It’s a scene any So Foot or Society journalist could have witnessed between 2013 and 2024. Christophe arriving at the office at 3:30 p.m., pointy shoes on his feet, all-weather down jacket – because there’s no season with him –, cigarette in his mouth, debonair, cheerful smile, with a bold proposal: “Hey my quiche! Would you like to go to Scotland with me? I’ve got a great idea for a subject. A story about dogs committing suicide from a bridge near Glasgow, sounds crazy!” Naturally, in the spring of 2015, his interlocutor agreed to follow him on this astonishing adventure, which, as is often the case, began with a short night in his little apartment in the 12th district) of Paris before taking an early morning flight.

Then, out in the field, in impeccable English, Christophe has no equal for wandering around on the trail of the right character to interview, the right scene to describe, opening doors, making encounters and unblocking situations that seem compromised thanks to his glibness, kindness and empathy. In Sean Connery’s homeland, this involved convincing women grieving the loss of their dog to come forward after having been mocked by British tabloid journalists a few years earlier, while unravelling a dark tale of a haunted manor house and a bridge that had been under a curse for two centuries. The six-page feature was published in an issue of Society in summer 2015 and traces what is still, alongside the Loch Ness Monster, Scotland’s other “great mystery”.

Christophe first set foot inside the office of So Foot when he came for an internship in June 2013, when the offices were still located in an underground parking lot in the northern 18th arrondissement/district of Paris. At the time, he had just graduated from Celsa school and had just published an article on his reporting website, Ipress, about drug addicts at the Gare du Nord. He sent it to two So Foot journalists, who themselves had their own reporting site. They found it excellent, started talking to Christophe, became friends and shared a common approach to journalism: a way of life that, above all, allows you to meet the world and set off on an adventure. The two journalists pass on the article to the editor-in-chief of So Foot, and Christophe is recruited.

At first discreet, he soon found a place he’d always dreamed of – “an island of freedom that allows me to do the journalism I love and that suits me”, he explains. Christophe Gleizes then became “Gleizou” and, with a passion for the field, began his extensive travels in search of good stories, particularly on the African continent, where he had lived as a child and for which he retains an undiminished fascination. Over time, some of his articles for So Foot will go down in history: his investigation into the age trafficking of African players dreaming of European soccer, in 2015 ; his long report on Bonaventure Kalou’s municipal campaign in his village in the Ivory Coast, in 2018 ; the CANs, too ; or almost the entire “100% Samuel Eto’o” issue, produced in Cameroon in the summer of 2022. “If I owe anything to So Press, it’s that they’ve enabled me to travel to Africa dozens and dozens of times. And that’s something I have really fond memories of,” he said in Tellement pied, the So Foot podcast, on May 23, 2024, just a few days before his departure for Algeria.

He says it himself: his passion for reportage goes back a long way, to childhood, and to Tintin, who “inspired him a lot” when he was young. “I had a bit of his style at one point. And I recently got a little dog,” he said in the spring of 2024. As a teenager, he bought a collection of Albert Londres awards, which never left his black Eastpak backpack, and whose texts he never stopped reading and rereading, day and night. Christophe had an intuition: long-form reporting, that genre of journalism, was also the one that best matched his human qualities. “I’m easy to get on with,” he says, “I’ve got a face that means people don’t get suspicious of me. I can often either make them laugh, or make them feel confident. And people often prefer reporters to journalists.” At times, he would even go so far as to say that if circumstances dictated that he could no longer do the job of reporter the way he wanted to, he would simply quit. Since we’ve come to know him, he’s also had an almost impossible dream: to get close to North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean, home to an isolated tribe that Westerners haven’t seen since 1991.

Christophe doesn’t like half measures. The proof: the writing, in a second stage, takes place exclusively at night, alone, on the little bar in his kitchen, with a cup of coffee, between two games of chess, and can end in the early hours of the morning. “I go over each sentence dozens of times to improve it. Without having the talent, it’s a bit like the Flaubertian method,” he laughs. For Christophe often laughs. Perhaps that’s the most striking thing about him: Christophe is a resolutely laughing, free, jovial, generous and cheerful person, whatever the circumstances and situations, capable of reciting a poem by Lamartine in the middle of the office or cooking a whole fish while reporting from Vienna, with eight hours to go before his article is due. This insouciance follows him everywhere. Including during the past year, when he was under judicial supervision, in the WhatsApp messages he intermittently sent to friends and colleagues, to play down the moment and his own solitude, which he sometimes cheated on in a restaurant in Algiers where he found “roast camembert” one lunchtime – it “lifted his spirits”.

Nothing is ordinary for Christophe Gleizes. Even less so a PSG supporter. For several years now, he has been hosting the Champions League evenings organized by So Foot at Le Sacré, a Paris nightclub, to defend his beloved club. A sequence was even broadcast in an episode of the TV show Quotidien in November 2019, on the occasion of a PSG-Real Madrid match. In it, he bursts onto the screen with his low-cost yellow sunglasses and vintage jersey flocked with the RTL logo on his shoulders, in front of a conquered audience. “When we came up with the idea of organizing these evenings, there was never any question of who the future host would be. Inevitably, the mission was Christophe’s. He’s easy to work with. He draws you in easily. At the end of each evening, I noticed that people were queuing up to greet him,” recalls Maxime Marchon, former editor-in-chief and current development director of So Foot.

Since Christophe is an obsessive man, he has another consuming passion: chess, a discipline in which he boasts a FIDE (International Chess Federation) rating of 1691 Elo. He even managed to place an article in So Foot on the passion of footballers – such as Hatem Ben Arfa and Marco Bode – for the king of games. A discipline he practiced frantically during the year he spent waiting for his trial, on June 29, in Algeria, where he went to report on the glory days of the JS Kabylie club, to interview the coach of Mouloudia Club d’Alger, Patrice Beaumelle, and to produce a portrait of the footballer Salah Djebaïli. Before setting off with his backpack, he used to say that he liked to be “in front of a mountain. I like it when there’s pressure around my articles, when I know it’s going to be tough. I always want there to be at least one person who doesn’t want the article to be published.” One of those legendary bursts of enthusiasm and optimism that characterize him, as when he punctuated the question “But are you sure about this?” with this reply: “Yes, my quiche, don’t worry. I always come back from my reports alive and with plenty of gear.”

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