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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Remember when Zinédine Zidane lifted the World Cup in 1998? Kylian Mbappé doesn't. The forward wasn't born when the French team first became world champions. But it was Mbappé's unique talent that helped France reach the summit of world football once again in 2018, erasing years of failure, rancour and shame. For Les Bleus, the road between these two highs was blighted by bitterly painful lows. Zidane's headbutt; a players' strike; infighting and recriminations; even sex scandals and blackmail. Mbappé witnessed it all as he honed his prodigious talent in the banlieues of Paris, and his story embodies France's journey from disaster to triumph. In Sacré Bleu, Matthew Spiro traces the rise, fall and rise again of Les Bleus through the lens of Kylian Mbappé. Featuring a foreword by Arsène Wenger and interviews with leading figures in French football, Spiro asks what went wrong for France and what, ultimately, went right.
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“When I lived in France in the early 1990s, I am not sure that I would have predicted the effect that the country would have not only on UK football but on global football. Certainly, when they made such a mess of qualifying for the 1994 World Cup, winning the next one seemed a long way off. Having worked with Matt many times, it is no surprise that he has perfectly captured the essence of this beautiful country and its beautiful game.”
Mark Chapman, broadcaster
“A detailed and sensitive account of France’s turbulent journey from one World Cup triumph to another; a fascinating story of football but also of far wider issues.”
Jonathan Wilson, The Guardian
“Glory, influence and the sheer volume of talent are clear themes of French football over the past twenty-five years. Matt Spiro goes deeper and covers the complications of culture and race, too. This is a book about modern France as well as modern French football.”
Michael Walker, The Athletic ii
“During my six seasons in France I saw the way Les Bleus brought an entire nation together. When they won the World Cup in 1998, I was kissing my teammates at pre-season training, thinking I was French. This fantastic book brings back some wonderful, vivid memories and truly encapsulates the complex relationship France has with football.”
Tony Cascarino, former Marseille, Nancy and Republic of Ireland striker
“Winning the World Cup in 1998 was the highlight of my career. In this brilliant book, Matt Spiro captures the significance of that event and explains how it changed football in France for ever.”
Frank Leboeuf, former France international
“A brilliantly insightful and entertaining read.”
Jon Spurling, FourFourTwo
“An amazing tale … Spiro skilfully traces the emergence of world-class players from city ghettos imbued with strife through a volcanic mix of inhabitants from former French colonies.”
Eric Brown, Sports Journalists’ Association
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To Éva, Lucie and Alice
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD BY ARSÈNE WENGER
For French people, watching the national team has been an emotional experience in recent years. The player strike at the World Cup in 2010 was a terrible low. You could say that Knysna was like our Waterloo. It was a sad period for everybody who loves French football. But it was also an opportunity to make a fresh start, and I believe we learned from it. We thought: ‘This cannot be allowed to happen again. The players have to behave better.’ It proved to be a good learning curve for us.
In 2018, I always thought France would win the World Cup. Why? Because physically the team was fantastic, and they had a good balance between physical power and technical ability. The longer the competition went on, the more this physical power took over. Even within the matches, the longer they lasted, the more they were able to dominate their opponent physically. It is simple, if I play against Kylian Mbappé and in the first twenty minutes he runs at me at 90 per cent, I have to go at 110 per cent to stay with him. If after an hour he goes at 100 per cent, then I can no longer stay with him!
Mbappé is of course very important. It has felt like God had sent us this boy to show us how to play – and how to behave. He typifies what French football is about. He is a boy who has received a very good education. His parents are sports people – his mother was an international handball player and his father xwas a football coach – and they clearly educated him well. But he also has something inside him, something he was born with. We have seen great young football players before, but when you hear Mbappé doing his first interview at eighteen, and you feel like he has been doing that his whole life, you realise he is different. This is not something that he learned. He was born to do this. Of course he has the footballing talent, but what is needed today to be a star is the ability to communicate with the rest of the world from one single interview. And he has that.
What we are currently seeing is that through immigration France has a huge opportunity. The absolute heart of the national team is made up of players from immigrant backgrounds who have been educated in the French game. I’m talking about Paul Pogba, N’Golo Kanté, Blaise Matuidi, Kylian Mbappé and Samuel Umtiti. This isn’t new. Historically the successful national teams have always had strong links to immigration, from Raymond Kopa, Michel Platini and Zinédine Zidane, to Mbappé and Pogba. So of course we are lucky to have so many fine players with origins from big football countries like Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Cameroon, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
In France, young players often learn their skills by playing football against each other in their home suburbs. I believe 60 per cent of professional players in France come from the Paris suburbs. That is incredible! I remember when I was Monaco coach, I asked Lilian Thuram to explain to me what his childhood was like. He said that after school, it was football, football and more football. He played together with people from all sorts of different backgrounds. It was tough and there were many good players. You have to be strong to survive in those conditions because there is a real competitive edge. You want to prove you are the best, and you’re playing with kids who are ready to fight to show you that you’re not. So the guys who come out from there, they are ready for the fight. I believe the football education they receive gives them great mental strength. xi
As a parent, when you educate your children you think you absolutely want to protect them from danger. But actually the best thing to do is to get them to fight against disappointment and adversity. This is the best preparation for life. Their hunger to achieve will be high and they will have developed their capacity to fight. That’s not something you get taught in the best schools.
For many years, France has been good at developing young players. When I was the Arsenal manager, I knew that if I took a player from France he would be at the physical level required to perform immediately. France has been ahead of the game in this respect. The other advantage that France coach Didier Deschamps has is that French players get to play from a young age in Ligue 1. They play, then as soon as they do well they leave for other leagues. When they leave Ligue 1 they are well prepared. This then opens the door for somebody else and that’s why we have so many good young players.
The big problem in England is in the category of players aged between seventeen and twenty-one. In England, they scout well and they coach well. But the integration of young players into the first team is often not successful because the competition for places is too high, the level of performance in the league is too high and the pressure put on the managers to succeed is too high. The last part of a player’s education is gained in competition. In France, unlike in England, the players get the opportunity to compete.
Looking forward, I think this generation of French players has the chance to create a legacy. Usually when a team wins a World Cup, it is the end of an era. But in 2018 the France team was full of young players. It was the start of an era. When it comes to players, we are spoilt for choice. Look at the last World Cup; Anthony Martial didn’t make the cut. He plays for Manchester United, which is not a small club. Alexandre Lacazette didn’t make it. Basically they had too much choice! It’s just a xiimatter of finding the right balance because we have no problem with the quality of the individual players. If they find the right balance, and if the team is efficient, they can carry on winning major tournaments.
