"Having great, great players, excellent players. My credit goes to the players," Didier Deschamps said after France's quarterfinal win over Morocco. "But maybe I do my job well." That's one of the great understatements in football management history.
Fifteen years ago, France left South Africa without a win, with one goal in three group games, and with players who had staged a training ground boycott against their own coach. The managing director of the federation quit in disgust. The team was branded uncoachable.
They now rank No. 1 in the world and are 90 minutes from a third consecutive World Cup final. Only Brazil and Germany have ever done that.
The infrastructure that changed everything
The turnaround didn't start with Deschamps. It started in 1988, when the French Football Federation opened the Clairefontaine training centre — the first in a network of 16 government-subsidised academies known as Centres de Formation. Zidane came through them. Thierry Henry came through them. Robert Pires too.
"They started building academies very early and structuring them very early," said Belgium coach Rudi Garcia, a former French player. "A lot of the good work being done by French football is due to the academies."
The numbers back that up entirely. Of the 1,248 players at this World Cup, 99 — nearly 8% — were developed in France. At least 13 nations in the tournament fielded French-born players, including Spain and Cape Verde. No other country is close. France isn't just producing its own stars; it's populating the global game. Riyad Mahrez, a former African Player of the Year, was born in Clichy. Senegal's Ibrahim Mbaye is from Trappes.
The Île-de-France region — home to large working-class immigrant communities from France's former colonies — is the engine. Eleven of France's 26-man squad this summer came from these banlieues, including Kylian Mbappé, the leading scorer at the last two World Cups. The competition to make the national team is so fierce that it raises the ceiling for everyone involved. France could probably have sent a B squad and reached the quarterfinals.
The man who made the uncoachable coachable
Then there's Deschamps. He took over in 2012 when the job looked genuinely thankless — a dressing room full of egos and a reputation for implosion. His record since: 20 wins and two losses in 25 World Cup matches as a coach. Ten knockout-stage victories, more than any manager in history. Unbeaten as a player too, going 6-0-1.
In total, Deschamps has been on the field or in the dugout for 26 of France's 48 all-time World Cup wins. Before he arrived as a player in the mid-1990s, France had never won one.
"This guy is a serial winner," Thierry Henry said. "I can also tell you how hard it is to have a lot of alphas and make sure that only one will be the alpha." That's the Deschamps superpower — not tactics, not systems, but people. He managed it as captain of the 1998 squad. He's been even better doing it from the technical area.
Nine of France's 11 starters against Morocco either immigrated to France or were children of immigrants. Deschamps, a Basque country boy who won everything as a lunch-bucket defensive midfielder, is the one who makes all of it cohere.
Win the next two games and he becomes only the second man ever to coach two World Cup-winning sides. France, meanwhile, would join Brazil as the only nations to win three World Cups in 28 years. Anyone pricing the outright markets right now is dealing with a team that hasn't conceded a single goal in three knockout matches.
"The collective spirit is our strength," Deschamps said. After everything France has been through since 2010, that line lands differently than it would from most coaches.
