Humiliation. Horror. Treason. The nation’s darkest hour. President Sarkozy’s fault. Those were among the overheated verdicts yesterday as France whipped itself into an existential frenzy over the off-pitch antics of its World Cup team.
As the once great Bleus headed for a probable exit after tonight’s match against South Africa, their compatriots washed their hands of a squad that did not just lose, but indulged in the ugliest behaviour yet seen at a World Cup.
Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, was horrified by the spectacle of the disintegrating team going on strike on Sunday. “This is a caricature of France . . . an appalling soap opera,” he said. Dominique de Villepin, the former Prime Minister, said that the country had been shamed. “I do not want France to resemble our football team,” he said.
Le Figaro called their behaviour “collective suicide, a living nightmare, a psychodrama that will go down in the history of the World Cup”.
Anti-discrimination groups scented a whiff of racism in the vitriol spewing from the conservative press towards the mainly black team. But there is no doubt that the farcical mutiny, in which the players refused to train, has prompted a bout of handwringing over a malaise in the national soul.
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“The fiasco of les Bleus is a question of the era — an era of big money, oversized egos and a vulgarity that is found at every level of the sporting, political and media world,” La Charente Libre newspaper said.
The team went back to work yesterday as their masters held crisis talks with Roselyne Bachelot, the Sports Minister, but the damage was done.
The nadir came late on Sunday when Raymond Domenech, the team manager, was forced to read out a protest from the players attacking him and the French Football Federation (FFF). The team were not pleased that their striker, Nicolas Anelka, had been sent home for telling Domenech to “F*** yourself, you filthy son of a whore”. They were also determined to nail the “traitor” who had divulged Anelka’s words to the media.
In France football is une affaire d’état. On orders from Mr Sarkozy, Ms Bachelot promised no mercy when the time came for “taking the necessary action” against all involved: Anelka, Patrice Evra, the insurgent captain, and other mutineers, as well as Jean-Pierre Escalettes, president of the FFF.
Mr Escalettes is blamed for failing to sack the unloved Domenech after he led the national side to humiliation at Euro 2008.
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Mr Sarkozy condemned the team’s behaviour as unacceptable. Privately, he is said to be furious and planning exemplary punishment.
Ministers have also gone on the offensive, deploring the example set by the millionaire footballers. “I am aghast at this pitiful spectacle,” Eric Woerth, the Labour Minister, said.
Valérie Pécresse, the Minister for Higher Education, wondered: “How can the young respect their teachers if they see Anelka insulting the coach?”
Intellectuals have piled in to assign blame for an affair that has stirred more media excitement than any event since Mr Sarkozy’s election in 2007.
Jacques Attali, a celebrity economist, saw the toxic team as a metaphor for France’s struggle to survive in a globalised world. “May the shameful elimination of this pitiful squad awaken us and push us to ensure that we do not suffer another humiliation, more terrible yet, in the gigantic geopolitical clash, the beginning of which we are experiencing today,” he said.
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But the main finger-pointing was, more mundanely, aimed at the money culture of professional sport. “The publicity people sell us an illusion of players imbued with team spirit,” Libération, the left-wing daily, said. “They are, in reality, bling-bling traders.”
Mr Sarkozy — also known as President Bling-Bling — was being held responsible for the excesses. Jérôme Cahuzac, a senior Socialist MP, said: “There reigns in the French team a climate that Mr Sarkozy has promoted: individualism, selfishness, every man for himself, with the only value of human success being how much you get at the end of the month.”
Still others blamed the social breakdown in the country’s ethnic ghettos, from which most of the squad hails. Alain Finkielkraut, a star philosopher and football lover, called the players, celebrated for their ethnic mix when they won the World Cup in 1998, “a bunch of millionaire louts”.
“These horrible, pouting, rich brats refuse to embody their nation. But if this team does not represent France, alas, it reflects the country, with its clans, its ethnic divisions . . . It holds a terrible mirror up to us.”