate him from the others, and because of his difficulty opening up, Gourcuff could be a victim of what has been known, since Antiquity, as “melancholy”.

Fallen angel

Melancholy is a fluid, vague concept which touches on areas as diverse as medicine and the arts. One first finds it in the ancient theory of the four humours, developed by Hippocrates and Galen, according to which an individual’s intimately linked physical and mental health depend on the balance between the four humours which make up the body: phlegm, yellow bile, blood and black bile.

It’s that last humour – “melankholia” in ancient Greek – that, in excess, leads to a melancholic temperament. From the nineteenth century, the word became synonymous with depression, before evoking a more general form of sadness tinged with nostalgia and an element of angst. Melancholy became, above all, associated with a raft of symbols and symptoms which, applied to the case of Gourcuff, can shed new light on his character.

How does one recognise a melancholic? His head is bowed and supported by his hand, weighed down by the weight of his sadness and his powerlessness. That is, in any case, how he was immortalised by Albrecht Dürer in his famous etching. If the silhouette of the stricken subject slumps groundwards, it is because melancholy is gravity: its element is earth, its metal is lead, a heavy metal whose negative connotations have been at the origin of several expressions, such as “leaden-footed”. And can it not be said that the size of Yoann Gourcuff’s transfer fee plumbed the depths for OL’s finances?

The result is that the melancholic has trouble moving, taking action, as if he were subject to a more intense gravitational force than others. Indeed, often at Lyon, Gourcuff has seemed to drag his body behind him. Cumbersome, off-form, stepovers so slow he would end up confounding only himself. His performances have led to very mixed reviews: Yoann Gourcuff is heavy, his moves and movement prove it. At Bordeaux, lively and light. At Lyon, unwieldy and slow. He resembles Dürer’s fallen angel.

The limelight that he wanted to escape

What happened between his bordelais pomp and his lyonnais decline? Media interest drummed up by a player, previously not well known to the public, who carried Bordeaux to the title of champions of France, intensified after Knysna and the debate surrounding his relationship with Franck Ribéry, and reinforced by an expensive transfer. A pressure which he did not know how to handle. He even said that he struggled in the hours that followed the announcement of his first France start against Serbia, on 10 September 2008. Special attention of which he was the victim and at the same time, in an ironic way, the main cause – as it is because he is a man apart that he is in such a unique position – and it is because he is the object of special attention that he ended up withdrawing into himself, thus leaving himself open to wild speculation about him.

From this point of view, Jean-Michel Aulas could not have been more wrong when he organised, in 2010, a presentation ceremony as embarrassing as it was unnecessary in honour of the Breton, and when he invested in the image of one who aspired only to discretion. The player who seemed to enjoy himself so much with Marouane Chamakh and the other Bordelais had already changed. He had become serious, he had lost the spontaneity which allowed him fully to express his creativity at Bordeaux, and losing his spontaneity meant suddenly becoming divided: playing and watching himself play. On his famous goal against Sammy Traoré’s PSG, Gourcuff said:“I didn’t stop to think. It was an instinctive goal”. Indeed, that is exactly what has so often been missing at Lyon: instinct and imagination. How can one keep doing things with insouciance when all of a sudden one has an acute awareness of what one is doing?

The romantic’s ideal of insouciance

Just as important as the idea of gravity to the destiny of the melancholic is that of the fall. The fall which, in its biblical sense, leads on to the fundamental theme of paradise lost. Because there is, within melancholy, the idea of “definitive loss”, explains Jean Starobinski in an interview given to Philosophie Magazine. With this in mind, reading a joint interview between father [Christian Gourcuff, former Lorient coach, now Algeria coach] and son, given in 2009 to Foot Citoyen, proves highly revealing. The two of them express a pure passion for football, free from all constraints and filled with joy. An Eden, in short. Because yes, “Yoann, above all, he is all about joie-de-vivre!” Christian declares. In the Gourcuff household, simply playing football is an end in itself.

A textual analysis of this interview would clearly highlight how “pressure” and “pleasure” are extreme opposites in the son’s mind. Then, a quick Google search would show how frequently he has used the expression “take pleasure in” since he has been at Lyon, like a vain wish. We know that his relationship with the professional world has been difficult. In 2010, after the World Cup, he made no attempt to hide his disgust for a football world which he saw as “increasingly toxic”. He added: “passion is being lost and people, the media, prefer to focus on everything around the game, rather than the game itself”. So it could be that that is the problem: a disappointed romantic and idealised vision of football.

The Prince of Aquitaine and the destroyed tower

However, it is difficult to believe that Yoann Gourcuff is really that naïve, and the origins of the “fall” bear far more resemblance to a powerlessness that is more insular and, in that sense, genuinely melancholic. First of all, there is the malaise alluded to earlier. Then there is a body that can no longer be relied upon. On that point, Alexandre Marles, performance director at OL, recently said that Gourcuff is as good physically as he has ever been during his time at Lyon, and that his lack of game time was related more to a problem of confidence than to any injury. This is a good point at which to remember that according to ancient medicine, the origins of hypochondria, like those of melancholy, derive from an excess of black bile, to the extent that the two ailments became confused, or that the former was seen as a symptom of the latter. “The idea of a state of health and a fulfilment that are impossible to attain is one of the complaints of the melancholic”, explains Starobinski.

Certainly, the ex-next-Zidane has no doubt suffered from the media attention to the point of becoming paranoid (“I was scrutinised. As soon as I did something, it was interpreted as negatively as possible”, he confided in 2012). But that should not obscure the fact that, in the beginning, he was praised to the skies, and no doubt to an excessive extent. Glorification immediately followed by its opposite would hurt anyone’s pride. Here is a player who is surely aware of the scale of his talent, but who realises that he is not up to the task. If the expectations of those around him have not been met, imagine what his own feelings must be when he sees the disastrous turn that his career has taken.

Out of sync and isolation

So Yoann Gourcuff is a player apart. In the Problema XXX, one can read that “all exceptional beings are melancholic”. By “exception”, read “not the norm”. Gourcuff is not an intellectual because he has read the works of Marcel Proust, and he is no doubt not the only footballer who possesses such a good tactical awareness, even if he is one of very few able to communicate it so brilliantly. But to be sure, his personality does make him an atypical footballer. He says that he feels “out of sync with teammates who have different ways of life to his”, doesn’t subscribe to the football world that he sees around him, and decides to do things in the most unique way possible, whether it is in his physical preparation, his extra exercises at training, or his wish to be represented by a lawyer rather than by an agent.  And that reticence to merge into the collective dynamic is also a reflection of the melancholic character.

All that said, melancholy can be positive. A sign of great creativity, it is one of the main catalysts for the greatest works of art created over the centuries. Unfortunately, it can reveal itself to be totally infertile and as Starobinski teaches us: “the melancholic is not always a creative genius, more often than not he dwells on his powerlessness and feels that he is not fit for the task”. How many times have we waited on Gourcuff, and how many times has he failed to respond? But hope remains because melancholy is like coal, one of its symbols: cold, but capable of flaring up at any moment.