The manager of Clermont Foot will not be presented with flowers before the Ligue 2 match against Tours FC on Tuesday. That has not happened since 4 August 2014, when Corinne Diacre was given a bouquet in front of the dugout by her counterpart, Alex Dupont, on the occasion of her first match as a professional manager, which happened to be on her 40th birthday.

The first woman to manage a men’s team in a major European league ended up as a loser that day but has won plenty of matches since and enough respect to be judged on the only thing that she ever asked to be judged on: her ability. More than two years after her appointment the media circus has moved on but she is still in situ, doing well at a job that she was supposedly only given as a publicity stunt.

Clermont Foot appoint second woman manager in Corinne Diacre Read more

It was not hard to see why critics thought hiring Diacre might have been an attention-seeking gimmick by a football club located in a region where rugby is king. Clermont’s chairman, Claude Michy, had appointed another woman, Helena Costa, a month previously but the Portuguese quit the day before her official start, accusing the club of refusing to involve her in preparations for the new season and of “a total lack of respect as well as amateurism”. Michy’s attempt to ridicule those claims gave them credibility. “She’s a woman so it could be down to a number of things,” he said with a shrug. “It’s an astonishing, irrational and incomprehensible decision. She developed a confidence problem but I don’t know why.”

The forecast for Diacre was not bright. Sure, she had won 121 caps as a centre-back for France’s women’s team, then served for six years as that team’s assistant manager under Bruno Bini and, in May 2014, had become the first woman in France to gain the qualifications that entitled her to run a professional team. But could that really prepare her for life at Clermont and in Ligue 2? Apart from being a woman in a world that has always been the preserve of men, she was the youngest and least experienced manager in the league and Clermont had the smallest budget.

There was enormous national and international interest in her appointment. Diacre understood. She responded to as many interview requests as practical but not to attempts to depict her as anything more or less than a football manager. She never entertained questions about her private life. To inquiries regarding her salary she simply replied “all I will say is that a female manager is not paid less than a male manager” and she easily closed off forays into prurience by saying: “I obviously will not go into the dressing room while the players are changing. I’ll wait until they are ready. There are currently 11 men in charge of women’s teams and that is what they do. They are never asked about it. So I will do what they do.”

A couple of months into her reign she had had enough of discussing her status as a pioneer. “The first! The first! The first!” she repeated, bored, at a press conference. “Yes, OK, now let’s please talk about football. People are talking too much about me. It’s annoying.”

That was just after she began to turn around results after a bad start. Clermont were bottom of the league and without a win after five matches. She was not afraid to pinpoint players’ mental weakness after the concession of late goals. Media criticism, however, focused on her and, as she said later, “came dangerously close to ‘I told you so’”. She soon made the tone change.

Clermont, whose pre-season aim was to avoid relegation, finished 12th in Diacre’s first season. All players acknowledged her meticulousness and drive, even the few with whom she fell out. By the end of the campaign the team looked quite different to the one that had started. She had, in her words, “purified the dressing room” by getting rid of several players whose attitude or work ethic were incompatible with her demands. A few, she said, had slackened off or acted up “either because I came from the amateur world – or maybe because they thought they could get away with things with a woman manager that they would not have tried with a man in charge” or because they “thought of their own ego rather than collective”. By the end of the first season five players had moved to other clubs, seven had been relegated to the reserves, three new players had arrived and Diacre had made changes to the backroom staff, too.

Last season, her second in charge, Clermont, still with the smallest budget in the division, came close to winning promotion to the top flight for the first time in their history. And they thrilled with their adventurous style. They eventually finished seventh in the table but as the third highest scorers in the league, with the third worst defensive record.

Fans approved, and so did critics: France Football declared her Ligue 2 manager of the year for 2015. Her fellow managers shortlisted her for a similar award at the end of last season, though ultimately gave it to Olivier Dall’Oglio of the runners-up Dijon.

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By then Diacre had signed a contract extension until 2018. She revealed in May that a Ligue 1 club tried to hire her but she turned them down to finish the job she has started at Clermont. She gave the French Football Federation (FFF) a similar answer in September when asked to take over the France women’s team. Michy then denounced the FFF for apparently trying to “harass” her into changing her mind.

Michy and Diacre have a strong working relationship. He was happy to widen her role last summer to the extent that the club did not seek a new director of football after Olivier Chavanon left. Her recruitment has been savvy. Her signing of Famara Diédhiou, who had been going nowhere at Sochaux, proved a masterstroke. The striker was voted Ligue 2 player of the season after finishing as top scorer with 21 goals. “I admire her courage and her commitment to her work and I’m very thankful to her,” said Diédhiou of Diacre shortly after his performances earned him a first cap for Senegal. “She is a fighter and never gives up and she has helped me get the best out of myself.”

The financial reality of Clermont meant that Diédhiou was sold this summer when Angers came calling. Diacre also lost her team’s three next highest scorers, as Farid Boulaya was sold to Bastia while the loanees Gaëtan Laborde and Adrien Hunou returned to their parent clubs.

Clermont have improved defensively but not yet overcome the loss of so many attackers, which is why they go into Tuesday’s game in 13th place, which is still higher than the balance sheet says they should be. On Saturday Diacre signed a 21-year-old striker, Dorian Caddy, on loan from Nice. She is still looking for ways to improve her team. Still doing her job.