CHAPTER 1
MBAPPÉ, LE SAUVEUR
30 JUNE 2018
The air in the Kazan Arena feels heavy. Even the 23,000 boisterous Argentina supporters, beautifully decked out in their Albiceleste colours, have somehow been calmed by the slow and tentative start to this round of sixteen tie. The first glamour match-up of the World Cup has been suitably hyped, but amid the heat and humidity of this stifling afternoon, the reality of France’s hopes looks to be hitting home.
The French fans I had met in Kazan’s vibrant city centre that morning seemed largely resigned. Most complained about Didier Deschamps’s negative tactics and team selections, and some had already booked flights home for the next day. Despite boasting several of the most exciting attacking individuals on the planet, Les Bleus had limped unconvincingly through the group stage. Paul Pogba’s deflected effort accounted for Australia, the team clung on grimly to a 1–0 lead against Peru and then featured in one of the dullest games in the history of the World Cup against Denmark.
As 7,000 France fans roundly booed their players off after that stultifying goalless stalemate at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium, it felt certain that the end was nigh for Deschamps. Indeed, many in France were already looking forward to a brighter 2future under the nation’s favourite son Zinédine Zidane. The previous month, Zizou had surprised everybody by standing down as Real Madrid manager after overseeing a third consecutive Champions League win, and he was now odds-on for the France job.
Yet Argentina were not the force they used to be either. Yes, Lionel Messi had provided a timely reminder of his brilliance against Nigeria to edge the two-time world champions through their group, but this was an ageing team that looked incapable of executing the high-energy pressing game that their coach Jorge Sampaoli demanded. The South Americans had been held to a draw by Iceland and were trounced 3–0 by Croatia. Few expected them to repeat the feat of four years previously when they reached the final in Rio de Janeiro.
The opening exchanges in the match were in keeping with a tournament that is struggling to break free of an omnipresent political cloud. Vladimir Putin’s Russia was a highly controversial choice to host the world’s biggest, most watched and cherished sporting event, and the endless debates over security, engineered elections, racism, homophobia and human rights overshadowed the actual football for much of the group stage.
But then a nineteen-year-old changed the entire dynamic of the game, and ultimately the World Cup as a whole. With one devastating, insouciant, lung-bursting run, Kylian Mbappé captured the imagination of millions around the world and reminded everybody why football is such a wonderful sport.
Mbappé had only shown flashes of his brilliance in the group stage – although by scoring a tap-in against Peru he had become the youngest Frenchman ever to find the net at a World Cup. This was the knockout stage, though. This was Argentina and Messi. This was the kind of stage that Mbappé had been dreaming of shining on throughout his childhood.
In the ninth minute, the teenager showed that he was in the mood by surging past two defenders and winning a free-kick on 3the edge of the box that Antoine Griezmann duly curled against the crossbar. But nobody was ready for Mbappé’s next trick just moments later.
When Éver Banega mis-controlled the ball deep inside the French half Mbappé pounced. He had one thing on his sharp mind. An initial burst took France’s number ten clear of Nicolás Tagliafico and streaming over the halfway line. Javier Mascherano, a born fighter and veteran of four World Cups, barely even bothered trying to get back. He knew his tiring 34-year-old legs were not up to the task. As Mbappé eased through the gears, hitting a top speed of 37km/h – only fractionally slower than Usain Bolt in full flow – Argentina’s last man Marcos Rojo looked vulnerable. Mbappé dropped a shoulder, exploded past Rojo on the outside, and in a moment of sheer panic, the defender thrust out his arm. Mbappé fell. Penalty to France.
Those few seconds were exhilarating. During my years reporting on Les Bleus, I have been fortunate to witness many extraordinary moments: Zidane’s late heroics against England in 2004 provided extraordinary drama, Thierry Henry eliminating Brazil in 2006 felt like a monumental moment, and the scenes in Marseille when Antoine Griezmann stunned Germany in 2016 were unforgettable. Yet this was different. As the French journalists around me in the press stand jumped excitedly from their seats, it felt like we had just witnessed a seminal moment. Perhaps this was the start of a new era.
Mbappé’s brilliance did not only thrill the French. Football lovers around the world were astounded by the sight of this bold, athletic, cool teenager from the Paris suburbs tearing through the heart of the Argentina team. ‘When you see something like that, it doesn’t matter if you’re watching in the stadium, in your living room or in a bar on the other side of the world, you just want to scream out loud,’ says UK football writer Amy Lawrence. ‘You knew you’d just witnessed something important. It felt a bit like seeing the Sex Pistols or Rolling Stones in concert 4for the first time. You sensed you were watching something special, something new.’
‘Mbappé’s run felt like something from another time, another dimension,’ explains a wide-eyed Vikash Dhorasoo. ‘We’d never seen anything like it before. For a nineteen-year-old boy to do that, against Argentina, with Messi looking on, and to do it with this incredible coldness.’ The former France midfielder, who played for Lyon, AC Milan and Paris Saint-Germain, pauses and puffs out his cheeks as he tries to find the words to do the moment justice. ‘Personally, I found it almost troubling,’ he says. ‘I remember thinking: “This guy is not like the rest of us.” It was scary.’
France winger Florian Thauvin was a substitute that day and had one of the best views. ‘On the bench, we were in shock,’ he stated after the match. ‘We couldn’t believe what he’d done. He ran so fast I wondered if he’d hopped onto a scooter or something.’
Thauvin had good reason to be incredulous. The smoothness of Mbappé’s movement, the way in which he seemed to glide across the pitch, made the seventy-metre raid appear almost super-human. ‘The scariest part,’ says France legend Marcel Desailly, ‘is that he destroyed Argentina by playing at about 60 per cent of his capacity.’ Les Bleus’ 1998 World Cup-winning defender was rarely troubled by an opponent during his playing days, but when I ask him if he would have fancied defending against Mbappé, the man known as ‘the Rock’ hesitates for a second. ‘I’m not sure, you know, he’s pretty quick.’
