France has excelled at major tournaments almost exactly as often as it has failed embarrassingly. Consider that they won the World Cup in 1998 and went back to the final in 2006—but they crashed out in the first round in 2002 and again in 2010. In ’02, they didn’t score a single goal. In ’10, the team went on strike prior to their final game over a dispute with their manager. Back home, a torrent of racial slurs washed over them for their comportment, including from members of the conservative government.
And while the French have done respectably at Euro 2012 and the 2014 World Cup, beaten by the eventual winners in the quarterfinals of both tournaments, the pattern is unmistakable. There’s no telling what you’ll get from Les Bleus. When things click, they’re symphonic. When they don’t, it’s cacophonous.
Videos by VICE
Read More: Euro 2016 Preview: Group A – The Group of Inherent Privilege
But the French usually wait for a major tournament to actually begin before they self-destruct.
They got started early ahead of Euro 2016.
In November, star striker Karim Benzema was charged with aiding in the blackmail of his France teammate, tiny Mathieu Valbuena, over a sex tape and got kicked off the team indefinitely. Striker is the only position where the French aren’t ludicrously deep, and Benzema, who scored 24 league goals for Real Madrid this year (a career high in spite of missing 11 games), would have been crucial to Les Blues‘ campaign to win a third straight major tournament on home soil, after Euro ’84 and the ’98 World Cup.
Shit hit the fan all over again last week, when former Manchester United star and sometime France player Eric Cantona, who was often ostracized from the national team himself, suggested that manager Didier Deschamps had used the sex tape scandal as an excuse to leave Benzema off the team on account of his race.
“Deschamps, he has a really French name,” Cantona told the Guardian. “Maybe he is the only one in France to have a truly French name. Nobody in his family mixed with anybody, you know. Like the Mormons in America.”
Karim Benzema has not played for France since being embroiled in a sex tape blackmail scandal. Photo by JORGE ZAPATA/EPA
First, let’s talk about Cantona for a minute. In 2011, after a failed attempt to become an actor, he was hired as the director of soccer for the New York Cosmos, then newly revived but not yet an actual team. It all ended in tears soon enough, when he got into yet another altercation and was fired, whereupon he sued for his outstanding salary. But before he did, he told me in an interview that he didn’t actually watch soccer. The only active players he could name were Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, even though he had been hired to sign soccer players. He isn’t very well plugged into the game, yet occasionally resurfaces to say something controversial.
If you speak French, here’s a video of Cantona telling some journalists that he “pisses on their asses” on live television—oh, and that he pisses on the Pope’s ass, too.
Deschamps understandably took issue with Cantona’s comments and has threatened to sue for defamation. Indeed, his national team is one of the most diverse at the Euro.
But it didn’t end there. Benzema himself chimed in, telling Marca that Deschamps had “bowed to pressure from a racist part of France.” Then, of course, the racists chimed in. Marine Le Pen, leader of the right-wing Front National, said she’s “not surprised Mr. Benzema hides his wickedness behind a violent charge against the French people.”
This is all so terribly familiar.
Not the blackmail. And not the racism, either—although before the ’98 World Cup, Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, did rail that the French national team wasn’t white enough. (The team shut him up by winning the World Cup in rollicking and rift-healing fashion.)
Les Bleus have been a roller coaster of a team going back decades even before that.
France placed fourth (and last) at the very first Euro, in 1960, and didn’t qualify again until 1984, when it won the whole thing. It missed ’88 and was knocked out in the first round in ’92, but then reached the semis in ’96 and won again in 2000. In 2006, just two years after reaching the World Cup final, they crashed out of the group stage.
At the World Cup, France either withdrew, didn’t qualify, or went out in the group stage every year from 1950 until 1982—except for 1958, when it came third. After semifinal runs in ’82 and ’86, France didn’t qualify in ’90 and ’94, before winning the whole thing the next time around.
Through it all, the only constant has been the talent level. France always boasts one of the deepest teams around, thanks to a youth system that consistently churns out skilled footballers. In spite of injuries to defender Raphael Varane and midfielder Lass Diarra, and Benzema’s suspension, Deschamps has at his disposal some of the best players of the past season in the Spanish league (forward Antoine Griezmann), the Italian league (midfielder Paul Pogba), the English Premier League (midfielders N’Golo Kante and Dimitri Payet), the French league (midfielder Blaise Matuidi), and some of the best prospects at Manchester United (striker Anthony Martial) and Bayern Munich (winger Kingsley Coman).
All the tools are there for France to tie Spain and Germany with a record third European title—if they can only get out of their own way.
