It was Thierry Henry’s eldest daughter who ended his playing career. Téa was nine years old, and one day in their New York home, she tapped him and said: “You’re it.” Henry wanted to chase after her, but couldn’t. The pain in his left and right achilles was simply too acute and agonising. Henry, by then a largely totemic striker for the New York Red Bulls, retired soon after.
So there was an emotional moment at the end of France’s comeback win in the Olympic Games semi-final against Egypt in Lyon on Monday. As Jean-Philippe Mateta put France 2-1 up in extra time, Henry turned to the stands, spread both arms and gazed up at the stands in a reverential, almost religious, ecstasy. Afterwards, video emerged of Henry dancing jubilantly with his players in the tunnel.
As it turned out, there was more to this victory than the victory. Henry now has four children, and three of them never got to see him play. “I never had my kids at a stadium watching me with my team, because when I got my kids I was almost at the end of my career,” Henry said on Thursday. “So having them around is something I never felt before.”
Men’s football has always been a slightly uneasy fit with the Olympics, marooned in satellite cities, staffed by largely unknown youth players and of questionable competitive value, a relative sideshow alongside the white heat of the Games proper. Enter: perhaps the most famous living French athlete taking his team to Paris for a gold medal.
And for all the abundant talent in this French side – Michael Olise, Mateta, Alexandre Lacazette – it is Henry who lends the star wattage to Friday’s Olympic final against Spain, gives it shape and meaning. As a player Henry won everything. As a coach he has won nothing, to the point where it was legitimate to ask whether he even had a future in a career for which he clearly had so much passion and enthusiasm.
This, then, is a tale of redemption and reinvention, a tale of how one of modern football’s greatest footballers may finally have found his second calling. As an Olympic coach, Henry has had few levers to pull, no means of compelling clubs to release their players, virtually zero preparation time. This is a project he has built from scratch, with his own grafting hands. More than a dozen players rejected his invitation to participate. Those who joined did so not just for the opportunity to win gold on home soil, but for the chance to learn at the elbow of a coach who adores talent, who wants to nurture it and give it the tools to flourish.
There is a famous clip of Henry on the sidelines at training during his time at Montreal Impact. He is vivid, animated, always challenging, always suggesting something better. “Mason, tell him!” he cries. “Tell him you were there alone! Shamit! Can you pass it one touch? Then why don’t you do it?” During his time as a Belgium assistant coach, there was abundant footage of Henry taking part in training sessions, demonstrating free-kick technique by stepping up and burying it into the top corner.
In a way, this encapsulates the essence of Henry as a coach. Right from his earliest days helping out in the Arsenal youth teams, his special gift has always been breaking down the components of a player’s game, finding ways to tune and optimise them, devising drills and exercises to develop their technique, getting in their head and finding out what motivates them. Alex Iwobi at Arsenal and Romelu Lukaku at Belgium are two who credit Henry for changing the way they saw the game, helping them to discover new levels.
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And yet, taking a long view, we still have only the most sketchy idea of how Henry teams are supposed to play. His tactics have been surprisingly malleable: in Canada he was constantly switching between 5-3-2 and 4-3-3, 3-5-2 and the midfield diamond. His time at Monaco in 2018-19 was, by consensus, a disaster for all involved, a club in chaos when he arrived and in chaos when he left 20 games later, having used 40 players and earned only four wins.
Perhaps a triter way of putting it is that while Henry is a brilliant coach of individuals, it is less clear whether he can improve teams as a collective. And in this respect perhaps the hard edges of tournament football are an ideal fit for his talents, an intense blur of positive vibes and secret sauce, where games are very often won with the same flashes of individual brilliance Henry so regularly displayed as a striker.
Naturally, for even the most passive consumers of football narrative, there is a temptation to speculate what a success at these Games may do for Henry’s coaching career, which seemed to have stalled a little after leaving Montreal during the Covid era. He returned to the Belgium staff before the delayed Euro 2020, became France’s Under-21 coach last August, and yet has never made any secret of his desire to coach at the top level one day.
Certainly there will be no end of speculation as to where he may go after this. There were rumours linking him with Wales in the summer, and the usual background hubbub over the United States job. Should Henry lead France to a gold medal it is not implausible that a Ligue 1 club may take another look at him next season.
But football occasionally gets a little hung up on the next thing. Will Henry ever fulfil his potential as a coach? Well, on Friday evening at the Parc des Princes, Henry will have an opportunity to lead his home nation to that rarest of sporting prizes. Paris will sway and shake to his tune. His family will be in the stands watching. And if that’s not fulfilment, then frankly what is?