Within minutes of Mbappé taking the World Cup stage by storm, the biggest names in football had taken to social media to applaud the youngster. ‘Fenomeno,’ read the simple tweet from Italy legend Franco Baresi, employing a word reserved usually for ex-Brazil striker Ronaldo. Gary Lineker reacted similarly, tweeting: ‘Phenomenal run from Mbappé. Reminds me so much of Brazilian Ronaldo’. Another ex-England striker, 5Ian Wright, added perspective: ‘A performance like that on world’s stage … At nineteen, I was being rejected by Brighton.’
The penalty Mbappé had earned was converted by Griezmann, and it ignited the start of one of the most thrilling games the World Cup has ever seen. Mbappé’s Paris Saint-Germain teammate Ángel di María levelled with a magnificent long-range strike before Gabriel Mercado diverted Messi’s shot into the net to put Sampaoli’s side ahead. Fans of Les Bleus had experienced their share of heartbreak over the previous fifteen, trophy-less years, and another disappointing exit looked like it was on the cards. However, out of the blue, right-back Benjamin Pavard scored the goal of the tournament, swerving a stunning shot into the top corner with the outside of his right boot to equalise at 2–2. Then Mbappé took matters into his own hands.
On sixty-four minutes, he latched on to a loose ball inside the box, took one touch to control, another to flick it beyond an onrushing defender and a third to rifle home. Three deadly touches in the blink of an eye. Argentina were still catching their breath when, four minutes later, Mbappé roared up the right flank, sprinted onto Olivier Giroud’s through-ball, and calmly slotted a first-time shot beyond goalkeeper Franco Armani.
It was breathtaking. Mbappé had become the first teenager to score two goals in a World Cup match since Pelé, and in so doing had put his country on the path to glory. Although Sergio Agüero’s late goal set up a grandstand finish, Deschamps’s men held on to their 4–3 lead and celebrated as if they had won the World Cup. Indeed, the calmest France player was Mbappé, who seemed to have barely even broken a sweat during the match. As he swapped shirts with Messi near the touchline beneath us, it was hard not to feel the strong sense of symbolism in this act. Messi may well be the greatest player of all time, but he now looks destined to finish his career without winning the biggest prize of all. The Barcelona legend will be thirty-five when the World Cup takes place in Qatar. Mbappé will be twenty-three 6and by then could well have overtaken Messi at the very top of the pile of the world’s best players.
What is clear is that his climb to the summit began in Kazan. ‘There was a sense among the players that with Mbappé playing at this level, we could be contenders,’ says Vincent Duluc, the chief football writer for L’Équipe newspaper. ‘He had left everybody open-mouthed. Personally, this was the ninth World Cup I’d covered as a reporter, and I don’t recall seeing another teenager make an impact like Mbappé did that day.’
Duluc, it should be said, did not witness Pelé in 1958. However, Arsène Wenger did, and the former Arsenal manager believes there are definite similarities between France’s wonderkid and the Brazilian. In the restaurant of the Park Hyatt hotel in central Paris more than a year after that day in Kazan, Wenger’s eyes still light up when he thinks back to Mbappé’s performance. ‘He was untouchable that day and, yes, there was something of Pelé about him,’ Wenger states. ‘You saw that mix of speed, power and the capacity to analyse the situation very quickly. These are qualities that only great players can combine.
‘The difference between football now and then is that the pace of the game today is relentless. But physically Mbappé is a monster. We saw that in the World Cup: the longer the games went on, the more dangerous he became.’
It felt fitting that Pelé himself reacted to Mbappé’s heroics by tweeting directly to his heir apparent: ‘Congratulations @KMbappe! Two goals in a World Cup so young puts you in great company. Good luck for the rest of the tournament – except against Brazil!’ Mbappé was quickly made aware of the tweet, but in keeping with his calm, assured manner, the Frenchman made light of any comparisons. ‘It’s flattering,’ he told journalists before leaving the Kazan Arena. ‘But let’s put things in context here: Pelé is in a different category entirely!’
Mbappé’s brilliance on the pitch is matched by his maturity off it. Indeed, his communication skills are almost as impressive 7as his capacity to devastate defences. ‘That year, we kept having to remind ourselves that he was only nineteen,’ Duluc says. ‘The way he was playing, the way he was talking, it wasn’t easy to believe it. It’s like he is ageless.’
Philippe Tournon worked as the France team’s head of media for much of the past two decades. Back in 1998, he managed the press conferences for such eminent figures as Deschamps, Desailly and Laurent Blanc. But Tournon insists none of those past greats had the ability to relate to an audience like Mbappé. ‘I’ve never come across a player able to express himself with so much ease at that age,’ Tournon told the television channel RMC Sport. ‘The way Kylian engages with the press, the way he speaks so naturally, always from the heart, and you never hear a misplaced word or a hint of pretentiousness. It’s remarkable and refreshing. I gained real pleasure from listening to him speak.’
• • •
For French football, the emergence of this well-spoken, likeable and brilliant black teenager from Bondy – a tough, underprivileged commune north-east of Paris – represented a hugely powerful symbol. This was an individual capable of singlehandedly transforming the image and fortunes of Les Bleus, while at the same time casting a wholly positive light on the country’s many stigmatised suburbs.
In France, the national team represents so much more than just football. It is the pride of the nation, the pinnacle of French sport and one of the few remaining spheres where the expression of nationalism is accepted. As Didier Deschamps often states, ‘there is nothing else above it’. Crucially, no other public entity in France reflects the country’s rich diversity so clearly. The national team, with its mix of cultures, is often alluded to by politicians and media personalities as a mirror for society 8– which is fine when things are going well but can create more troubling issues during the darker times.
Since winning the World Cup on home soil with a magnificent, multicultural team in 1998, and clinching the European Championship two years later, Les Bleus have stumbled from one crisis to the next and the image of the country’s footballers has been dragged through the dirt. Just as Aimé Jacquet’s much-cherished black-blanc-beur (black-white-Arab) team was held up as a beacon for France’s multi-ethnic society in the late 1990s, the scandal-filled era that followed was used as a stick with which to beat the nation’s immigrant youth. ‘A France team that wins is black-blanc-beur, and a France team that loses is scum from les banlieues [the suburbs],’ mused Éric Cantona in the documentary Les Bleus, une Autre Histoire de France (The Blues, an Alternative History of France).
