The Koh Lanta candidate Julie Debever is also … professional footballer. Portrait of the candidate taking part in the orientation test.
Koh Lanta has been on TF1 since Tuesday, February 21, 2023. And among the candidates, one candidate is a little better known than the others. A certain Julie Debever. Professional footballer in the city, Julie Debever went through 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 Ouest France the athlete. She believes she has achieved “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 [her] daily life. The unknown”, is what makes her characterized. The FC Fleury player has fully lived this experience and has invested a lot. For example, she admitted “working on her letters a lot” in her application file before giving everything during the game.
While she will participate in the orientation test on Tuesday June 6, Julie Debever announced on social networks that she was ending her career as a professional footballer. “This is a special moment in my life because it concludes a very rich career (…) Football has given me incredible joys, magical memories and unforgettable moments that have been ingrained in me for the whole So, when I take stock of my career, I have no regrets but in life, when you get older you realize that sometimes to love is to let go.Heart, sweat, honor, it’s Is what you asked me in each of my clubs and that’s what I gave and football gave it back to me. A huge THANK YOU to all the clubs in which I passed, presidents, leaders, to the coaches who allowed me to understand that no one is greater than the club, to my teammates with whom the human adventure has been extraordinary, all my family who have been of unconditional support and for whom the announcement must be complicated and finally, YOU, the fans without whom football could not exist in this way.”
In the columns of Ouest-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 [which she had] for a long time”.
Julie Debever was born in Marcq-en-Barœul in Hauts-de-France. She embarked on 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 defender was revealed to FCF Hénin-Beaumont in 2005. She stayed there until 2011 before joining FCF Juvisy for a season where she was vice-champion of France. Afterwards, she knew AS Saint-Etienne with whom 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 French women’s journey 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.
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 Regina Baresi. In Italy, she played 22 matches.
According to estimates by L’Equipe, 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.
