Before Euro 2004 started, French coach Jacques Santini announced that he was quitting as soon as the tournament was over.

There’s no way of knowing whether that news had any effect on his players. But the team did not play particularly well and was eliminated by the eventual winner, Greece.

Added to France’s flop in the World Cup two years ago – when it didn’t even manage to score a goal in its three games – this has been taken as evidence of a malaise in French soc cer. The French soccer authorities have evidently decided that not merely a new coach, but a new approach, is needed.

Everyone knows that the French lead Europe in terms of individual talent. Their new approach, however, will emphasize the same old thing that we always get in these situations: discipline.

Enter Raymond Domenech. The new French coach comes with no great track record; during a 20-year coaching career in France, none of his teams has ever won a major trophy. Nor, for that matter, was Domenech any big deal as a player.

But when you add together his modest playing attributes you can see why he got the job. First of all, he lied to his first club, Olympique Lyon – told them he was 10, the minimum age for young players with a pro club. He was only eight.

The club found out,but they liked his attitude,so he stayed. By 1969, when he was 16, Domenech had turned himself into a pitbull of a defensive midfielder, the position that has been home to so many of the sport’s more rustic performers.

So the young teenager was pitched into the first team, and made an immediate impact. In his very first game, he broke an opponent’s leg with a ferocious tackle. This was more evidence of the right attitude.

Domenech himself explained to Reuters: “I knew that a player of limited physical and technical qualities like me had to get himself a reputation and this reputation was given to me from the start – I was going to play the baddie’s part.”

Pity about the guy with the mangled limb – his name seems to have been forgotten – but otherwise everything was going fine. Domenech spent his 16-year playing career with French clubs, and managed to get on the national team eight times. Appropriately enough, a knee injury ended his playing career at age 32, and he turned to coaching.

As a player, Domenech collected euphemistic adjectives like “hard-tackling” and “fearless.”As a coach, he is “uncompromising, strong-willed and outspoken.”

France, then, will get a dose of vigorous discipline. Who knows whether that’s what it needs, but at this moment discipline is in vogue. We can thank the Greeks and their German coach, Otto Rehhagel, for that.

It was team discipline that enabled Greece to win Euro 2004, while France’s collection of stars failed. So did Holland’s, and Italy’s too. That is the accepted wisdom, and it is likely to dominate soccer thinking for a few years.

Rehhagel’s disciplined workhorses do what he tells them to do, no more, and certainly no less. Other coaches like this formula because it enhances their own importance.

A coach much in favor at the moment is the Portuguese Jose Mourinho, who has recently taken over at Chelsea. He ridiculed all the criticism heaped on Rehhagel for being defensive and negative: “I say exactly the opposite. Rehhagel did wonderful work. He adapted the team to the players’ qualities.”

I find that a very questionable judgment. It seems much more likely that Rehhagel adapted the players to his ideas of how a team should play. Andy Roxburgh, the Scot who is UEFA’s Director of Coaching – another coach glowing with praise for Rehhagel – put it this way: “Otto Rehhagel has fixed ideas, and imposed them on his players, who responded brilliantly.”

Whichever way you look at it – whether you agree with Mourinho or Roxburgh – the emphasis is on the coach. In deed, Mourinho made that very point, saying that Rehhagel “had no stars, no players coming from the moon. Maybe soccer is changing,and teams are the big things,not individuals.”

A mischievous statement, that. This is the man who is about to take over Chelsea’s array of highly talented, highly paid, high-profile stars. It sounds as though he is delivering a warning: Individuals are no longer the “big thing.”

Watching the Euro 2004 telecasts, one could be forgiven for thinking that individuals were very much the big thing – but that the individuals were now the coaches. The cameras were constantly cutting away to sideline shots of the coaches: During the final game, Rehhagel shared no fewer than 33 such cutaways with the Portugal coach Felipe Scolari. Rehhagel’s record, by my unofficial count, was 53 sightings during the Greeks’ overtime game against the Czech Republic.

The sudden prominence of coaches like Mourinho and Rehhagel can be seen as a healthy reaction in a sport in which players’ salaries are widely criticized as being way out of line – not only by coaches, but by fans and, of course, the very owners who pay those salaries.

The fact that so many of the superstars – Zidane, Figo, Henry, Raul, Van Nistelrooy, del Piero, Vieri – failed to deliver during the European championship greatly strengthens the hand, or at least the statements, of disciplinarian coaches like Mourinho and Rehhagel.

And perhaps Mourinho does, in a cleverly cryptic way, mean that coaches are the new big thing. It is possible, in his statement quoted above, to substitute the word “coach” for “team.” It makes perfect sense. But that pendulum swinging between individuals and team play (read “coaches”) never seems to swing smoothly. It is subject to violent lurches.

Not so long ago another disciplinarian, Louis van Gaal, was the coach du jour for his successes with Ajax in Holland. He ascended to the coaching job at Barcelona, quickly started emphasizing that he and his plans were all that mattered, had Rivaldo sitting on the bench … and departed from Barcelona a spectacular failure.

Whatever Mourinho and Rehhagel may tell us, it is the individuals,those damn overpaid stars,whom the fans want to see.