The coach of the French football team Didier Deschamps on Wednesday deemed "unacceptable and intolerable" the attitude of Kurt Zouma, including a video showing him hitting his cat caused a scandal.
“I was very surprised by Kurt.
It is something that is inadmissible, intolerable and of course an unspeakable cruelty.
I'm sure he was aware of it but these images are shocking and unbearable,” said Deschamps, who was speaking on France 3 following the Nice-Marseille Coupe de France match.
The coach has not said explicitly whether or not he will continue to call on the defender of West Ham (11 selections) for the next matches of the Blues.
“I am not a prosecutor.
I'm here to make selections based on different criteria.
It could have happened to me when players had made mistakes not to select them for a while, so I will not change my way of proceeding for the next list.
Deschamps had notably stopped retaining Karim Benzema due to the attacker's involvement in the Mathieu Valbuena sextape affair, before calling him back in May 2021 before the Euro.
France will play its next match, a friendly match, on March 25 in Marseille against Côte d'Ivoire.
Unanimous condemnations
The controversy escalated on Wednesday in England: nearly 200,000 people demanded legal action, Zouma's cats were taken away from him and Adidas broke its contract with him.
His club West Ham imposed the “heaviest possible” fine on him.
Such a sanction generally corresponds to a withdrawal of two weeks' salary, or around 300,000 euros in his case.
Asked by Le Parisien, Noël Le Graët, the president of the FFF, sent us the following statement this Wednesday afternoon: “This is an obviously shocking act of abuse.
He was whistled by the public yesterday (Tuesday evening) during his match against Watford and we can understand the emotion aroused.
This gratuitous, stupid and nasty act of violence seems all the more astonishing since I have never heard of Kurt Zouma being badly spoken of.
On the contrary, he is a boy known to be respectful, positive.
However, I note his apologies;
I hope he draws the necessary lesson from this and I believe he has.
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