Time has vindicated the French approach to sourcing talent for its national team. Everyone else at this World Cup is doing what the French national team started doing 30 years ago: weaponizing its multiculturalism. Or, conversely, cultivating and capitalizing on its diaspora.
And yet of the 48 teams contesting this quadrennial tournament, France seems to be having the most vociferous national discourse on how “French” the French team should be. Which is to say, how white. France alone bickers over what the racial makeup of its national team says about the nation, which, per the Institut National d’Études Démographiques, now comprises as much as 18 percent Arab or Afro-French citizens.
The men’s national team is the public-facing French institution that has consistently functioned the best—although you’d never know it from the way it’s spoken about.
Two years later, that team, popularly described as “black, blanc, beur” (Black, white, Arab), even though only star playmaker Zinedine Zidane actually fit the latter ethnicity—won the World Cup on home soil and was heralded as a paradigm for a new, more diverse and multicultural France. This, of course, ignored the rampant racism and substantial issues still faced by the nation’s minorities at the time, and which persist—from 2020 to 2024, the number of reported hate crimes in France more than doubled.
Kylian Mbappé, the face and captain of the team today—and currently the World Cup’s co-leading scorer, along with Lionel Messi, at six goals apiece—was born in that very year, 1998. Lilian Thuram’s son, Marcus, is his teammate. Ahead of another election that threatened to elevate the rebranded National Rally in 2024, now led by Le Pen’s daughter Marine, Marcus Thuram warned the nation: “The situation is extremely serious,” he said. “As citizens, we have to fight to make sure that the National Rally doesn’t get through.”
Unpopular centrist French president and noted soccer nut Emmanuel Macron has been in power throughout the nation’s glorious soccer run and has attached himself to the team like a barnacle. He personally and successfully lobbied Mbappé against leaving Paris Saint-Germain for Real Madrid, citing the national interest, for several years, although Mbappé eventually went in 2024. It has brought Macron little benefit; not even his association with World Cup success could make the people love him.
That word, citoyen (citizen), is meaningful in France. During the French Revolution, it was used as a greeting, not unlike comrade under Communism. “Aux armes, les citoyens,” the national anthem still impels. Arm yourselves, citizens. It is drilled into French children that good citizenship is a high virtue.
It’s unclear exactly at what point during the French Revolution the rallying cry of “liberté, egalité, fraternité” (liberty, equality, brotherhood) was adopted, eventually becoming the new republic’s national slogan. What is entirely clear is when it was bastardized into “liberté, egalité, Mbappé.” That was the 2018 World Cup, when the 19-year-old led his nation to its second world championship.
“Luckily you weren’t on the other side,” Mbappé shot back with a grin, before the room broke into laughter.
Around that same time, the underperformance of a querulous and scandal-plagued incarnation of the national team—which went on strike at the 2010 World Cup over a falling-out with its head coach—was blamed on the team’s Black and Muslim players and those of North African descent.
I also saw a Frenchman in a full Napoleon costume. But what struck me was the makeup of France’s fans who followed their team to New Jersey. They were almost exclusively white. Deschamps is white. His assistants are all white. And yet so few of the players are. Zidane, French-born to Algerian parents, the impeccably qualified alternative, has been lying in wait to replace Deschamps for years—he finally will after this tournament. That will make him the national team’s first nonwhite manager.
“You can be a player, you can be an international star, but above all that, you are a citizen,” Mbappé told Vanity Fair.
The French team is full of citizens.
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