Les Bleus face the challenge of diversity

France are the most impressive team I have seen in the World Cup so far, but their team faces the challenges of a divided nation, a situation examined by football writer Simon Kuper in the Financial Times.

Kuper notes that the federation’s president since 2023 (Philippe Diallo) unites two different worlds. He passed through the obligatory grande école, Sciences Po university in his case, that is the entry ticket to the French ruling class, but also played football in Nantes’ youth academy. And, unusually among France’s overwhelmingly white elite, he is the son of a boxer from Senegal.

That background helps him manage relations between the diverse national team and a divided nation that may elect a far-right president next year.  France’s talent pool is certainly unmatched. Les Bleus reached four of the last seven World Cup finals, winning in 2018 and runners-up last time.

Dozens of the 98 French-born players at this tournament represent their parents’ countries of origin, including Algeria, Haiti and DR Congo. That talent emerges from a pyramid of 2.4 mn amateur footballers, Diallo says, playing on publicly funded sports complexes. The federation is spending nearly €140mn this year on the amateur game. Diallo notes that 99 per cent of his budget comes from private sources such as sponsorship deals and television rights — another benefit of Les Bleus’ excellence.

Diallo says their success is also a powerful social force. “In a country that is sometimes divided, the French team unites all French people, at least during a World Cup,” he says. Yet parts of the French public remain wary of a national team mostly made up of expatriate multimillionaires from diverse backgrounds.

And uniting France is probably harder than winning the World Cup. Several players have spoken out against the far-right Rassemblement National party. “I know what it means, and what kind of consequences it can have for my country when those kinds of people take control,” Mbappé told Esquire magazine just before the World Cup.

The party’s president, Jordan Bardella, responded with mockery, posting on social media: “I know what happens when Kylian Mbappé leaves PSG: the club wins the Champions League!” Diallo says players are “citizens” with “freedom of expression”. But he has asked them to use this freedom during the tournament “to unite the French” because talking about politics “runs the risk of dividing”.

Once back at their clubs, he says, they can have a “broader expression”.  The modern team’s foundational crisis was the 2010 World Cup, when the players, in conflict with the coach, Raymond Domenech, went on strike mid-tournament. The response at home turned nasty, with some charging the players of immigrant origin with disloyalty to France. The affair is dissected in a new hit Netflix documentary The Bus.

To maintain excellence, France must persuade its best talents of immigrant origin to play for France, rather than for their ancestral national teams. Until now, only second-tier French players chose African teams.

But in a shock for the federation, 18-year-old Ayyoub Bouaddi, captain of France’s under-21s, decided to play this tournament for Morocco. Diallo told the Pink ‘Un: “He’s a formidable player. He made another choice, which I respect. Bouaddi wouldn’t have played this World Cup with France.” 

Diallo says Morocco has made “more aggressive approaches, in quotation marks, to recruit players” ahead of co-hosting the 2030 World Cup. He muses that players might make such decisions “out of respect for their parents”, and says the Bouaddi affair has taught him “to reflect particularly on these binationals, and maybe to accompany them better”.