Replace a world champion with two young hopefuls. This is RMC's bet for next season. According to our information, Jean-Louis Tourre and Mohamed Bouhafsi will be promoted at the start of the 2020 academic year. From Monday to Thursday, the two young journalists will present "Top of the foot", a new program in a long period of three hours (from 6 pm at 9 pm).
The tandem will have the heavy task of succeeding Christophe Dugarry. The former Girondin announced in April that he would leave the radio station he had joined in September 2016, at the end of June, where he had succeeded Luis Fernandez on the block from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Pure RMC products
But this time, RMC did not want to play the transfer window or poach a football star at a hefty price. Altice group radio (SFR) has chosen to dig into its "training center" to spin a football metaphor that would please its myriad of consultants, dubbed the "dream team". Because the two winners are pure RMC products. Mohamed Bouhafsi, 28, joined the NextRadioTV group in 2011, barely an adult.
In less than ten years he has become one of the faces of the group, a scoop machine. Jean-Louis Tourre, 33, is also a pillar of the editorial department where he joined in 2013, after six years at RTL. For four years, he has been an essential link in the “Team Duga”. "They are RMC's child prodigies", even dares Hervé Béroud, one of the big bosses of the media of the Altice group, who hopes to hold there the future Alain Marschall and Olivier Truchot, the duo of "Grandes Gueules".
Relaunching a losing radio
More than a change of face, it is above all a new editorial line. “We are on RMC which we will obviously count on the analyzes and the good humor of our dream team. But above all we will debrief the news of the day, with exclusive information and event interviews, ”promises Jean-Louis Tourre. Priority to the info as on the big sister BFMTV, rather than café du commerce. To analyze 24 hours in the life of football, Tourre and Bouhafsi will be surrounded by Jean-Michel Larqué, Jérôme Rothen, Rolland Courbis, Éric Di Meco and Laure Lepailleur. Undoubtedly joined by some new ones which will be announced in the coming days.
This reorientation must make it possible to relaunch a radio in loss of speed in audiences and in full social plan after a crisis of Covid-19 painful for all the media. And there is an emergency. RMC had 3.5 million listeners every day this winter. That is 850,000 less than during its record recorded in November 2016. And "Team Duga" did not escape the bleeding, with 230,000 faithful at the last score, against 285,000 a year earlier.