Dimitry Bertaud is brutally frank about why he left one of the best soccer leagues in the world to join Forge FC.
“To play football and enjoy myself…and to get my career going again.”
Landing the 27-year-old Congolese-French goalkeeper is a major coup for the Hammers, who immediately become the club’s starting keeper and will work in tandem with rising talent Dino Bontis, the first local player to ever wear the kit of his hometown team in an official game.
Bertaud spent 13 years with the historic Montpellier HSC, which included 32 on-field appearances over the last seven years with the senior team in Ligue 1, France’s top tier.
He was born and raised in France, but because his grandfather on his mother’s side emigrated from the Democratic Republic of Congo, he’s now playing internationally for the Congo, which is just one win away from advancing to the Men’s World Cup, which begins in June in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.
As he worked his way through the deep and demanding Montpellier goalkeeping ranks, advancing from off the roster to fourth-string, then third, despite those nearly three dozen starts between the sticks — 14 of them in his breakthrough 2021–22 season — Bertaud could never quite climb past the No. 2 designation. Montpellier kept finding others to fill the No. 1.
So he’s in Canada, trying to re-establish himself and, as fits a team with a name like Forge, he’s jumping right into the fire, with Mexico a burning central theme.
First, there are two games against Los Tigres UANL — the opening leg at Hamilton Stadium Tuesday night, the return match in Monterrey a week later — and then on March 31, the Democratic Republic of Congo will be in Guadalajara to face the survivor of Jamaica vs. New Caledonia. The winner of that game advances to the World Cup and if it’s Congo, it’ll be only the second time in history they’ve reached the Cup. They were last there in 1974 when the country was known as Zaire.
“My mom took me to Congo when I was younger and she always spoke to me a lot about the country,” Bertaud recalls. “In my heart I always wanted to represent Congo.
“We have just one match now to get there and it’s a feeling that makes me very proud. It’s been more than 50 years. It’s a record for us.”
Before declaring for Congo in 2023, Bertaud played 20 international games for France’s national youth teams and was on the bench for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo (delayed until 2021 because of the pandemic). Nigeria, which lost on penalty kicks to Congo in November’s African qualifying final, has since protested the presence of six Congolese players who had dual citizenship, a case that has yet to be heard. Bertaud wasn’t one of those six, and wasn’t dressed for that game because he’d been what soccer calls “without club” since June when he didn’t re-sign with Montpellier.
He had been the No. 1 Congolese keeper but is currently No. 2 because of his competitive inactivity at the club level. While a good showing in the Champions League will help his exposure in front of the soccer universe, he says that wasn’t the primary consideration in signing here.
What is the Concacaf Champions Cup and Why it Matters.
“Not really. I just want to play and enjoy the game, and get back to playing every day, because the last six months were very long and difficult,” he said. “Forge gives me the opportunity to play and show myself in football, and to get my career back on plan.”
The process was initiated by Forge, which has created a large network of coaching, managing and player-agent relationships in several talent-deep European countries including Greece, Belgium, France and England.
“We scour the market,” says Bobby Smyrniotis, Forge head coach and sporting director. “We look at players who are free (out of contract). A lot of times here at Forge we’re looking for things that are difficult to get and his name came about just through our own scouting and then from some different contacts we have in Europe. His name kept coming up and we started having conversations.
“We were able to provide Dimitry something he was looking for: a chance to play; an opportunity to be No. 1 keeper; and a team that always competes and wants to win games. I think that’s very important for a player who’s at his stage and it gives us someone who could be a very good player…so it’s a win-win for everyone.
“When you’re looking for a goaltender you look for a guy who can step right in and play. You look at different types of experience too. For me it’s important that a keeper has played games and sometimes it doesn’t matter at what level. Dimitry has played at the highest level and has been around the big club in Montpellier through his formative years and development years and then played for the first team.
“He has experience with the national team and has played quite a bit there. We’re happy to have him here. It gives us a guy who’s at a fantastic age, a player who has aspirations and gives us an ability to win.”
After his agent told him there was a possibility of signing in Hamilton, Bertaud called Johan Albert, the club’s goalkeeping coach, and a fellow French-speaker, one of many around, and on, the team.
“It was a very good discussion with Johan, and afterward we talked with Jelani (Smith, Forge’s director of soccer operations) and it was very simple and very good, and the club has been excellent with me.”
His wife Celia and their four-year-old son Milann will likely arrive from France in April, when the weather will be a little less intimidating. As Forge took to the Hamilton Stadium field for weekend workouts, it was the coldest air he’d ever breathed in his life, he said. But he started to acclimatize quickly.
His position coach says extreme cold is more of a challenge for all goalkeepers — not to mention those who’ve played their careers in southwestern France — than for other players. It’s imperative for them to keep moving during a game, especially when the ball is at the other end, to wear surgeon’s gloves under their oversized keepers’ mitts which tend to freeze solid and to use warming devices and wraps inside their game boots.
“(The weekend training) was probably the coldest we’ve been in since 2019, when our keeper’s (Triston Henry) gloves got ice on them in Calgary,” Albert says of the weekend workouts. “We learned from that game.”
Bertaud’s primary attributes are quick reflexes — which will be important against the dangerous-in-the-box Tigres — and his ability to play with his feet, which he can do with rapidity and precision. He likes to stop the ball and with little hesitation find the open teammate and move it the other way, which can, in turn, trap an over-pressing opponent.
And from his play and training in Europe he’s accustomed to the sudden changes of pace and direction with which top club teams attack, and how quickly gaps close on both offence and defence. He likes what he sees on his first line of defence, which has added depth and skill with the return of Daniel Krutzen and this weekend’s signing of Antoine Batisse, who’s also from France:
“They aren’t scared to play anyone and I love that because I love to play too. They’re good guys and very professional.”
Bertaud’s also aware that in the CPL’s seven years, a Forge star has won three times the Golden Glove as the top goalkeeper in the league; Henry twice and the now-departed Jassem Koleilat last season.
“I hope to continue that,” he said.