The image is etched in the collective memory: a group of hilarious friends lifting the supreme trophy in the Moscow rain. However, behind the facade smiles and the second star, certain pillars of the France team hid gaping flaws. This is what is highlighted in the documentary “Diving Heads”, broadcast next Tuesday on TMC. Far from the glitter and usual elements of language, several heroes of 2018 agreed to sit in a circle facing teenagers to remove the mask. Among them, two defenders give moving testimonies, admitting to having gone through periods of absolute darkness even though the general public thought they were at the height of their glory.
The documentary which reveals the dark side of the 2018 coronation
These two men who decided to break the armor are Samuel Umtiti and Djibril Sidibé. The contrast between their status as world champions and their intimate distress is striking. Faced with young people who are themselves victims of harassment or discomfort, the two footballers open up like never before. This is particularly the case of the former Lyonnais, the hero of the semi-final against Belgium, who recounts his descent into post-World Cup hell. A sudden, silent fall that no one saw coming, not even him at first.
For Samuel Umtiti, the price to pay for this World Cup was exorbitant. We knew that he had “sacrificed his knee” for his country, but we ignored the collateral psychological damage. His story of his difficult years at FC Barcelona is chilling.
“I went from the mountain of a World Cup to the very bottom,” he confides. Isolated, attacked by his own supporters, he describes a daily life where “loneliness ruined him.” He explains that he lived as a recluse, locked in his room, “depressed without knowing it”while the outside world only saw him as a privileged person with a fantastic salary.
Samuel Umtiti, 2018 world champion, reveals his descent into hell. Behind the hero of the semi-final was a man consumed by loneliness and silent depression, sacrificing his well-being for glory.
Sidibé’s terrible secret
If for Umtiti the pain came from the sporting fall, for Djibril Sidibé, the trauma is much older and more intimate. The former Monaco full-back takes advantage of this speaking space to reveal a drama which has “weighted down his adolescence” and which he had never dared to share with his locker room teammates. He recounts the death of his two-month-old little brother, which occurred when he was 14 and he had to watch him. A devouring feeling of guilt that made him want to “jump out the window”.
This documentary, which also features Raphaël Varane, Olivier Giroud and Blaise Matuidi, is of rare public utility in the sanitized world of football. Seeing these colossi admit that “everything has not been rosy”
and that they sometimes ” dark “the myth of the robot footballer collapses to make way for humans. Umtiti and Sidibé remind us that the gold medal protects neither from the demons of the past, nor from the violence of the void once the spotlight is turned off.
