AC Milan’s tyro opted for backheels over backhands when he chose to play football rather than tennis. New balls please.

AGE 20
CLUB AC Milan
POSITION Midfielder
LOWDOWN He could have gone to Wimbledon... but only to play tennis

Yoann Gourcuff introduced himself to AC Milan’s fans in spectacular style earlier this season. Making his first start for the Italian giants since switching from Rennes a few months earlier, the 20-year-old Frenchman scored with a bullet header in his team’s 3-0 Champions League victory over AEK Athens. Although a relative unknown to most fans, Gourcuff’s transfer made ripples in France. Though the classy midfielder is expected to go on to great things, there was concern in his homeland that he might struggle to impose himself in Serie A. Gourcuff was having none of it.

“I really felt the time was right,” he explains earnestly. “I was ready for the challenge and where better to learn your trade, to take the next step forward, than at AC Milan?”



Gourcuff, whose father Christian is a former player and now manages French top-flight side Lorient, almost never became a footballer. Equally gifted at tennis, he only made up his mind a short while ago.

“I realised that it might be easier for me to make it in football,” he says.

It was the first of several difficult decisions he has faced in his fledgling career. After starting out at Lorient, where his father was in his first spell as manager, he had to decide in 2001 whether to follow papa to Rennes. Yoann initially wanted to join Nantes instead, causing his father to wonder what was going on and whether his son was as good as he believed he was.

To find out for sure, Christian asked Patrick Rampillon, head of the youth academy at Rennes, for his opinion. “I told him I would go to his house on my knees to pick Yoann up if it meant I could have him with me at Rennes,” Rampillon recalls with a grin. “He already had a great reputation.”

The young Gourcuff wouldn’t regret his choice. He scored in the final to help Rennes win France’s youth cup in 2003 and signed his first professional contract the same year, despite interest from Arsenal and Valencia. He made his first-team debut aged 17 and became a regular the following season, which he ended by helping France Under-19s to win the European Championships in Ireland, with Gourcuff scoring a hat-trick against Norway en route.

Gourcuff is neither a pure playmaker nor a defensive midfielder. His father sees him more in the role of a Fernando Redondo or an Andrea Pirlo. And at Milan, Gourcuff now has a chance to learn from the Italian World Cup winner.

Rampillon has no doubt his former protégé will become a major star. “You can tell that you’re looking at a top-class footballer, he has everything going for him,” says the man who guided ex-Arsenal striker Sylvain Wiltord through Rennes’ youth academy. “He has a natural authority, great vision, his play is fluid and he is very intelligent. He has a creative talent that you rarely see these days. He’s capable of making it right to the very top.”