These days, the majority of France’s players hail from immigrant backgrounds and many have grown up in the relatively poor, humble world of French suburbia. When violent protests erupted on the outskirts of major cities for three long weeks in November 2005, the temptation to link the unrest with Raymond Domenech’s struggling football team became too great for some. The outspoken philosopher Alain Finkielkraut chose this sensitive moment to question the make-up of Les Bleus. ‘People say that our national team is admired because it is black-blanc-beur,’ Finkielkraut began. ‘In reality, the team is black-black-black and it’s the laughing-stock of Europe.’
France’s Minister of the Interior at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, shocked millions – including Les Bleus defender Lilian Thuram – by remarking that it was time to ‘flush the scum out of our suburbs with a power hose’. Thuram could not contain his fury. ‘What does Sarkozy want to clean? Who does he want to flush out?’ he raged during a France national team press conference. ‘People used to call me scum when I was on the estate, but I wasn’t scum. I just wanted to work. The situation makes me 9sick. Nobody’s asking the right questions. Nobody’s looking at the real problems.’
Indeed, ever since far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen began commenting on Les Bleus in the mid-1990s, describing France’s increasingly multi-ethnic team as ‘artificial’ or even ‘too black’, the footballers have featured regularly on political agendas.
Former President Jacques Chirac gained popularity by associating himself closely with Jacquet’s World Cup winners, but then both he and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin suffered in the polls when France’s friendly against Algeria in 2001 was abandoned due to a mass pitch invasion by disaffected youths of North African origins.
For Les Bleus, the nadir arrived in 2010 when Domenech’s players went on strike in the middle of the World Cup in South Africa, refusing to train in a disastrously misguided show of faith for the banished Nicolas Anelka. The Minister for Health and Sports, Roselyne Bachelot, appeared to insinuate that the players’ antics reflected life in the suburbs, accusing Patrice Évra and friends of acting like ‘immature thugs bullying frightened kids’. Finkielkraut went further, declaring: ‘France has been invited to look into a mirror, a terrible mirror. We’ve gone from the Zidane generation to the scum generation.’
The country had fallen out of love with its football team, and with certain politicians pointing the finger at les banlieues, there was a clear racist undertone.
Over the past decade, the controversies surrounding Karim Benzema have only served to fuel the fire of negativity around the French football team. The Real Madrid striker, whose father was born in Algeria, has maintained links to his childhood mates from the Lyon suburbs, some of whom could be described, at best, as shady characters. Those associations have often landed him in hot water. In 2010, Benzema – along with another France player Franck Ribéry – was accused of sleeping with an underage prostitute. He later found himself linked to 10a scandal that would lead to several years of negative publicity, this time regarding the blackmailing of France teammate Mathieu Valbuena over a sex-tape.
The debate surrounding Benzema’s selection became quite literally une affaire d’état (a state affair). In the build-up to Euro 2016, the country’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls felt compelled to speak out, making it clear he did not want the striker involved. ‘A great sportsman must be exemplary and if he isn’t then he should have no place in the France team,’ Valls declared. At the time the country was reeling from the November 2015 terrorist attacks on Paris and Saint-Denis, Islamophobia was mounting and the climate had become tense. Deschamps was accused of racism when he left Benzema out, yet nobody quite knows if that was truly the France manager’s decision or if he was acting on orders from above.
In this context, the impact of Mbappé’s rise cannot be reduced merely to his skills with a football. The day after the Argentina game in Kazan, Le Monde newspaper was already reflecting on the strong symbolism at play. ‘The bad performances, the player strike and the scandals of 2010 now seem a long way away,’ wrote the columnist Abdourahman Waberi. ‘The critics have been forgotten. The boy from Bondy has well and truly kicked Alain Finkielkraut … and [National Front leader] Marine Le Pen into the back of the net.’
That Mbappé comes across as such a kind, balanced individual is thanks largely to his parents. Wilfrid, Kylian’s father, is a former amateur-level footballer of Cameroonian descent. He was his son’s first coach at local club AS Bondy. Kylian’s mother Fayza is of Algerian origin and is also from a sporting background having played top-level handball. Both were everpresent during Kylian’s upbringing and remain fiercely protective of their boy.
Above all, though, Mbappé is a figure that everybody in France can relate to. ‘We won our first World Cup with a black-blanc-beur11team, but Mbappé seems to represent this diversity all on his own,’ claims Duluc. ‘He comes from the ninety-third département like so many black footballers, so he is recognised in those communities. He speaks well and is the son of middle-class parents so for many [middle-class white people] he is a little bit white as well. And, of course, his mother is from Algeria, so he ticks all of the boxes. The fact is Kylian Mbappé pleases everybody in France. You could say he is black-blanc-beur rolled into one.’
20 OCTOBER 2018
The train ride from Saint-Lazare in central Paris to the suburb of Bondy takes just eighteen minutes. Yet, when you arrive and step out of the station and into the market opposite you feel as if you have been transported a million miles away from the opulent boulevards of France’s capital. Stalls selling exotic fruits, spices, mobile phones, roasted chestnuts and second-hand clothes do a roaring trade as emigrants of Maghrebi, West African, Indian, Pakistani and West Indian origins bustle about, joking and negotiating deals.
Surrounded by high-rise concrete towers, the setting feels poor and would not be out of place in the developing world. But this is the reality of modern-day France. This is the France that the tourists don’t see and that the wealthy part of the country only sees on the news, usually after an outbreak of violence between local residents and the police. This is the France that Kylian Mbappé, and indeed most of the country’s professional footballers, grew up in.
The sprawling suburbs of Paris represent the biggest reservoir of football talent in Europe. Eight of France’s 2018 World Cup winners – Mbappé (Bondy), Paul Pogba (Lagny-sur-Marne), Benjamin Mendy (Longjumeau) and N’Golo Kanté (Suresnes) included – grew up in the hardened environs of les banlieues12Parisiennes. Bring the national teams for Tunisia, Morocco and Senegal into the equation and the Paris suburbs alone contributed fifteen players to the tournament in Russia.
From a population of just over 12 million, there are approximately 30,000 qualified football coaches and 235,000 licensed players from Paris and its suburbs, more than a third of whom are under eighteen. Football in these parts is quite literally a way of life.
Bondy is nestled in the heart of France’s notoriously troubled ninety-third département. It has around 54,000 residents, most of whom are of foreign descent, and is one of the many ‘rough areas’ seen by some politicians and sections of the public to be a cancer on French society. Drug-trafficking, terrorism, crime, unemployment, you name it, if France has a problem the suburbs tend to get the blame. They have also become the scapegoat when the national football team is getting bad results.
