Mysterious France. Why isn’t the star-studded team playing as offensively as expected?

France is definitely one of the biggest favourites to win the European Championship trophy. But don’t expect beautiful football, lots of chances and nice actions from Les Bleus. Why? Didier Deschamps relies on teamwork and solid defending.

Benzema – Mbappé – Griezmann in attack. Pogba, Rabiot, Kanté operating underneath them. Coman, Dembelé and Ben Yedder are still on the bench. World quality, offensively it promises to be a thrilling spectacle. However, the picture of the game is a little different.

But let’s go back to 2006, where it all began. Because the French lost to Italy in the World Cup final, Zinedine Zidane’s knockout went down in history. But what is important is what followed. The great decline of French football.

European Championship 2008 – France failed to progress from the group stage. World Cup 2010 – France failed to qualify from the group. European Championship 2012 – Elimination in the quarter-finals. World Cup 2014 – Eliminated in the quarter-finals. After a golden era and wins at the 1998 World Cup and 2000 European Championship, there was huge disappointment in France.

The France national team had the aura of cocky stars who were more interested in their own glory than team success. France had a star-studded team on paper, but because of their big egos, Les Bleus were never cohesive as a team. That’s why the revolution came.

Didier Deschamps stopped playing on the individual quality of his players and started betting on character and team footballers. After the 2014 World Cup, Franck Ribéry ended up in the national team, and a year later, Deschamps dropped Karim Benzema due to blackmail problems.

And he slowly pieced together a team that, while still very star-studded, was purposeful. At their home Euro 2016, the French believed their moment had finally arrived. They reached the final, but lost to Portugal.

But two years later, Deschamps has improved his system even more. He found out the way to success. If you look at France’s line-up before the game, you expect a spectacle and lots of goals. But in the vast majority of cases, that’s not what happens.

Mbappé and co. are very organised, they rely on solid defending and quick counter attacks, they don’t hesitate to barricade themselves in the penalty area even for the last few minutes. They will do everything to succeed, they are no strangers to stalling quietly from the first half, as they did against Germany.

Throughout the entire championship in Russia, the French have somehow gone through in a salty, unctuous way. Yes, they won, but in the words of the classic, it was “boring, boring, grey, grey”. We may be looking at a similar picture at the current tournament.

France wins a lot of its matches by a goal at most, unless it is a significantly weaker opponent, it rarely outshoots its rival. For the attacking potential France has, that’s a great shame. However, it almost always works out, so in a country of sixty-seven million people don’t mind too much.

Deschamps has simply found his way to success. He’s thrown away his egos, bet on character, and made a systematic team out of cocky prima donnas who do his bidding to a tee. The whole team defends as one man and are capable of leaving life on the field. Stopping this French machine will be an extremely tough nut to crack this year.

Source: Livesport