Greg Dyke’s countdown clock to England winning the World Cup has struck zero and England are already out a week before the final.
While the national team got no closer than the previous two major tournaments – the semi-final in 2018 followed by the Euro 2020 final – most agreed the quarter-final elimination had a slightly different feel to it. Edged out by France, who play Argentina in Sunday’s final, in a game England had dominated against the reigning world champions. A Harry Kane missed penalty from possibly forcing extra time.
It was, perhaps, England’s sliding doors moment. In this reality, Kane shoots over the crossbar and England lament. In another, Kane scores, England go on to beat France then see off Morocco, Lionel Messi slips while carrying a chicken shawarma by the pool and is out of the final where Argentina are defeated – just as Dyke, the former Football Association chairman, predicted all along.
On the surface, it felt as though the France game was so close, as though there wasn’t much separating the talent of individual players on either side. Yet dig deeper into the French national team – and its history – and you find the grit and courage that England perhaps can’t match.
St George’s Park, England’s state-of-the-art central hub, is helping to produce as technically gifted and skilful young footballers as France’s Clairefontaine, the elite training centre hidden in the Rambouillet forest some 40 miles outside Paris.
The Institut National du Football de Clairefontaine, to give its full title, was dreamt up by French Football Federation President Fernand Sastre in the 1970s, opened its doors in 1988 and a decade later the country won its first World Cup, as host nation, with the national team based there. Twenty years later, they won a second.
On Sunday they can become only the third country, after Brazil and Italy, to win successive World Cups, and it would add a third gold star to the breast of their jersey, behind only Italy and Germany, with four, and Brazil’s five.
That England didn’t even have a central HQ until 10 years ago shows how much catching up the country had to do. But these luxury training centres are only part of it.
One of the reasons it hurt so much when England were knocked out last Saturday was that the players genuinely believed they would progress – and played as such. It’s an element that Gareth Southgate has worked so hard to instil during his six years as England manager, but it has had to be earned and nurtured.
However, with the French it’s as though that winning belief runs through the veins of any player who pulls on that suave navy jersey – one that affords an air of almost surgical precision and authority – to represent their country. A “winning mentality” has become a modern cliché but it’s precisely what Didier Deschamps sees as crucial to his job as France’s manager since he started in 2012.
“I knew all about that,” said Deschamps, who was a midfielder in France’s 1998 World Cup and 2000 European Championship winning sides. “It’s true that technical qualities and individual talent will make a difference on the pitch, but the collective strength – the team working together – is what counts. No team can win without unity.”
Indeed, France had setbacks before the Qatar World Cup began that could have broken weaker squads. They lost their Ballon d’Or winning striker Karim Benzema on the eve of the tournament. Yet in came 36-year-old striker Olivier Giroud, deemed past his best by Chelsea last year.
They had already lost their two most experienced central midfielders, N’Golo Kanté and Paul Pogba. In came Adrien Rabiot, of Juventus, and Aurélien Tchouaméni, who signed for Real Madrid last summer.
Tchouaméni is only 22, and a great example of what lies beneath, of how such a young mind can cope of the complexities of defensive midfield. He studied English while a teenager in Bordeaux’s academy because he had an ambition to play in the Premier League. And after breaking into the Bordeaux first team at 18, he hired a personal trainer to improve the physical and fitness areas he felt he lacked.
Even losing Rabiot and Dayot Upamecano, the centre-back, for the semi-final against Morocco, didn’t destabilise them. In came 23-year-olds Ibrahima Konaté and Youssouf Fofana, onwards they went.
There’s an inherent steeliness in France’s players, an inner sense of bravery earned only by experience. Antoine Griezmann, who at 31 has excelled as a revised box-to-box central midfielder, moved to Spain aged 14, after constant rejection from French clubs, where he joined Real Sociedad.
Upamecano was 17 when he moved to Austria. Konaté was 18 when he moved to Germany. Eduardo Camavinga, the 20-year-old Real Madrid midfielder, was born in an Angolan refugee camp. He is extraordinarily talented yet has only played once, against Tunisia, in a much-changed side with qualification already secured.
And then there’s the fact that France simply produces more professional footballers playing in elite leagues than England. Last season, in Europe’s top five leagues, there were almost twice as many French as English.
In the Premier League there were 149 Englishmen to 27 French, but elsewhere the contrast was stark. France’s Ligue 1: 211 French to seven English. Germany’s Bundesliga: 34 to eight. Italy’s Serie A: 28 to five. Spain’s La Liga: 20 to zero.
That’s 53 per cent more elite professional players available for France than England. That alone provides some context to England’s narrow defeat.
Southgate has been warning since 2018 that there aren’t enough English footballers playing in the Premier League (let alone abroad). And though the figures have risen fractionally since then, it’s far from ideal.
The best young player to have emerged for England in the past 10 years is Jude Bellingham, who left Birmingham for Borussia Dortmund aged 17. What made his father pick the Bundesliga over the host of Premier League clubs who wanted him, you wonder.
There is constant pushback by the superpower of the Premier League towards attempts by the FA to try to ensure more English players play. A disconnect creating a problem that has no easy or obvious solution.
People laud the Premier League as the best league in the world, and that may be true – in terms of revenues and viewing figures. But while we may sneer at France’s Ligue 1, it’s producing a far greater volume of players for its country’s national team.
So maybe England has a lot further to go than it realises to truly become one of the world elite, to truly foster that mentality throughout every atom of the organisation.
When you travel up the winding driveway to pass through the security gates at Clairefontaine, there is a neat lawn on which sits a giant World Cup and two gold stars. When you pass through the security gate at St George’s Park, you are greeted by cows.
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