On this particular October day, Bondy’s streets don’t feel the least bit unruly. Indeed, the atmosphere is far friendlier here than on many a Parisian pavement where commuters push and shove their way through life. Maybe the locals are in a particularly good mood because this is a special day. It is the day that Bondy’s favourite son returns home.
When France beat Croatia to win the 2018 World Cup, the country exploded with joy. However, nowhere were the scenes more frenzied or heart-warming than in Bondy. Most of the town gathered to watch the final on a giant screen that had been erected at the Stade Léo Lagrange, where Kylian honed his craft. The local club, AS Bondy, is the beating heart of this football-obsessed town, so screening the match here seemed an obvious choice. Before Mbappé broke into the France fold, AS Bondy had already provided one international in Sébastien Corchia. Since the World Cup in 2018, it has provided another in Jonathan Ikoné. In 2019, the club’s latest gem William Saliba signed for Arsenal from Saint-Étienne in a €29 million deal. 13
This is a proud community and veritable footballing hotbed. So, when Mbappé scored to seal France’s 4–2 victory over Zlatko Dalić’s side, the Stade Léo Lagrange absolutely erupted in ecstasy. Young and old partied long into the night as an unprecedented sense of happiness took over.
Three months later, that pride is palpable again as around 9,000 Bondynois return to the stadium, this time to witness the homecoming of their very own world champion. As an excited, expectant crowd sways to the sound of ‘Ramenez la Coupe à la Maison’ (‘Bring the Cup Home’), France’s unofficial World Cup anthem by Vegedream, a hip-hop artist of Ivorian origins, it is impossible not to feel moved.
The PSG star’s arrival on stage is greeted by a chorus of deafening screams and then chants of ‘Mbappé! Mbappé!’ The crowd represents a melting pot of cultures. Most of those present are children but even the adults heartily join in. Parents hoist their little ones aloft to offer them a glimpse of this superstar and role model.
For all his fame and riches, Mbappé has strived to maintain close links to Bondy. Twenty-five lucky children from Jean Renoir School in Bondy travelled to Russia and watched France play Australia in their first game, courtesy of Mbappé’s generosity. As well as financing a large part of the trip, Mbappé treated the students to a prolonged autograph session after training. Just days after returning from Russia, he was back in Bondy to visit the children’s hospital. His World Cup bonuses of around €350,000 were donated to the charity for which he is an ambassador, Premiers de Cordée, which helps disabled children through sport. ‘I earn enough money – a lot of money,’ Mbappé told Time magazine. ‘I think it’s important to help those who are in need. Lots of people suffer and have illnesses. For us, giving a helping hand is no big deal. It doesn’t change my life, but it could change theirs.’
Today, as Mbappé steps up onto the stage with a broad smile, 14it is obvious that he feels a strong sense of duty to his hometown. ‘You cannot imagine how happy it makes me feel to see so many of you here,’ he tells his adoring fans. ‘This is even better than winning the World Cup! Next time there’s an event like this, I’ll be down there in the crowd acclaiming one of you … because you’re all brilliant people and you will also go on to achieve great things.’
Standing next to him is the Mayor of Bondy, Sylvine Thomassin. No politician worth his or her salt would miss the opportunity to make a public appearance alongside Mbappé, but Thomassin’s speech is genuine, even rousing, and is greeted by loud cheers. ‘Kylian has shown the world that the ninety-third département develops brilliant individuals,’ she declares. ‘He is proof that – regardless of what the politicians say – it is possible to grow up in Bondy and become a successful, polite, kind, grounded and likeable person.’ The message is clear. Mbappé is not just a footballer. This supremely gifted, impeccably behaved kid from an Algerian and Cameroonian family is the success story that French football – and indeed France as a whole – has been crying out for.
CHAPTER 2
BLACK-BLANC-BEUR
For footballers, and especially strikers, timing is everything, and Kylian Mbappé could hardly have timed his entrance to the world any better. When Mbappé was born on 20 December 1998, he arrived in a country that was freshly gripped by the wonders of the beautiful game. Just five months previously, a pair of Zinédine Zidane headers and Emmanuel Petit’s clinical strike had clinched Les Bleus’ inaugural World Cup win against Brazil inside a delirious Stade de France.
France ’98 was a magnificent month-long football party. From David Beckham’s stunning free-kick against Colombia to Davor Šuker’s deadly finishing, Ronaldo’s mystery illness or Dennis Bergkamp’s flash of genius against Argentina, the games served up endless moments of drama and brilliance. When the hosts were in action the mix of tension and excitement was intoxicating.
As the tournament progressed towards its dizzy climax, France not only felt like a happy place, it appeared to be a united nation. People had been charmed and inspired by Aimé Jacquet’s strong, skilful, multicultural team.
Winning the World Cup on home soil changed the way football was perceived in France. ‘In 1998, it became fashionable and more acceptable to like football,’ explains Joachim 16Barbier, author of the book Ce Pays Qui N’Aime Pas le Foot (This Country That Doesn’t Like Football), as he sips an espresso in a bustling Paris café. ‘Previously the middle and upper classes looked down on it. But France’s elite discovered the joys of football that summer, and suddenly politicians and media personalities all wanted to associate themselves with the World Cup victory.’
Businessmen on the Paris metro used to hide their copies of L’Équipe, the country’s only daily sports newspaper, in order to maintain an image of respectability. Knowing about football did not bring you kudos. It was widely seen as an uncouth pastime for commoners. In the cult film Le Dîner des Cons (The Dinner Game), which enjoyed enormous success following its release in 1998, the idiocy and boorish behaviour of two characters, François Pignon (Jacques Villeret) and Lucien Cheval (Daniel Prévost), is depicted by their passion for football. In one scene, Pignon, an AJ Auxerre fan, trades insults with his Olympique de Marseille-supporting friend on the phone. When he hangs up and starts chanting ‘Marseille, down the toilet!’ at the telephone, his snobbish friends Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte) and Juste Leblanc (Francis Huster) stare at him with utter disdain.
But the stigma that was associated with football magically disappeared during that heady summer in 1998 as Les Bleus played their way into the nation’s hearts. All of a sudden, even the more sophisticated newspapers began reporting on matches and interviewing the biggest names. France’s World Cup stars became celebrities overnight.
