The French team has always lived to the rhythm of group affinities. A world champion confirmed it this week.
For more than two decades, the Château de Clairefontaine has vibrated to the rhythm of the exploits of the French team. From the 1998 generation to its 2018 successors, the groups have come one after the other. And as always, affinities were created, just like enmities.
The 1998 generation perfectly illustrates this human dimension. While the heroes of the first star meet regularly, certain players in this group maintain very fresh relationships, like Didier Deschamps and Christophe Dugarry.
Already at the time of the 1998 World Cup, the selection concocted by Aimé Jacquet was made up of “small clans”, as former center forward Stéphane Guivarc’h explained. So at Auxerre, the man who twice finished top scorer in Ligue 1 emphasized in the columns of So Foot that he mainly hung out with his club teammates at the time. “ With Charbonnier, Blanc and Diomède we got along very well. We formed a little “clan”, like Liza, Duga and Zizou in Bordeaux.“
For their part, the ex-Bordelais have always assumed this almost fraternal bond which united them, also citing Vincent Candela in their group. The young people in the selection, Thierry Henry, David Trezeguet and Patrick Vieira, also maintained a strong friendship.
This notion of clan did not alter the fantastic group spirit which carried the Blues to the end of their epic. It simply underlines the difficulty for a coach to combine very distinct personalities for a common objective.
