France - I guess that's why they call it Les Bleus (Part 2)
A team that keeps sabotaging itself... they just like me fr
This is the second part of ‘France - I guess that's why call it Les Bleus’. If you haven’t read Part One yet, you can find it here. Alright, let’s get into Part Two…
We left our story in the aftermath of a crisis. The mutiny of 2010 was still fresh in the memory of both the French people and their national team - disciplinary committees had suspended certain players officially and unofficially nobody was sure whether they would ever be selected again.
Raymond Domenech was sacked, but I probably didn’t need to tell you that. He had overseen the burning of Rome and might as well have been trying to put it out with a water pistol.
His last action as France manager (bar making sure everyone got on the plane, but let’s be honest mentally half of them were already at home) would come after the whistle had blown in their final group game against South Africa. Instead, petulantly he would refuse to shake SA manager Carlos Alberto Parreira’s hand (a name you will remember if you read the Brazil instalment).
What became of the rest of his career? He received nearly a million euros in compensation from France for his dismissal, but this couldn't make up for his substantial loss of reputation.
He wouldn’t manage at the top level again for over a decade before securing the FC Nantes job on Boxing Day in 2020. He would last eight games and win none before being unceremoniously sacked.
Back in 2010, his replacement was Laurent Blanc. His spell as manager of Les Bleus only lasted two years, but he was the man tasked with untangling the mess that had led to the French implosion in South Africa.
This was Blanc’s second job in management… boy he really knew how to pick them. He was the one who had contacted the French Football Federation (FFF) to ask if they had any jobs going after leaving Bordeaux. Lucky for him, one had just come up.
For France, Blanc was the perfect poster boy for the rebirth of the national team. In his first season with Bordeaux, he had led the team to a second-placed finish and won Ligue 1 manager of the year; in his sophomore season, he had gone one better winning the whole thing.
A shiny new manager, for a shiny new age.
Unfortunately, he could not get started straight away as for their first game following the 2010 World Cup, the FFF had decided to suspend all 23 members of the squad that had been part of the mutiny in South Africa.
France faced Norway and lost 2-1. A non-event in the grand scheme of things; the real work would start after that. However, there was something bubbling under the surface that was greater than just football.
During the 2010s, French politics were in a really bad place (whether they are any better now, that’s not for me to comment on). Though they never became the main party and therefore had a president in office, the right-wing National Front began to gain momentum within the country.
Led by Jean-Marie Le Pen and then his daughter Marine Le Pen, their platform was one of anti-immigration and then whatever problems that were happening in France (which they in turn blamed on immigration).
So when there was a mutiny in the French camp and the team exited the 2010 World Cup in an embarrassing fashion, they plainly asked ‘Is it because of immigration?’ (well they didn’t really ask, so much said it).
They wielded the events in South Africa as a weapon, using the heightened negative emotions people felt for the sport to fuel an agenda that covered a lot more than just a sport.
Personally, there is a deep irony in complaining about diaspora when you are a former colonial power, especially when it benefits you in a talented field, but I’m not going to get into that.
All I’m going to say is that Zinedine Zidane, the man France welcomed back home as a hero not four years earlier, was the son of Algerian immigrants and part of the ‘black-blanc-beur’ (Black-White-Arab) team that had won the 1998 World Cup for France and been hailed by the population as a result.
But politics have got to politics.
As Marcelo Bielsa said recently: ‘The same argument that they use to magnify your behaviour when you win, is the same argument they use to condemn you when you lose.’ He was talking about the English media’s problematic flip-flopping when it comes to talking about managers, but it probably applies on a greater scale than even the Argentinian manager believes.
The ‘enemy within’ narrative began to bubble away in France, four of the five players disciplined for the 2010 mutiny were descended from immigrants and had grown up in working-class neighbourhoods, so of course, their ‘patriotism’ was questioned by those who sort to fuel their own agendas.