Robert Pirès was a shy, young player enjoying the relative anonymity of life at FC Metz when his presence in the World Cup squad swiftly thrust him into the public eye. More than two decades later, when we meet in a Belsize Park café, in his adopted hometown of London, the former winger smiles at the 17memory of the tournament that changed his life. ‘It was a crazy time,’ Pirès recalls. ‘We were suddenly like rock stars. Young people in France used to worship singers and actors, but now the footballers were the ones being idolised. Even the lifestyle magazines wanted to talk to us. They wanted to know everything about us from our musical tastes to our cultural backgrounds,’ adds the Arsenal legend, whose mother is Spanish and father Portuguese. Pirès’s parents both arrived in France in the 1960s in the middle of a prolonged period of economic prosperity during which the country welcomed immigrants from all corners of Europe and Africa. They met in Reims where Robert’s father worked in a car factory and his mother was employed as a cleaning lady.
The origins of the players in the World Cup squad created particular intrigue and prompted open discussions and debates about race and the impact of immigration for the first time. Jacquet’s class of ’98 was a beautiful mix of cultures that reflected the diversity of modern-day France. The team included players with antecedents from Argentina (David Trezeguet), Armenia (Alain Boghossian and Youri Djorkaeff), Ghana (Marcel Desailly), Senegal (Patrick Vieira), Portugal and Spain (Robert Pirès). France’s overseas territories were handsomely represented by Guadeloupe (Lilian Thuram, Bernard Diomède and Thierry Henry), French Guiana (Bernard Lama), New Caledonia (Christian Karembeu) and Martinique (through Thierry Henry’s mother). And of course it was a virtuoso of Algerian origin (Zinédine Zidane) who knitted everything together. The team was an ideal example of what France could achieve through its rich diversity when everybody pulled in the same direction.
For many this was not merely a victory for French football, it was a victory for French society. President Jacques Chirac hailed France’s ‘tricolour and multi-colour’ triumph, adding: ‘A 18country needs, at certain moments, to come together, around an idea that makes it proud of itself. This victory has shown the solidarity, the cohesion … that France had a soul, or more precisely that it was looking for a soul.’ The term black-blanc-beur was adopted to describe this new positive identity. ‘The black-blanc-beur slogan was first heard in France in 1983,’ explains Yvan Gastaut, a historian who specialises in football and immigration. ‘Back then, it was used to describe the participants of a fifty-day march from Marseille to Paris known as “The March for Equality and Against Racism”. The English word “black” was used to describe a black person, as many felt it sounded less crude than “noir”. Likewise, “beur” was seen as a friendly way to describe a French person of North African origin.’
As a feeling of unity and happiness swept across the country, it was clear that something of greater significance was happening. Four days after the final, the headline on the front page of weekly magazine L’Express read: ‘The World Cup that changed France’. The lead article explained that:
French people, all French people, were able to identify with this France team because it was a multi-racial team, because every one of its matches was thrilling, and because it was composed of great players, but above all good people. With idols like these, our kids can dream happily of a bright future.
Emmanuel Petit did not necessarily feel ready to become an idol for France’s youth. The battling midfielder was enjoying a steady if unspectacular career when everything suddenly accelerated in the late 1990s. Petit captained Monaco to a Ligue 1 title in 1997, claimed a Premier League and FA Cup Double with Arsenal the following year, then, with a swing of his cultured left foot, sent an entire nation into raptures in the World Cup final against Brazil. 19
Petit and his blond ponytail immediately became part of French football folklore. He would never be looked at the same way by his countrymen again. ‘The World Cup propelled us into a different dimension,’ Petit, now working as a pundit on French television, tells me. ‘We became national treasures and symbolic figures for so many people. Even now, I get stopped in the street on a daily basis by people who want to talk to me about the World Cup. I won many trophies in my club career too, but people rarely talk to me about Monaco, Arsenal, Chelsea or Barcelona. They want to talk about Les Bleus.’
The ex-Gunners favourite is immensely proud of his 1998 exploits, but being held up as a beacon for society does not sit so easily with him. ‘The black-blanc-beur slogan always made me uncomfortable,’ Petit states. ‘It felt like people were telling me something I’d known already for twenty years. For me, the guys I played football with weren’t black, white or Arab. They were just mates. We didn’t take into consideration or even notice what colour a player was. This is France and this is the France I’ve always known.’
Marcel Desailly was also surprised by the racial categorisation, but there is a clear sense of pride in his voice when he discusses the impact that he and his teammates had on French society. ‘For us, on the inside, this was nothing new. We’d grown up together and our origins or skin colour had never been a subject,’ explains the former defender, who moved to France from Ghana aged three. ‘But if we sent out a positive message, if this team helped people of different origins feel more comfortable about themselves, about their identity, then I am pleased. To see a nation of multiple origins decked out in the Tricolore flag is beautiful. Maybe it was just a fleeting moment, but at least for that time we gave the country a certain energy by showing that it was possible to succeed as sons of immigrants.’
Thanks to Zidane, the fresh sense of equality was keenly felt among the Maghrebi population too. Popular French comedian 20Jamel Debbouze – who has a Moroccan background, and is one of the strongest voices on matters affecting France’s North African communities – claims the World Cup triumph transformed the way people looked at him. In the France 2 documentary 12 Juillet 1998: Le Jour Parfait (12 July 1998: The Perfect Day), Debbouze remembered: ‘July 13, the day after the final, was even more pleasurable. All of us Arabs were now handsome. They’d abolished racism. It was the best summer of my life. We were in demand. The chicks all wanted to be with little Arabs or little black guys. It was our time.’
The 1998 vintage had a huge impact despite the fact they were not France’s first multicultural team. Indeed, historically Les Bleus have always been a cultural melting pot. ‘The composition of the France football team strongly reflects the country’s immigration patterns,’ notes the historian Yvan Gastaut. ‘In 1904, the first-ever French national team was made up of English people living in France. You could say the French team was created by the English.’
