So far, so-so: France’s journey to the World Cup was not without worry, and pre-World Cup friendlies were all but reassuring. France’s opening game against Australia was an assault on the nerves but ended in video-assisted victory. [The next game, a 1-0 victory over Peru, was equally unconvincing–Editor]. The best thing to come out of this may well be the fact that in the media Paul Pogba’s diary has replaced Antoine Griezmann’s unbelievably tone-deaf docudrama La Decisión, in which he wasted half an hour of our lives to announce that he would stay at Atlético Madrid. Team France lives under the sign of video: a sign of the times—constant contact has become a staple of modern sports culture and communication. Or lack thereof.

Indeed, it isn’t like Pogba had anything interesting to say in his diary. “Tough game;” “tough adversaries;” “we did what had to be done”: Pogba practices a 21st century athletic Esperanto designed to occupy the airwaves with more air, to occupy the news cycle without offending anyone. Team France’s studied dullness is manager Didier Deschamps’ trademark and it has been devised to avoid repeating the shit show that were the early 2010s. When Deschamps became France’s manager in 2012, he infamously declared “players can no longer make mistakes.” Mistakes like World Cup 2010, when France lost all three group games, decided to out-French itself by going on strike in the middle of the tournament, and eventually imploded following a locker room spat brought by French sports newspaper L’Equipe to the level of a national quarrel. The following years were equally laden with scandal: stories of locker room bullying between players, underage sex parties, sex tapes and blackmail all provided opportunities for every French politician and pundit to divine in every French player’s actions a diagnosis of the state of social relations in the Republic.

Deschamps demanded the end of public mistakes, in the process drawing the spotlight away from the institutional scandal that had shaken the tenure of Laurent Blanc, his predecessor at the head of the team: the 1998 World champion and former PSG coach was caught on tape in 2011 discussing with representatives of France’s football authorities the possibility of creating quotas in French football to limit the number of dual citizens; what he described as the prototypically “big, strong, powerful” players churned out by French academies: “What is there that is currently big, strong, powerful? The blacks. That’s the way it is. It’s a current fact. God knows that in the training centers and football schools there are loads of them,” he added. Blanc was eventually cleared of discriminatory practices, but the row was a symptom of the toxicity of French public discourse and habits in relation to football.

After 2010, politicians had demanded that heads roll, and the players singled out for public opprobrium—Evra, Ribéry, Nasri, Ménez, to name the most obvious—were systematically reduced by journalists and politicians alike to their social and racial background: these were banlieue kids, most of them of African descent, with dubious loyalty to France. These disrespectful thugs had taken over the French team—next step, the whole country. It wouldn’t be like we hadn’t been warned. Players were put on the stand, summoned to demonstrate that their existence was compatible with a vision of the team as the epitome of French virtues.

And so rather than treating the problems, Deschamps mostly cured the symptoms: no more mistakes, no more outbursts; no more denunciation of the intrinsic racism of French football authorities and organizations; no more public complaints about the manager’s choices, no more rejoinders to casual classism and racism. Deschamps’ team is squeaky clean; his players are polite and geniuses at what the French call langue de bois—wooden tongue: the political art of saying nothing well. Kylian Mbappé, France’s 19 year-old prodigy, thus regularly collects praise from all for being modest, confident, articulate. Oh yes. Articulate—the international term of endearment for respectable negroes. This is not a commentary on Mbappé, but rather on the evolution of media and political treatment of the French national team in France, and in order to better understand where we are now, it is    useful to look back even further to 2006. That year, France played against Italy in what was perhaps the most dramatic World Cup final ever. If the highlights will forever boil the game down to a Panenka, a headbutt and a missed penalty, there was much more at stake in the conclusion of France’s journey. The 1998 victory had made football a respectable topic of discussion for intellectuals and politicians alike; 2006 played a central role in the liberation and normalization of a racialized discourse until then mostly confined to the far-right gutters of French political life.