Fadela Amara was a junior minister at the time, born to Algerian parents. She warned President Nicolas Sarkozy’s governing party:
“There is a tendency to ethnicize what has happened. Everyone condemns the lower-class neighborhoods. People doubt that those of immigrant backgrounds are capable of respecting the nation.”
Of course, for want of a better phrase, this racially charged narrative is a load of bullsh*t. These players grew up in France and chose to play for the French national team, so there should have been no doubt that they were as, if not more, committed than their ‘pure French’ teammates.
And if you don’t want to take it from me, take it from Lillian Thuram. The defender was born in Guadeloupe but played 142 times for France (he holds the record), and in 2006 when the senior Le Pen tried to push his party’s politics in regard to that squad, the defender offered the perfect response (this is just an excerpt but you can read the whole thing here):
"When we take to the field, we do so as Frenchmen. All of us. When people were celebrating our win, they were celebrating us as Frenchmen, not black men or white men. It doesn't matter if we're black or not, because we're French. I've just got one thing to say to Jean Marie Le Pen. The French team are all very, very proud to be French. If he's got a problem with us, that's down to him but we are proud to represent this country. So Vive la France, but the true France. Not the France that he wants."
There would be no overt outcome in the end. The French team’s selection would not be directly affected nor would there be any ejections; all of the players who were suspended due to the events of 2010 would return after their suspensions had been served.
However covertly there nearly was. In 2011, recordings were leaked that included Blanc and other members of the FFF. In them, they discussed a plan to cap the number of 12-13-year-old black and Arab hopefuls at sports academies to 30%.
Blanc would initially deny the talks, but after the recordings were published, he would amend his statement to one that stated his remarks were taken out of context and misinterpreted and he did not accept any accusations of racism and xenophobia.
He was about to quit if President Nicolas Sarkozy had not stepped in and convinced him not to.
I’m going to park this unfortunate part of the story here for now, not because I want to ignore it but because there isn’t much to say. It doesn’t disappear in time nor is it resolved… well not yet anyway. So we will get back to it in due course, but let’s return back to football for now.
Football-wise, Blanc was a great manager, on the road to Euro 2012 he went on a 23-match unbeaten streak that would only end in the final match of the group stages against Sweden.
However while Blanc had got France back on track on the pitch, his tactic to just move on from the issues of 2010 rather than confront it head-on would come back to bite him in the knock-out stages.
Any scientist will tell you that while Earthquakes are dangerous, aftershocks have the potential to be worse. They are unpredictable, have a similar magnitude and can bring down structures that were damaged by the original quake.
What France needed was a rebuild, Blanc had just tried to refurbish the ruins. So when the aftershock of 2012 hit he was buried and someone else would be needed to take his place.
I’m going to say something now that might get me some strange looks… but Didier Deschamps is the exact manager France needs, even if his football is boring.
Now if you disagree with that statement, that’s fair enough. He has an incredibly talented squad and plays simple, pragmatic football with it, but this is where I think the perception of Deschamps is slightly skewed.
Football fans want the French manager to be a Teppanyaki Chef. They want to have their meal but also be entertained in the process; they want the flaming onion volcano or the prawn in the pocket just as much as they want a tasty dish at the end of it. There’s danger, there’s fire, and something can always go wrong.
Deschamps however is a classically trained French chef. He works behind the scenes, carefully tasting his food and balancing the flavours with a pinch of this and a sprinkle of that and at the end, you get your dish and it’s tasty, sometimes slightly underwhelming, but it’s exactly how the chef wanted it to taste.
And after 2012 that’s exactly what France needed.
Euro 2012 was a disaster for Blanc and the French National team. They at least made it through group stages this time but then it all fell apart once again. Sagna did not travel to the competition after suffering an injury but he spoke wistfully to the Guardian at the time about the problems within the camp:
“It's a shame. We had the potential to go further. People would take me for a madman for saying that, but I saw a team that could go to the final. I had faith in them.