Immigration allowed France to become a footballing heavy-weight after the Second World War. Les Trente Glorieuses, a thirty-year period of economic boom, saw several million migrants flood into the country, boosting a depleted workforce and strengthening the football culture. ‘France opened its doors to labourers from football countries like Poland, Italy, Portugal, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, and our national teams reaped the benefits,’ explains Gastaut. ‘It was a paradoxical period. On the one hand France was very open to immigration, but on the other hand society was not very open to diversity from a cultural point of view. Only native-born people were considered truly French. Even today, an immigrant in France can suffer from discrimination. Football has often served as a counterbalance because it gives everybody an equal chance. Immigrants have always thrived in French football.’ 21
Les Bleus’ first black player, Raoul Diagne, the son of a Senegalese minister, was selected way back in 1931, some forty-seven years before Viv Anderson became the first black player to represent England. Raymond Kopa, the son of Polish immigrants, was France’s earliest international superstar. Kopa won the Ballon d’Or in 1958 after inspiring a France side that included the Moroccan-born forward Just Fontaine and Roger Piantoni, another forward who had Italian roots, to reach the World Cup semi-finals.
In 1984, Les Bleus claimed their first major prize on home soil. A son of Italian immigrants, Michel Platini, captained the hosts to glory in the UEFA European Championship, ably assisted by the Spanish-born Luis Fernández, Mali’s Jean Tigana and the Frenchman Alain Giresse. ‘That was a fantastic team,’ Petit enthuses. ‘The carré magique [magic square] of Fernandez, Tigana, Giresse and Platini was a wonderful midfield that I loved watching as a boy. Unfortunately for them they were born too early. The public don’t remember Platini’s team like they remember ours because they didn’t get the same media coverage. We were lucky. In 1998, France was ready to embrace football like never before.’
• • •
When Aimé Jacquet took charge of Les Bleus in December 1993, the idea that his team might become an example for the rest of society must have felt laughable. France had just failed to qualify for the 1994 World Cup in the most disastrous and embarrassing fashion. Gérard Houllier’s outfit needed only one point from their last two qualifiers at home to Israel and Bulgaria. For a side blessed with the talents of Laurent Blanc, Didier Deschamps, Jean-Pierre Papin and Éric Cantona, it should not have been a tall order. 22
Yet, a month after suffering a shock 3–2 defeat by Israel, the unthinkable happened. France were drawing 1–1 with Bulgaria in the dying moments when David Ginola, instead of keeping the ball in the corner of the Bulgarian half, attempted a cross. He overhit it, the visitors raided up the pitch, and within seconds Emil Kostadinov had drilled a shot high into the net. The Parc des Princes fell silent and Houllier hung Ginola out to dry. ‘He’s committed a crime against the France team,’ the future Liverpool boss raged. ‘Ginola has fired a missile through the heart of French football.’
Houllier’s number two Jacquet got promoted to the top job, and he was no more forgiving towards Ginola. Despite the flamboyant winger’s brilliant Premier League form with Newcastle, he was left out of Jacquet’s squad for Euro ’96. There was no place for the 1991 Ballon d’Or winner Papin either, while, incredibly, Cantona – the inspiration behind Manchester United’s 1995/96 Double triumph – also missed out.
Cantona’s performances since returning from a nine-month ban for kung-fu kicking a Crystal Palace supporter had been sensational. His omission from the French national side left English observers perplexed. ‘It felt extraordinary to us,’ says Amy Lawrence, who reported on Les Bleus’ Euro ’96 campaign for The Observer. ‘That a player of Cantona’s ability and personality could be deemed not good enough? Inexplicable. Utterly incomprehensible. As English people we were thinking “we’ll have him if you don’t want him!” From the outside, you thought “Jacquet must be a terribly conservative manager.”’
Marcel Desailly is quick to defend Jacquet. A Champions League winner with Marseille in 1993, the powerful defender had joined AC Milan by the time Les Bleus suffered the Bulgaria humiliation. Like Cantona and Ginola, Desailly was on the pitch when Kostadinov plunged a dagger into French hearts. Yet he assures me Jacquet had little choice but to ring the changes 23after such a monumental disappointment. ‘The 1994 campaign was the failure of a generation,’ Desailly claims. ‘Aimé came in and slowly began to identify players he wanted from the next generation. He wanted to make a clean break and build a new team.’
Jacquet used Euro ’96 as an opportunity to mould that new side and, above all, prepare for the upcoming home World Cup. But he very nearly lost his job in doing so. France’s performances at the tournament in England were distinctly lacking in panache. The high point proved a revenge-laden 3–1 win over Bulgaria in the group section, but Les Bleus failed to score a single goal in the knockout stages, edging past the Netherlands on penalties before limping out to the Czech Republic in the semi-finals.
Without the flair of Cantona or Ginola, the team lacked sparkle. Both players would have walked into any other national team, yet Jacquet’s cautious mind told him he could not trust this pair of mavericks. For midfield creativity, he preferred to put his faith in two more conformist talents: Zinédine Zidane and Youri Djorkaeff. However, Zidane, then twenty-four, had little impact on the tournament, while Djorkaeff showed only glimpses of his exquisite skills.
French fans were fuming and the clamour for Cantona and Ginola to return intensified. But rather than looking back, Jacquet focused on the future, calling up a modest, unassuming 22-year-old playmaker from Metz. ‘When I came into the side, the atmosphere was tense,’ Robert Pirès recalls. ‘Jacquet was already getting criticism before Euro ’96, but when he refused to bring Cantona and Ginola back, he got hammered. It wasn’t easy for me either. I knew people were comparing me with Ginola. We played in the same position, on the left flank, and he was flying at the time with Newcastle.’
Pirès coped just fine thanks to his own talent and the support 24he got from within the squad. ‘The first time I arrived at Clairefontaine, Didier Deschamps took me to one side and said, “Robert, I want you to know you’re welcome here, and I hope you’ll be coming to the château for as many years as possible.” I don’t know why he said that. He didn’t need to. But he was the captain, he had an aura, and those words really stuck with me.’
Evidently, Deschamps was much more than the water carrier Cantona had once branded him. He was Jacquet’s skipper and the team’s general out on the pitch.
Few know France’s World Cup-winning captain better than Desailly. The pair first met when competing against one another in the local junior leagues of western France, and they became inseparable after joining the FC Nantes academy, aged fourteen, in 1983. ‘We were very different,’ Desailly recalls, offering a nostalgic smile. ‘Didier was so intense, so serious. I was always having a laugh and I think that Didier liked that. He fed off my insouciance.
‘But at first Didier struggled at Nantes. He had stopped growing while the other kids were getting bigger and bigger. Didier was quite small and he wasn’t athletic or agile. So he decided he’d have to compensate through hard work. He was obsessed with football and he did everything to succeed. Even as a boy his diet was perfect, he was always doing stretching exercises. He was the model professional.’
