This week, I am French. I’m as French as a deposed dauphine, as French as a film plot of perfumed deceit. During the World Cup, there is just no profit in being American. Yes, I’m shamelessly bandwagoning, and deserting my nation on its 250th birthday. But my sentiments are with the country that will win this World Cup if feet have anything to do with it: France, a team that scores goals as easily as guys named Didier blow smoke from Gitanes. Is that a cliché? Well, the word cliché is French, is it not? As am I.
One of the more marvelous things about the World Cup is that its 39 days afford you the time to develop unreasonable affections for teams not your own. You don’t need to know a thing about France, or tactics or formations, to fall under the spell of the team’s sorcery with a ball, or to see its potential for world dominion, or just to love how its players flip their sweat-soaked hair. Who but Les Bleus could wear the bright-red knee socks of uniformed schoolgirls and make them seem like flair? When the players rush down the field in those socks, they look like a battle painting in motion.
The French make so much happen. They’ve scored 13 goals in just four games, a torrid pace for a sport in which, quite often, absolutely nothing happens. This is the nature of football, as they pronounce soccer in other countries: To profess enjoyment of a 1–0 final score is to pass some kind of fan-purity test. Which I, a Texan by blood, tend to fail. But you’ll experience no low-score-induced boredom in this World Cup if you are French. And so, for this week I am French. As French as jealousy in the rain, as French as the perfect little scarf.
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France’s toe-tapping captain, Kylian Mbappé, has scored six of the team’s goals, including two in a 3–0 knockout of Sweden to reach the round of 16. Mbappé moves with the sweetest jolt of current in his legs you may ever see on a green field, and he now has 18 goals in 18 career World Cup games to trail the immortal Lionel Messi, of Argentina, by just one (Messi has 19 in 29 games). Mbappé’s surges into open space make him unmissable even to the most novice viewer; his sprint was once clocked at 23.6 miles an hour, on par with Usain Bolt’s average cruising speed in the 100-meter dash. Mbappé said the other day that he thought that France had played a little “timid” early in the tournament, which provokes one to wonder what kind of attack he could mount with a fully confident team.
Amazingly, for all his striking power, Mbappé may not be France’s most crucial player. Some observers believe that the 24-year-old attacking midfielder Michael Olise is. Olise is one of France’s three notable front-liners who are making their World Cup debut, along with the 21-year-old Désire Doué and 23-year-old Bradley Barcola. All of them are flashy players. All are appealing, budding stars with varied family roots, helping make this a team that almost anyone can connect with. Barcola, born near Lyon, has dual citizenship in France and Togo. Doué, from Angers, is the son of an Ivorian father and a French mother. Olise was born in London to British Nigerian and Franco Algerian parents, and he grew up speaking both French and English at home. Since 2024, he has played professionally for Bayern Munich, which required further acculturation. At his first Oktoberfest, he was introduced to schnitzel and “those round potato things,” as he described the traditional dumplings called Knödel. “I’ve never known anything like it,” he said of the festival.
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Although Mbappé’s goals command the most attention, Olise is the team’s chief enabler, a sleight-of-foot artist whose tricksy passes can provoke sharp intakes of breath, and who leads the entire tournament in assists, with five. As Barcola said of Olise, his performance on the field “brings danger.” The combination of Olise’s footwork and Mbappé’s speed creates a don’t-know-where-to-turn predicament for France’s opponents. After Sweden’s loss in the round of 32, its coach, Graham Potter, said, “We had to be perfect, and even if we were, I’m not sure that would have been enough.”
France has so overwhelmed its opponents, in fact, that the team’s biggest concern could become overconfidence; it faces Paraguay on Saturday and will be the strong favorite to advance to the quarterfinals. The veteran French midfielder N’Golo Kanté addressed the issue this week by saying, “There is something that we cannot hide, that we have a lot of quality in the team.” But, he said, “We cannot see ourselves too beautiful or too strong.” See ourselves too beautiful or strong? How French is that? But they are beautiful, and they are strong, and that is why, for now, I am French.
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