"I was especially annoyed to hear the stories going around. That's regrettable – in the end it gives a bad image of us, the team. It's a waste of a competition. Everything was avoidable. It's a shame that this never leaves the team alone."
Yann M’Vila and Jeremy Menez reportedly clashed in training, Hatem Ben Arfa clashed with Blanc and then the piece de resistance, Samir Nasri, who felt he had been unfairly criticised by the press, launched into a furious tirade towards a journalist after France were knocked out by Spain.
Blanc, realising the poisoned chalice he had inherited, bowed out after the competition, cutting his spell as manager short by two years. And that’s the situation that Deschamps walked into.
So like any good chef walking up to watch over a stew that he had not started, he first tasted the food. He got to know the players, spoke to them personally and gauged their personalities.
Then he worked on the balance of the flavours. France didn’t need a coach, they needed a relationship counsellor. They needed a manager who could cater to the egos while giving the quieter players a voice; someone who placates the hotheads while stoking the flame in the passive squad members.
This was Deschamps through and through. It was how he had acted when he captained France in 1998 and it was how he approached and still approaches his role as a manager; a selfless watercarrier there to raise everyone else up.
The trade-off for everyone else is that he might prioritise keeping clean sheets more than most.
Speaking to Eurosport in 2020, he explained how he approached his role as manager while preparing for the European Championships:
No team can achieve a high level if there is something going on internally. The harmony of the squad is paramount. There are choices to make. It was his [Aime Jaquet] responsibility like it is mine today.
So going into 2014, France really had only one aim. Not to lose because of their own stupid mistakes.
They would reach the quarter-final, losing 1-0 to eventual winners Germany (seeing how Germany would then beat Brazil 7-1 in the semi-final they seemingly got off lightly).
The important thing is that France had simply lost to a better team, they hadn’t sabotaged themselves and left Brazil with regrets. They had done the best they could do at this point in time.
You could have said they just needed an extra push. However when Karim Benzema was accused of blackmailing his teammate Matheu Valbuena in 2015 and was exiled from the France squad, that push needed to be a little bigger. Deschamps would later say of the incident:
"There have been very unpleasant moments which were outside of the context of football, when it went on the private and personal sphere. Am I thinking about the tag? Yes. I will never be able to forget it. Then, it went too far. It was violent, inappropriate and unacceptable.”
Luckily for France however, if they just needed a push, the player that would break onto the scene ahead of the 2018 World Cup would be like strapping a jet engine onto the back of their chances.
For me, one of my favourite matches to watch is where a player announces himself on the world stage. The game where everyone watches on (usually in Europe) and says ‘that guy is good,’ only to follow that up 10 minutes later with ‘Oh that guy is really good’.
For Kylian Mbappe, this game came in a Champions League quarter-final against Borussia Dortmund, where he announced himself with a brace against the German side. This came after he had scored against Manchester City in his CL debut to secure AS Monaco’s progression to the next round.
The comparisons to Ronaldo (the Brazillian one) and Thierry Henry flowed freely; he was lightning quick and once he got going it seemed that even a tackle wouldn’t stop him.
Arsene Wenger, who had the pleasure of managing Henry and the displeasure of wanting to sign Mbappe when literally the whole world wanted to, would say of the comparison between the two:
"He is not exactly Thierry Henry but it is true that he has similar qualities and the future and talent is similar. The potential is similar, after that if he has the same level of motivation, desire and intelligence that Thierry has, and the next two to three years will tell us that, then he can be very promising.”
These Champions League games were just the tip of the iceberg, the ones that were visible to everyone who didn’t want to dive into the sea of Ligue 1 football. He had been incredible for Monaco in the league and formed a formidable partnership with veteran striker Radamel Falcao.
Falcao finished the season with 30 goals in all competitions, Mbappe was close behind with 26 as Monaco toppled Paris Saint-Germain to win the title.
