Interview by Louis Tellier,
With "The Blues and the World Cup, from Kopa to Mbappé", which appears in Le Détour editions, he is the first historian to tackle the myth of the Blues, after seven years of research and work.
SPORT24. - How do you explain that the subject of the French football team, so much media, has never been treated in depth by historians?
François DA ROCHA CARNEIRO.
- In my opinion, there is a gap between the academic world and the sports world.
As soon as you belong to the academic world, it's not serious to be interested in the world of sport because it is "only sport".
And that's just popular culture.
So popular culture is good when we talk about the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
Contemporary and immediate popular culture is more problematic.
And then there is also another divide between the popular and the academic world, more generally.
When we love sport, we naturally want to exercise our body and not to have a learned culture or to intellectualize.
Another example: when you are a researcher in the history of sport, you do not always have very easy access to players, especially football players because they say to themselves: "another journalist, who will distort my words", or then a certain shame in not understanding the scientific discourse.
Originally, your thesis covers more than a century of the French team. In this book, you focus on four World Cup finals (1958, 1982, 1998, 2018), what guided this choice?
Somehow, the choices weren't hard to make because they were made by the publisher (laughs).
Without joking, with Bernard Bertrand (the editor), we chose four times that speak to everyone.
1958, it's (Raymond) Kopa and (Just) Fontaine with “champagne football”.
(Michel) Hidalgo - (Michel) Platini for 1982, (Zinedine) Zidane - (Aimé) Jacquet for 1998 and (Kylian) Mbappé - (Didier) Deschamps, everyone knows who these personalities are.
The idea was really to make an intelligent book on a subject that is treated anecdotally.
“We cannot understand the way Michel Hidalgo worked in 1982 if we do not take into account the training policy initiated by Georges Boulogne in the early 1970s, the popularization of football thanks to the epic of the Greens and the arrival of color television in homes. ”
“This book is in a way a management manual”,
and at the same time, these four stages are as many markers of the evolution of the France team… with a central figure each time: that of the coach.
Because I believe that from my research, we owe a lot to the course or the final victory to the staffs led by Paul Nicolas (1958), Michel Hidalgo (1982), Aimé Jacquet (1998) and Didier Deschamps (2018).
These World Cups are the culmination each time of a slightly longer process, controlled by selectors who will simply end up making an impression or winning the competition.
Their choices are the result of a convergence of phenomena and make it possible to highlight the evolutions of football.
For example, we cannot understand Michel Hidalgo's way of working in 1982 if we do not take into account the training policy initiated by Georges Boulogne in the early 1970s, the popularization of football thanks to the epic of the Greens and the arrival of color television in homes.
And above all, the arrival of a star player, Michel Platini.
Finally, this book is a bit of a management manual because these breeders are constantly looking for balance.
And the search for balance necessarily involves making choices and testing many players.
In this book, I also wanted to show that behind Zidane, Platini, Mbappé ... there is an army of players who sometimes have sometimes only spent five seconds on the pitch like Franck Juretti who only came in at the very end of a France - Cyprus in 2005. In all, a quarter of the selected have only one selection and nearly half only show five matches.
This is why the figure of the coach is essential in the book, to illustrate the fact that the France team is a devourer of men and that behind the stars, hides a real army of the shadows.
Even if the contexts of the four World Cups you tell are different, is there still a common denominator that emerges each time?
Yes, there is still one that stands out, it's the press.
Breeders have to constantly deal with it.
We must not forget at the outset that the first match of the France team was wanted by the newspaper l'Auto (which would become the Team in 1946).
By promoting the birth of sports events such as matches for the France team, the press will be able to sell sports stories.
There is also a porosity between players, managers, journalists that has nothing to do with now.
"Politics will start talking about the France team because football will become a national investment with the organization of the 1998 World Cup."
From the 1990s, you show that politicians will increasingly try to seize the France team and take advantage of the latter's growing media coverage.
Politics will start talking about the France team because football will become a national investment with the organization of the 1998 World Cup. And then the success of the France team will appear to be profitable for the president Jacques Chirac, then in political difficulty, who knows almost nothing about football.
And then there is also a recovery on the part of the National Front which will, through the development of a racialist discourse, force the players to sing the Marseillaise.
There, we no longer talk about football, but it is the social origin that is called into question.
In your opinion, this politicization made the players shoulder too important responsibilities?
Even if there are strong media stakes, economic stakes and sometimes even political stakes, football remains only sport.
In essence, these 23 players of the France team who play in a World Cup and who sometimes win it, they are little children who have taken a taste for the ball and who are given responsibilities they do not have. request.
A player from the France team is above all selected for his sporting qualities.
In addition to these developments that you highlight, there are the many stories of matches. If there was one for you to remember, both scientifically and emotionally, which would it be?
Inevitably, that of Seville in 1982. It is undoubtedly a match that marked a generation of football enthusiasts.
It is both a Greek tragedy and a historical drama.
Because it is against Germany and that at the time, many French people experienced the Second World War but also the first examples of twinning within the framework of Franco-German rapprochement.
And that it is also a semi-final of the World Cup.
And sportingly, there is good play, a tough match, twists and turns ... and for us French, the aggression of German goalkeeper Schumacher on Battiston.
Finally, this match is an important conquest of prestige for French football.
And the France team will attract sympathy, notably symbolized by the open letter from Francis Huster to Michel Platini, emphasizing the chivalrous character of the Blues.
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