Adrien Rabiot interview: Man Utd interest, Juventus development and his mother’s influence

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Had things panned out differently last summer, Adrien Rabiot might have spent this season playing for Manchester United.

United have been long-term admirers of the tousle-haired French midfielder and made the latest in a long line of approaches to him last year following the end of his five-year spell at Juventus. But instead, he made the bold and eyebrow-raising decision to join Marseille.

Given the drastically contrasting trajectories the two clubs have pursued over the intervening months — Marseille brilliantly securing automatic Champions League qualification for only the third time since 2013, United slumping to their lowest league finish since 1974 — it is not a choice that he has had much reason to reflect on.

“It really could have happened two years ago, when I was coming to the end of my contract at Juventus and I finally decided to extend by a year,” he says. “We had great talks, and there were written offers. But in the end, it didn’t happen.

“Last year as well, when I was free, they came back in again. I had good talks with them again. But it’s true that it was a bit tricky. The situation they’re in at the moment… I felt a bit of reticence about whether United were going to be able to go on and achieve great things. Because they’re in a bit of a hole at the moment.”

Rabiot says his focus is always on what is coming rather than what might have been.

“I have no regrets in my career,” he adds. “I’ve always been very happy with the choices I’ve made. I’ve always enjoyed myself. At PSG, I won. At Juve, I won and I learnt a lot.

Rabiot has had a successful season with Marseille (Christophe Simon/AFP via Getty Images)

“I arrived at Marseille and I had a great season. I helped the club to fulfil its objectives by qualifying (for the Champions League) in my first season. So no, no regrets.”

Were his curiosity about life at United ever to be piqued, Rabiot would not have to look far for someone who could give him the inside track on the club. Former United prospect Mason Greenwood made a comparably headline-grabbing switch to Marseille last summer. Greenwood and Rabiot struck up a fruitful on-pitch understanding at Stade Velodrome, spending a significant portion of the campaign playing as twin No 10s in a 3-4-2-1 system concocted by Roberto De Zerbi.

Whereas Rabiot had free rein to pick his next club, Greenwood’s choices were narrowed by the fact he left United after allegations of attempted rape, coercive and controlling behaviour and assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Greenwood strongly denied all the allegations, and the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service ultimately discontinued proceedings against him.

The 23-year-old Englishman made an immediate impact at Marseille and finished his maiden campaign as Ligue 1’s joint-top scorer alongside Ousmane Dembele with 21 goals, only losing out on the official prize because he had scored more penalties than the PSG forward. Despite having been publicly rebuked at times by De Zerbi for a lack of effort, Greenwood has made a major impression on Rabiot.

“Mason is an incredible player,” says the midfielder. “If he hadn’t had all of his problems, I think he’d have an image like (Jude) Bellingham. Mason would be the star.

“Because he’s an exceptional player. He can score with his right foot and his left foot, he has an exceptional shot, he can dribble. We’re very lucky to have him. When he’s really focused, he does really great things.”

With his 6ft 3in height, elegant technique, boundless stamina and powerful running style, Rabiot has long appeared to possess the kind of attributes required to thrive in the English top flight, a championship he follows closely.

“English football is very attractive,” says the France international, who briefly spent time on Manchester City’s books as a youngster. “Everyone knows that it’s the best league and the football it produces is a spectacle every weekend. There are lots of very good teams, and the league is uncertain.

“You know that the team in 18th place is capable of beating the team in first or second place. At the start of the season, you really don’t know who’s going to win (the league) and who’s going to get into Europe. It was really tight right until the end.

“And then there are new teams that emerge every year, which makes it a really top league. So yes, I’ve always got an eye on the Premier League.”

Rabiot’s signing last September was a massive coup for Marseille, who had finished eighth in Ligue 1 the previous season and consequently had no European football to offer him. The club’s famously passionate fans, thrilled by the furious reaction to the switch back in Paris, welcomed him with open arms. He immediately found common ground with De Zerbi, whose arrival from Brighton & Hove Albion had generated a similar level of excitement.

Rabiot heaped praise on De Zerbi (Lou Benoist/AFP via Getty Images)

“I clicked with him straight away,” Rabiot says. “He’s someone who talks a lot, who exchanges, who explains his ideas and who tries to find the right position for every player.

“He works a lot tactically. He spends his days at the training centre, from morning to night. He’s football crazy. That’s something that I appreciated because to really succeed, you have to have that passion, that determination, that desire, that ambition.

“We hit it off straight away, and we talked a lot. He asked me, as the most experienced player, to lift the team up and bring the other players along with me. That’s what we did.

“Everyone knows the coach De Zerbi is. He was at Brighton and did great things. In Italy, he has a reputation. He must have received a lot of offers. He’s been very important this season for Marseille and I think that the French league is lucky to have a coach like him here.”

In a testament to De Zerbi’s tactical creativity, Rabiot began the season playing in a two-man midfield, then moved to the right of a midfield three, then shifted to a more attacking role in the 3-4-2-1 system introduced by the Italian in November. He finished the campaign playing in the No 10 position in a 4-2-3-1 formation.

Rabiot has tended to play in more of a box-to-box role throughout his career, but his more advanced positioning enabled him to finish the campaign with 10 goals and five assists in all competitions.

“He’s a coach who tries to adapt and who tries to find the best position (for you) with regard to the players around you,” Rabiot says. “That’s why he moved me around so much.

“We talked and we tried things. At the end, I was playing higher up, closer to the striker, and it was really good because it’s a position that suited me really well.

“He’s a coach who gives you the keys (to the next game) in training. He’ll say: ‘This team will play in this way. Put yourself in this zone, do this, do that’. That’s where he’s good — it’s almost like he knows how the match is going to unfold before it’s even happened.”