So how did PSG deal with this embarrassing defeat? Well, they just bought Mbappe (as well as signing Neymar for a combined fee of around £350m).
Real Madrid had also wanted to sign the player (events would repeat themselves five years later), but Zinedine Zidane, who already had a wealth of attacking options, did not guarantee him game time. Unai Emery however was determined to sign Mbappe; former PSG Scout Luis Ferrer told Le Parisien:
"I remember how strong Unai was, how good! He gave his word to Kylian that he would play with him. And he kept his promise. Kylian wasn't quite ready for a Champions League game but Unai had committed, so he played him anyway. One night I got back to Paris at 10:30 p.m. When I arrived, I called Antero (Henrique) to give him an update and he was surprised that I hadn't stayed in the south. The next day, at six o'clock, I took the first flight. Two hours later I rang the doorbell of the Mbappés with croissants."
In his first season, he scored 22 goals in 44 games, a slightly worse return than his time at Monaco but he still won the domestic treble with PSG and this form secured him a place in Deschamps’ French squad for the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
Having an 18-year-old lead the line for a national team led to the word ‘risk’ being thrown around a lot by the French media.
Of course, as we know now, he would only get better, winning the Ligue 1 Player of the Year the following season and earning back-to-back Golden Boots the year after that. But at the time, the media were still sceptical, however when asked about Deschamps made it perfectly clear that he had faith in his selections:
“Those young people are there, and if I have selected them it is because they are good for the team. They are here because they have the quality to be here.”
France now had their star boy, a strong team full of talented players and a manager who knew how to keep the tensions within the camp from boiling over. The ingredients were there, now it was up to France to deliver their fans the meal that they all wanted; a recipe by Jules Rimet himself.
The match I always remember from the 2018 World Cup (that didn’t have England involved) is always France vs Argentina in the Round of 16.
France had coasted through their group, winning two games vs Australia and Peru and drawing against Denmark. They weren’t awe-inspiring performances, but they got the job done and that’s what Deschamps wanted them to do.
But then they faced Argentina, and from this game, you just knew that they were going to win the entire competition.
It was a cagey first half as Argentina adopted a siege mentality; France could have control of the ball if they weren’t productive with it. But Les Bleus opened the scoring in the 13th minute thanks to a penalty from Antione Griezmann which was won after an awe-inspiring run by Mbappe, but then Angel Di Maria would equalise in the 41st minute.
France were keeping Lionel Messi quiet and limiting his influence on the game, but then in the 48th minute, their concentration lapsed for just a minute.
Messi was left open at the back post and fired a shot towards goal, it then ricocheted off defender Gabriel Mercado into the net to give Argentina the lead.
These are the moments that decide ties. Where you dig in and find something within yourself to get the job done.
Sometimes it’s a moment of pure brilliance, like Benjamin Pavard’s stunning half volley which brought the scores level, but other times it’s because a teenager from Bondy is about to show the entire world that he’s not just ‘good’ he’s not even ‘really good’, in fact, he’s one of the best.
For his first, he is inexplicably able to find space in a crowded box, before drilling it low and making it difficult for Franco Armani to save it. And his second just a few minutes later showed a similar level of composure, as he latched onto a pass from Oliver Giroud and drilled it past the keeper.
Journalist Jorge Valdano would be full of praise for the French forward in his match report for the Guardian:
“Mbappé chose the day that Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo left the World Cup to start his revolution. Without asking permission, without the need to knock discreetly at the door, he burst into footballing history, flattening everything before him. From the first minute, he appeared to be made of wind and steel, taking flight and destroying the Argentinian defence.”
Sergio Aguero would get a late consolation goal, but it was too late, France were through and wins against Uruguay and Belgium would confirm their place in the final against Croatia.
I watched that final on holiday and it was a great match. Paul Pogba, who had been exceptional in France’s 4-3 win against Argentina, was again fantastic against Croatia getting a goal for his efforts while Griezmann and Mbappe were on the scoresheet again (the other being an unfortunate own goal by Mario Mandzukic).
