“You can come every day, you won’t beat me.” » It’s the mid-1990s in the Maison des exams district in Arcueil (Val-de-Marne). The Arc brasserie and its two table footballs are popular with Gérard Melloul, a great table football champion at the time. Olivier Covos takes a look there as he prepares to enter hotel school. “At the time I played table football like that, at the café. I played a game against him and he massacred me, laughs this 48-year-old man. I was young and resentful. I spent months trying to beat him.”
He succeeds and comes out completely hooked on “table football”. This is still the case thirty years later. Today he is the boss of Covos at Kremlin-Bicêtre, a PMU bar and the only table football room dedicated to competition in France. A specificity which has earned it being selected among the “100 PMU bars that make France”, in a guide which has just been published by Fooding. In Île-de-France, 13 PMUs were noticed.