Damien Comolli: How the man who signed Henry, Bale & Suarez is reshaping Toulouse

It is not just young players being poached. Toulouse’s Scottish head of recruitment Brendan MacFarlane left at the end of last season to join Manchester City.

Comolli found his replacement at Leicester City in Viktor Bezhani.

In fact, few foreign club presidents know English football as well as Comolli. He worked under Arsene Wenger at Arsenal as head of recruitment and was director of football at Tottenham and Liverpool, bringing in some remarkable talent.

So how does he do it?

“I didn’t find Thierry Henry, let’s say I recommended him to Arsenal,” he explains. “I looked at highly technical players with incredible drive and motivation to be successful and to develop themselves, and who can make the right decisions at the right time on the pitch.

“This is definitely the case when we [Tottenham] signed Gareth Bale when he was 17 and Luka Modric. This was the case for recruiting Robin van Persie [at Arsenal] when we got him for peanuts.

“When you see the drive in these young players who want to beat up the opposition and improve every day, plus their decision making, that is the recipe I was looking for at the time.”

On top of promotion and the Coupe de France triumph, Toulouse also beat Comolli’s old club Liverpool at home in the Europa League group stage last November.

He says his two take-aways from his experience in English football are the sense of community and the use of data and statistics.

“It’s quite simple to explain,” he says. “We have a lot less money than everyone else, so if we try to do the same as everybody else with less money we are going to fail.

“My obsession is how to find a competitive advantage in the market and that is by using data and numbers when we recruit coaches and players, and using data when deciding playing style and when to rest players or to train players more. We use data to optimise our transfer budget and wage bill.”

Since he took over as club president, attendances have rocketed from 5,000 to sometimes 30,000 for home games. Again, he took ideas from his time in English football.

“I was extremely privileged to work with people like David Dein, who created the Premier League, alongside Daniel Levy and [learned] from Kenny Dalglish, when I was at Liverpool,” he explains.

“I also learned what not to do running football clubs. What I took from English clubs is a sense of community. I think about what I learned from my time at Tottenham, Arsenal and Liverpool – in other words, the footprint of the football club within the local community.”