“Miss out on playing at the World Cup? I don’t even want to think about it,” said Ludovic Giuly after becoming the first ever Frenchman to win La Liga with FC Barcelona.

“When we speak about it amongst ourselves at Barca, even the biggest jokers in the team are serious. It’s like a sacred question.

“If we don’t have the World Cup, we don’t have anything.”

Ludovic Giuly is an ambitious man.

At 29 years of age, the former Lyon and Monaco right-winger has already won the French League, the Champions’ Cup, the Coupe de la Ligue, the Spanish championship, played in a Champions’ League final and won the Confederations Cup with Les Bleus.

But while many of his contemporaries in the French national team have already chalked up two World Cup appearances, Giuly had almost missed the boat.

The pint-sized winger-cum-striker began his professional football career at his native Lyon.

He made his Ligue 1 debut as a teenager in the 1994-95 season, playing just eight games, but already demonstrating the lightning pace coupled with an frightening tenacity that would become his trademarks.

The following season he played in every single match, was often switched from the right-side of midfield to a striking position and showed that he had more than an eye for goal.

Despite measuring just 1.64m, Giuly was a regular supplier of goals during the 1996-97 season with 16 from 37 games.

Just six months before France hosted the World Cup, ultra-ambitious Giuly had decided he wasn’t going to realise his dream of wearing the famous blue shirt unless he joined one of France’s consistently big clubs.

When Monaco came knocking the 22-year-old jumped at the new challenge. Yet despite lining up the goals for principality teammates Thierry Henry and David Trezeguet, Giuly would watch from his living room as his teammates wrote their names into the history books at the Stade de France that summer.

In six seasons at Monaco, Giuly finally established himself as one of the top performers in Ligue 1, but it would also be where – for a long time – he would be considered one of the almost men of French football.

He won the League and earned his first French cap against the Scottish in March 2000, but agonisingly missed out on the triumphant Euro 2000 squad. A serious injury limited him to just 11 matches in the 2001-2002 season and ended his dreams of the 2002 World Cup.

He led Monaco to the Coupe de la Ligue in 2003, but was replaced just minutes into the disastrous Champions’ League final loss to Porto a year later – an injury that would once again cost him a ticket to a major tournament with Les Bleus.

In 2005, after his first season in Barcelona Giuly helped the Catalan giants claim their first title since 1999. In the process, succeeding where the likes of compatriots Christophe Dugarry, Emmanuel Petit, Frédéric Déhu and Philippe Christanval had failed and winning a place in the hearts of Spain’s most passionate fans.

Yet despite all his success at club level, Ludovic Giuly is all-too aware that he needs to be on that plane to Germany 2006 if he is to join the likes of Ronaldinho and Samuel Eto’o and shake off the tag of being the most successful ‘almost man’ of French football.