By facing Argentina this Sunday, France can become a third time world football champion, after 1998 and 2018.
Since the coronation of 2018, the reasons for collective celebrations have been rare between the Covid-19 and its multiple confinements, the generalization of telework, the climate crisis, the elections or the war in Ukraine.
For psychologists Philippe Zawieja and Robert Zulli, interviewed by 20 Minutes, the good course of the Blues is a lifesaver for the morale of the French, including in the medium term.
It has a little air of golden light at the end of the tunnel, this World Cup.
After three years of confinement, telework, worsening global warming and elections at loggerheads, we found a little joy, lightness and communion on the Champs-Elysées on Wednesday evening, a possible prelude to the party this evening.
Over the month, a whole nation, with the exception of a few violent ultra-right bands, lined up and found themselves behind these Blues who were said to be also wounded, worn out.
They were ultimately the ultimate refuge of collective joy.
“Emotionally, we are coming out of unpleasant years, with an anxiety-provoking climate on a collective and individual level”, explains for
20 Minutes
Robert Zulli, clinical psychologist specializing in emotions.
“We start from a low” moral question, which has generated “a lot of suffering, impaired health, irritability…”, he adds.
Thus, cases of depression have increased by 25% worldwide due to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the WHO.
I promise, that will be the only stat in this article.
Fight your sorrows together
But that was necessary to measure the gloom in which France was plunged when the World Cup kicked off.
Political campaigns have not been marked by the hope of a brighter future either.
"France sees itself as a former great power, we tend to have defeatist speeches on the decline of the nation", regrets the psychologist Philippe Zawieja.
Except that we can't let go indefinitely.
“There is a need for transcendence, for a common ideal that goes beyond all our splits.
And the World Cup gives us a positive image,” he adds.
In short, fed up with bad news and those who sow discord, so we cling to what unites us.
"It brings people together because we finally share positive emotions", supports Robert Zulli.
"Feeling the fact that we are not the only ones to experience them makes these emotions real", he adds, hence the need to go down to the bars and then to the streets.
And to the grumpy people who talk about living together for a short time, the psychologist has the answer.
According to him, experiencing a victory collectively makes it possible to "create a positive emotional reserve, which we will be able to draw on in 2023" and even longer, by reviving the memory.
Joy stronger than anger
It is this need to experience positive emotions that can also explain the relative failure of the boycott, which has been pushed into the background by the media and abandoned along the way by some viewers.
"The intellectual, rational discourse was swept away by emotion and the exaltation of victories", taking the spectators to the bone, explains Philippe Zawieja.
Robert Zulli wants to exonerate those who have left aside their ideals: “To impose oneself to exclude oneself from the collective joy borders on a form of masochism.
Here, shared joy prevailed over anger.
This does not prevent "remaining lucid about human issues", the psychologist observing a "greater collective consciousness and a greater transversality of emotional content" in 2022.
Among the topics that have gripped and divided society, including on an emotional level, on this World Cup and in recent years, the climate occupies a prominent place.
Again, the course of the Blues could well have positive effects.
"2023 is going to be a year of acceleration on the ecological transition of football", assures Antoine Miche, president of Football Ecology France, for whom the world of the round ball was "electrified" by the environmental controversy of the World Cup and by the affair. of the "sailing tank".
But, he assures, the round ball is also a means "to appease, to depoliticize the debate, through a passionate and practical vector".
Live together
“During the pandemic, volunteers asked themselves the question of the meaning of sport” in the amateur world.
With Football Ecologie France, Antoine Miche goes further than replacing plastic bottles with water bottles.
"When we build shared vegetable gardens or set up beehives with young people, their club and residents, we feel that it makes people happy and that it reconnects them with each other and with nature", he enthuses. he, also noting a drop in incivility.
The beautiful course of the Blues in this World also gave the beautiful image of the French and Moroccan supporters, often the same ones, celebrating together during the semi-final.
By sharing the party with illustrious strangers, what binds us has become much more evident than what divides us.
"It's nice that this long-stigmatized community is setting an example, smiles Philippe Zawieja, that part of the population still believes in living together".
Under two or three stars, let’s extend this same blue dream a bit…
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World Cup 2022
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Sport
Champs-Elysees
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