Her name may tell you something, well yes: the Koh Lanta candidate Julie Debever is also … professional footballer. Portrait.
Koh Lanta returned to the small screen on Tuesday February 21, 2023, the opportunity to discover the participants of Koh Lanta: The Sacred Fire. And among them is a candidate a little better known than the others. A certain Julie Debever. Professional footballer in the city, Julie Debever is currently defender of FC Fleury, but also played at Inter Milan and has to her credit a participation in the 2019 World Cup with the France team led by Corinne Deacon. But for Julie Debever, participating in Koh Lanta has so far been, as for many candidates, a childhood dream. “It’s a fan story, a show that I’ve liked for years,” testified in the columns of West France the athlete. She believes that she has realized “her second dream”, the first being of course her football career.
After “10 years of candidacy”, Julie Debever found in this adventure “the team spirit, the sharing of values around a sporting practice which is [s]we daily. The unknown”, is what characterized her. The FC Fleury player fully lived this experience and invested herself enormously. For example, she admitted “to work on her letters a lot” in her application file before giving everything during the game.
How did his club take the news of his selection for Koh Lanta?
In the columns of West France, Julie Debever did not hide the difficulty of managing a sports season and a selection in a show like Koh Lanta. “It’s never easy to manage this kind of situation,” she began, before pointing out that her age had played a lot. “It would have been very different if I was 23. There, at 34, I’m at the end of my career, potentially on my last six months. So the speech was different,” she explained, emphasizing that FC Fleury was particularly “attentive to this dream [qu’elle avait] since a long time”.
A family steeped in football
Julie Debever was born in Marcq-en-Barœul in Hauts-de-France. She began a career as a professional footballer and is now playing for FC Fleury 91, in the Paris region. The player has been around the world of football since her childhood. His father practiced this sport as a goalkeeper and his brother Anthony is currently in the Regional 1 division at AC Cambrai. At 34, the player has now started her 18th season in the professional world.
The French team in consecration
The defender was revealed to FCF Hénin-Beaumont in 2005. She remained there until 2011 before joining FCF Juvisy for a season where she was vice-champion of France. Afterwards, she knew AS Saint-Etienne with which she was a finalist in the Coupe de France in 2013. Her time at EA Guingamp between 2015 and 2019 earned her the right to be selected by Corinne Deacon during the Football World Cup in France in 2019. She had played her first match in the blue jersey at Geoffroy Guichard in 2018. The course of the French nevertheless stopped at the quarter-final stage, defeats by the United States 2- 1. She has so far only three selections with the French team.
Inter Milan an enchanted parenthesis
Her life took a turn when she left French soil in 2019. She joined Inter Milan and found love there. Julie Debever now has a relationship with her ex-teammate, Italian striker Régina Baresi. In Italy, she played 22 matches.
A salary close to €2,000
According to estimates of The Team, in 2022 the Fleury club will pay its players an average of €2,000 gross. This is not the lowest salary for women. At Guingamp, at the time, Julie Debever had a salary of around €1,600 gross per month. Lyon, the biggest club in women’s football, comes out on top with around €12,000.