France Will Win the World Cup
Unless they don't. But Didier Deschamps and his team have mastered the tournament format.
It’s foolish to make predictions in a binary game. Football is about ones and zeroes, mostly, unless your team scores a lot of goals, and even then you’ll get pegged back to 3-2 sometimes and it’s once again a game of one goal or nothing.
Your fortunes can change in a moment, a draw snatched from victory, defeat from parity. You hit the post and it rolls out, they do the same and it glances in. Nothing is certain when there are lots of good teams around, world class players prowling the World Cup pitch who can hurt you in the flash of a ball whipped in. Anything could happen.
But watching France smash in two goals in two blinks of an eye heading into the second-half hydration break to claim lethal quarterfinal victory over Morocco, I thought that surely no one is beating this team.
They don’t concede goals. It helps to have William Saliba sweeping up the danger at the back, barely breaking a sweat as he trots over to snuff out a chance (and, gradually, the opponent’s hope). 253 Premier League appearances have exposed that Lucas Digne can be got at in the left back position, but overall the back line and goalkeeper Mike Maignan are talented players.
In midfield, it gets a little weirder, though manager Didier Deschamps’ decision to go with Adrien Rabiot has been vindicated by results. The Milan man has made a good mixture with Kouadio Koné in recent matches.
But it’s the front four who are show-stopping. Michael Olisé is one of this tournament’s great creators, inventing new ways to cut teams open for fun. In front of him is Desiré Doué, teenage wing phenom for back-to-back European champions PSG; Doué’s clubmate and reigning World Player of the Year Ousmane Dembélé; and perhaps the greatest player in World Cup history, a forward for Real Madrid named Kylian Mbappé. Then there are all the ballers they have coming off the bench.
It’s just absurd. Dembélé has scored five goals in this tournament. Mbappé tops the Golden Boot charts with eight, which takes him to 20 career World Cup goals in 20 appearances. We used to marvel at Ronaldo Nazário’s 15, then Miroslav Klose’s 16 when he finally took the record. A 27-year-old Frenchman has blown them away.
So has the great one, Lionel Messi, and Argentina are always a threat to win a match while he still stalks the pitch in stripes. Spain defeated France at the semifinal stage at EURO 2024, and Lamine Yamal and Co. will hope to slay the dragon once again if they can get past Belgium.
But “France is going to destroy you,” Zlatan Ibrahimovic said after the game, referring to … any prospective opponent. “And it feels like they aren’t even giving 100%. I’m sorry to say. It feels like that.”
“World class players, you give them a little space, they will punish you,” he added. “That’s the difference between world class and the average player. That little space.”
Mbappé was an assassin here once again. He missed a penalty in the first half, a theme for this tournament’s top scorers,1 but then Morocco gave him a couple of yards at the top of the box and he launched a guided missile past Bono into the far side-netting. Bang.
Then, six minutes later, Dembélé picked the ball up with space in front of the backline and ran at them. Mbappé was ahead of play and ran diagonally in behind, dragging defenders with him, which gave his mate the Ballon d’Or holder a lane. Dembélé drifted right and snuck one low past Bono at the near post to seal it up.
2-0, hydration break. Then the game’s fourth quarter played out uneventfully as the Blues pythoned the game. Goodnight, see you in the semi.
It’s the dispassionate ruthlessness with which France go about their business that makes them so dangerous in a tournament format. They’re seeking three consecutive World Cup final appearances. Since 2016, between this competition and the EUROs, they’ve missed the semifinals just once. They don’t concede goals and they score them when they need them. They have a solid spine and players who make the difference in the final third. They’re coached conservatively but not negatively, with respect for the importance of every goal.
They are kings of the binary, masters of football’s laws, and it will take a fabulous performance to stop them. Perhaps Yamal can re-find the form that saw him finish second behind Dembélé in the Ballon d’Or voting last year.2 Maybe Messi will do Messi things. Erling Haaland is pillaging defenses for Norway, and the English are hanging around. Belgium smashed the United States, for whatever that’s worth. But we surely all know it now: The French are the team to beat.
Messi would be on 23 all-time World Cup goals if he’d buried the two penalties he’s missed in this tournament.
I’ll confess I thought the teenager should have won it. He was the best player I saw on any pitch.