Rabiot’s five years at Juventus were ideal preparation for working under a coach as tactically meticulous as De Zerbi.

The Frenchman was 24 when he arrived in Turin in 2019 and was widely perceived as something of an enigma. He had left his formative club PSG after being frozen out of the first-team squad halfway through the season for refusing to sign a new contract. He had also been sidelined at international level by France coach Didier Deschamps after rejecting a place on the standby list for their triumphant 2018 World Cup campaign.

After winning a ninth consecutive Serie A title in Rabiot’s first season, there were no further major trophies beyond a pair of Coppa Italia wins in 2021 and 2024. He nevertheless finished his spell at the club strongly under Massimiliano Allegri, who appointed him vice-captain in 2023, and says that his half-decade in northern Italy opened his eyes to the demands at the very highest level.

“It was an important step in my career,” Rabiot says. “It was a period when I gained maturity and when I took on the mentality that they develop at Juventus: work, selflessness, sacrifice. They’re things that you learn and that become part of you.

“My time at Juventus was very useful to me. It allowed me to grow up a huge amount. I experienced great things, I won titles. But it’s also the people I worked with, the players I played with.

“I think of the players who were there when I arrived — the Cristiano Ronaldos, the Gigi Buffons, the Giorgio Chiellinis, the (Leonardo) Bonuccis. They’re players who have that mentality, and they transmit it. They were examples for me.”

Rabiot says he learned a lot from his time at Juventus (Isabella Bonotto/AFP via Getty Images)

Twenty-five years before Rabiot’s move to Juventus, another industrious French central midfielder had crossed the Alps to hone his trade during a five-year spell in Turin. Deschamps joined Juventus from Marseille in 1994 and has credited his own experience of Italian football with enabling him to develop the fierce winner’s mentality that has since become his trademark.

Deschamps brought Rabiot’s two years of international exile to an end in September 2020 and the midfielder has since become one of his principal lieutenants, forming part of France’s first-choice XI at both the 2022 World Cup and Euro 2024.

“When I first came in, I was very young,” says Rabiot, who was 21 when he won the first of his 53 France caps in November 2016. “So inevitably, you don’t have the experience and all the things I might have now that enable you to have a relationship with a coach.

“The more experienced players who had been here for longer had a different kind of relationship with him. Little by little, that kind of relationship develops through the moments you spend together and the tournaments you play in.

“Now we have a relationship where we’re able to say things to each other. There’s real trust between us. For a national coach, I think it’s important to have players you can lean on and say things to.”

Having turned 30 in April, Rabiot is one of the oldest and most experienced members of the current squad. With youngsters such as Desire Doue, Bradley Barcola, Warren Zaire-Emery and Rayan Cherki all in the foothills of their international careers, he now finds himself being looked up to in the same way that he looked up to his battle-hardened former Juventus team-mates during his early days in Turin.

“For me it’s about setting an example on the pitch,” says Rabiot, who was speaking before France’s remarkable 5-4 defeat by Spain in the UEFA Nations League semi-finals. “Showing that when you arrive here, you have to give everything, whether it’s in training or matches, and having that mentality of always wanting to win for France.

“Knowing that the collective is more important than any individual, that we’re all together, whether we win or lose. Showing those values and trying to transmit them. It’s an important role to have with certain players as one of the older players in the team.”

Rabiot has been advised by his mother, Veronique, since the very beginning of his career. She took the lead after Adrien’s father, Michel Provost, suffered a severe stroke in 2007 that left him with locked-in syndrome and she has succeeded in carving out a reputation as a formidable negotiator.

“She’s always supported me,” Rabiot says. “She’s always been by my side and she’s always said: ‘You concentrate on your football and what happens on the pitch. I’ll handle everything else.’

“For a footballer, there are things that can get into your head because there are so many things you have to manage around you. Sometimes you don’t know who to delegate that to. It can be a weight.

“Straight away, my mother was there to manage everything going on around me and to leave me to focus on the pitch. That’s what’s enabled me to advance in the way that I have and to have the success I’ve had.

“She’s always been very ambitious. She wants the best for me, and she’s always done things as I’ve asked her to. That’s important because maybe with other people, people from outside the family, things wouldn’t have worked out like that.

“She’s very professional and meticulous, in the same way that I am. We take after each other a lot.”

Rabiot spoke about the importance of his mother Veronique (Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)

When Rabiot returned to the Parc des Princes to face PSG in March, both he and his mother were targeted by abusive chants and banners that made crude references to his late father, who died in 2019. In an Instagram post, Rabiot told PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaifi: “You can’t buy class.” The Rabiot family subsequently announced their intention to take legal action against those responsible for the abuse, while French Football Federation president Philippe Diallo told AFP the abuse was “disgraceful and appalling”.

It is not the first time Veronique has found herself in the spotlight, having long been caricatured in the French media over her uncompromising stewardship of her son’s career. Given everything the family has been through, seeing her publicly criticised must hurt.

“Yes, of course,” Rabiot says. “But whether it’s her or me, we’ve built tough shells. Because in this environment, you have to be armed.

“On that level, she’s exceptional too because she doesn’t let anything get in, she’s focused on her objectives, and it doesn’t matter what people might be saying around her.

“If she’s convinced that something is the right choice and she’s doing the right thing, she’ll do it and she won’t be intimidated by what’s happening externally.

“You have to have a rock-solid mindset, and she does, notably because of the things we’ve been through together in our family. They are things that have forged us, and on that level, she’s unbeatable.”

(Top photo: Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)

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