Deschamps’s leadership skills were also evident back then, as he demonstrated on one tragic evening in November 1984. That night Desailly’s half-brother and mentor when growing up in Ghana, Seth Adonkor, was killed in a car accident. Adonkor was twenty-three and a Nantes first-team player, but for Desailly he was so much more than that.
Breaking the news to the vulnerable sixteen-year-old would be no easy task. ‘It was quickly obvious that Didier would take responsibility for talking to Marcel,’ Nantes sporting director at the time Robert Budzynski told So Foot magazine. ‘He 25was a leader then and he’s never stopped being one. He was already exceptionally mature and with the other youngsters he behaved like the head of the family.’ Desailly will never forget the moment that his teammate broke the terrible news to him in their shared bedroom. ‘Some people don’t like Didier,’ the former Chelsea defender says. ‘They think he’s a cold, obsessive person. But I know him well and I know there is another warm, human side.’
Deschamps, it should be said, was not the only strong personality in France’s characterful squad. ‘All over the pitch we had big players who were playing for the biggest clubs in Europe,’ Desailly stresses. ‘There was [Bixente] Lizarazu at Bayern Munich, me at Milan, Zizou and Didier at Juventus, Djorkaeff at Inter, Petit who was phenomenal at Arsenal. That’s why the criticism Jacquet was getting didn’t really affect us. When you’re a footballer, you have to be a bit selfish. You have to think about yourself and tell yourself just to focus on the job that you need to do.’
As the World Cup got nearer, the attacks on Jacquet grew nastier. Indeed, being depicted as a turnip on the front page of The Sun – as England boss Graham Taylor was in 1993 – would probably have been preferable to the treatment dished out to the former Bordeaux and Lyon manager. He could have lived with the accusations of being too defensive, but the personal barbs hurt. The proud son of a butcher, Jacquet grew up in the tiny village of Sail-sous-Couzan in south-east France, and his rural accent and mannerisms were continually mocked on the popular Canal Plus television show Les Guignols de L’Info (France’s equivalent of Spitting Image). L’Équipe newspaper labelled him ‘the country bumpkin’ and called for his head in the spring of 1998.
Fortunately Jacquet’s reputation within the squad was very different. ‘We trusted Aimé 100 per cent, both on a technical and human level,’ Petit argues forcefully. ‘He had that skill of 26finding the right balance between discipline and kindness. On a human level, he’s an exceptional man. We were aware of the criticism he was getting, and we wanted to help him rise above it.’
Jacquet had one other very powerful supporter in the form of Jacques Chirac, the French President, who was known to be a keen follower of sumo wrestling but had never before expressed any interest in football. As France’s leader between 1995 and 2007, Chirac had been a controversial figure when it came to the subject of immigration. In 1991, during his time as Mayor of Paris, he questioned whether French workers living in Goutte d’Or – a poor neighbourhood in the north of the capital – should have to put up with the ‘noise and smell’ supposedly created by their immigrant neighbours.
By 1997, Chirac was languishing in the polls following a failed attempt to dissolve Parliament. His decision to throw his political weight behind Les Bleus was the first clear indication that this World Cup carried far more than just sporting significance. In March of that year, he told his sports adviser and future Minister of Sport Jean-François Lamour that he wanted to hold regular meetings with the team, and monthly briefings with Jacquet, in the run-up to the tournament.
After a 1–0 victory over Spain in January 1998, Chirac spent thirty minutes in the Stade de France home dressing room, discussing plans with Jacquet and motivating the players. ‘Chirac was behind us from the start,’ Pirès says. ‘He told us we had a big responsibility because we were defending the colours of the nation. That had a real impact. When the head of state takes the time to come and see you and talk to you, it means that what you’re doing is very important.’ Petit agrees but adds a caveat: ‘It felt strongly symbolic and it sent a powerful message. But we weren’t naïve. We knew there was a political element there and that it was also about gaining popularity.’
Lamour feared that Chirac’s association with Jacquet’s 27beleaguered team could further damage his popularity. He warned the President against backing a horse that looked likely to lose. Yet Chirac seemed to genuinely believe in the squad. ‘There’s a spirit in this group, a coach who knows his players and a captain with a strong collective sense,’ Chirac told Lamour after the Spain friendly, according to Le Parisien newspaper. ‘Something special is brewing and I sense they can go all the way.’ Lamour noted: ‘Chirac was one of the first people, maybe the only person at that point, to truly believe in them.’
The doubters emphasised the fact that France lacked an established striker. AS Monaco pair Thierry Henry and David Trezeguet were just twenty, and while the former still operated as a winger, the latter was not yet ready to perform on the biggest stage. Searching for a solution, Jacquet even held an olive branch out to Cantona on the condition that he play as centre-forward. The United man allegedly refused.
‘It’s a pity,’ mused ex-France boss Gérard Houllier, who could not help thinking about what might have been. ‘If Cantona had played just ahead of Zidane, he’d have scored plenty of goals. Éric wanted to be the number ten, but this role was reserved for Zidane. And with hindsight you can’t say Aimé got that wrong.’
Auxerre striker Stéphane Guivarc’h, who had been Ligue 1’s leading marksman for the past two seasons, started as Jacquet’s first choice, but he went off injured in the twenty-sixth minute of France’s opener against South Africa. When his replacement Christophe Dugarry took to the Stade Vélodrome pitch in Marseille he was greeted by vociferous boos. Dugarry, who had flopped at Barcelona, had been slammed in the French press. Many journalists felt he had only been included because of his close friendship with Zidane. The pressure looked to be getting to him as he fluffed his first chance, a one-on-one with the goalkeeper, then committed a careless foul on the edge of the France box.
Luckily for Dugarry and for France, the South African free-kick came to nothing and the substitute’s fortunes quickly 28changed. Just moments later Zidane curled in a corner, Dugarry swivelled and nodded home. The maligned forward wheeled away gleefully, sticking his tongue out at the journalists who had been gunning for him. ‘I felt both joy and hate,’ Dugarry explained in the documentary covering the lives of the French team during the competition, Les Yeux dans les Bleus. ‘You can see all the fucking journalists sitting in the stand. I thought: “I’ve screwed you all!” I felt hate.’ The goal helped Dugarry to expel the negativity that had been building up and transformed the atmosphere both on the pitch and in the stands. Les Bleus won 3–0 and their campaign was up and running.