And with that France won the game 4-2 and lifted the World Cup for the second time in their history. They had redeemed themselves after 20 years.
But of course, as I said before politics have got to politics.
With the issues of immigration at the forefront of French politics partly due to the migrant crisis and Le Pen’s National Front growing in support over the decade leading up to this World Cup, who this achievement actually belonged to came to the forefront of the competition.
Around 12 of France’s squad were in some way of African origin, leading the comedian Trevor Noah to make a joke that was along the lines of the World Cup belongs to the African continent. It was a joke weighted with his perspective and it caused a horrendous backlash in France. Ambassador Gerard Araud retorted:
“By calling them an African team, it seems you are denying their Frenchness.This, even in jest, legitimizes the ideology which claims whiteness as the only definition of being French.”
I would like to point out that the National Front tried to hijack Araud’s comments to fuel their own patriotic agenda (trying to have their cake and eat it) and he shut them down immediately; his points were made to unite not divide.
Noah would then retort ‘why can’t they be both French and African’. It’s truly an interesting point of view, one that was made from the perspective that in the 20 years prior, the question of whether the national team was ‘French enough’ had been circling, but now they had won something it was now a non-issue (Bielsa’s words echo).
The issue, however, is that both missed the point. It’s not their decision to make on who the trophy belongs to, they didn’t win it, it’s up to the players themselves.
There’s a very good Twitter post I could link here to support the point, however, it’s made by an (allegedly) terrible person. So instead I’ll use the words of Nicolas Batum, a French Basketball player of Cameroon descent who seemed to sum up the feeling that Noah was missing:
“Yes my dad and my last name are from Cameroon but I was born, raise[d], educated, taught basketball in France. Proud to be FRENCH. I’m playing for the youth in France who wants to be like us and make the country proud. And I’m proud of that and our 2018 World Champ.”
Centre-back Adil Rami on the other hand makes a point to refer to himself as both French and Moroccan, giving credence to both sides of his heritage.
In general, both points of view from Araud and Noah were made with good intentions, the ambassador wanted to try and remove the divisions that had become more apparent in the 2010s, while Noah was commenting on the erasure of diaspora and therefore the player’s roots.
However, they approached a nuanced discussion that needs to be approached on an individual basis, instead of with a carpet bomb of definitive opinion. France had won the World Cup as a country; whoever the players wanted to dedicate it too was completely up to them.
So here we are, with the 2022 World Cup in Qatar fast approaching. France’s form isn’t great as they are bottom of their Nations League group (though they did win the prior instalment) and some issues are already starting to form.
Pogba will be injured until at least the beginning of the tournament (he’s their most creative player so this is a problem) and at the moment the midfielder is embroiled in a scandal that has his brother Mathias accusing him of putting a curse on Mbappe. It’s insane and I don’t really understand it.
Mbappe himself has just signed an insane contract extension at PSG which reportedly gives him an incredible amount of power at the club. Whether that will be good for his ego in the long term we are still yet to see, but it does give Deschamps a new power dynamic to consider in his dressing room regardless.
It’s also yet to be seen how having one of Qatar’s PSG assets, and therefore one of the faces of the competition as the squad’s key player will affect that dynamic as well.
In the positive column, however, Benzema has returned from exile after his form became undeniable and a number of other talented players have entered the fold such as Theo Hernandez and Christopher Nkunku. This gives France more options in what will be a highly competitive World Cup.
Overall, France still has one of the best squads in world football and should be considered one of, if not the favourite for the competition in November. However it’s France and as we’ve seen through the course of this account of their World Cup history, sometimes their biggest opponents are themselves.
Thanks for reading ‘That’s why they call it Les Bleus’, sorry for the delay on the second part but had a lot of things on. As always will be something a little different this week followed by the next instalment of this series the week after. See you soon.