Wally Dieng: from professional footballer to football entrepreneur
In an interview with BeSoccer from Málaga, Wally Dieng looks back on his career — Caen, Sedan, Tours, Miami — and on founding Football Scout Events, the scouting structure that Ferland Mendy notably passed through.
Wally Dieng: from professional footballer to football entrepreneur
“Sport has the values you give it. I share my passion with others because it is in sharing that I find fulfilment.” That is how Wally Dieng sums up his journey, from the pitch to enterprise.
Trained at Stade Malherbe de Caen, Wally Dieng climbed every step up to the professional squad, alongside a generation he himself calls golden: Xavier Gravelaine, Olivier Pickeu, Stéphane Paille and Benoît Cauet. He then moved on to Sedan, Tours and a spell in the United States, in Miami, after representing the France under-21 side.
That experience gave rise, back in 2010, to Football Scout Events. Far from a mere events agency, FSE defines itself as an alternative recruitment cell: mandated by professional and semi-professional clubs in search of talent, it gives visibility to promising players. “We are creators of opportunity, for players and for clubs,” he says.
Among the profiles who passed through FSE, Wally Dieng mentions Ferland Mendy. By his account, the future Real Madrid full-back and France international joined the structure after physical setbacks, stayed for around two years, was introduced to several clubs and rebuilt his career at Le Havre. The rest is history — and, Wally insists, first and foremost the player's own work.
Around fifty players who came through FSE are professionals today — 53 by the group's own count. But the ambition goes beyond reaching the pro game: for those who will not get there, Wally Dieng champions staying within football, through training in the trades of the sector.
That philosophy carries over into University Sports Talents (UST), the programme that sends young athletes to American universities to combine studies with high-level sport. “We are about transmission,” he repeats: nutrition, recovery, the mental side, life after the career — all that invisible training he wants to pass on.
At the time of the interview, he was already sketching a development academy — international, open to players without means through patronage, and to women's football. A vision now embodied by FSE Academy. “As footballers, we all wear the same kit”: at FSE, equality is not a slogan.
Source: interview with Wally Dieng for BeSoccer (Antoine Strohl), Málaga.
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