EXCLUSIVE | Franck Leboeuf on England’s positive transformation: ‘Their players were far more invested in their club than the national team’ | OneFootball

Ahead of France’s first appearance at the World Cup, Get French Football News spoke exclusively to World Cup winner Franck Leboeuf.

In this third of a four-part interview, Franck talks about the importance of squad harmony for France’s – and England’s – chances of winning the World Cup.

Looking back, less so to 2002 but certainly in 2010, France’s problems can manifest themselves more off the pitch than on it. There’s been a little fuss made about the clip of Kylian Mbappé and N’Golo Kanté ignoring each other. Is there really an issue or is this just the media trying to create a story out of nothing?

When you are 100% invested in this, like us, you see problems everywhere! People in everyday life, they haven’t even heard of a Kanté-Mbappé problem, they are not aware of it.

In 2002, there were tensions because we had lost a little bit of our mojo as they say and we were at the end of an extraordinary cycle from 1995 to 2001. By 2002, we were very tired. The World Cup started two or three weeks too early and we’d all played a lot of games and didn’t have sufficient recovery time. Basically we never looked for excuses, but there were excuses.

In 2010 we had Raymond Domenech – a man who wanted to break everything. You can see in the [Netflix] documentary The Bus that the players were not responsible – on the contrary, they came together to try to save Nicolas Anelka from his unjust eviction. So 2010 was more the team bearing the brunt of everything and Domenech doing everything he could to absolve himself of any blame.

But I trust Didier, I’m sure he’ll solve any problems that there may be of tensions in the changing room and, if he doesn’t solve them, then they’re not going to win the World Cup. We have never seen a team with tensions win a World Cup.

England over the last few years was the perfect example of what you should not do, where the players were far more invested in their club than the national team and tensions existed. And I think that Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard wanted to play together but everything was done in the environment to create animosity, to create a Chelsea-Liverpool rivalry.

We experienced it with Marseille and Paris Saint-Germain and in 1990 we didn’t qualify, 1992 was a disaster at the European Championship and in 1994 we didn’t qualify. There was so much animosity that it didn’t work. And it was like that with England.

But that is the key point. If there is no chemistry in the squad, if the substitutes are not happy to be on the bench, if the starters don’t accept being substituted, it’s over, it’s dead. There is not a team in the world that has won the World Cup with tensions in the squad. And Spain in 2010 was successful because they said enough is enough with the Real Madrid-Barcelona rivalry. And that’s the only way England can win, it’s the only way that France or any other country can win – by accepting the squad’s differences, the coach’s choices and each other’s skills.

For me, that’s exactly when it began to click for England – when Gareth Southgate took a leaf out of Deschamps’ book and said the most important thing is the 11 that makes the best team, not necessarily the 11 best players.

Exactly, and we have seen it with Thomas Tuchel and the choices he makes. When he picks Ivan Toney, it is because he knows he’s a good player but also because, if he’s on the bench, he’ll say nothing. If he comes on, he will give it his all. And that’s crucial. It’s about finding the right elements to make it work.

[In 1998] Aimé Jacquet told me two months before the World Cup “listen, my choice is Laurent Blanc and Marcel Desailly. Maybe I’m making a mistake, maybe you think it’s unfair, but that’s how it is. And there are two choices. Either you agree to join the squad, you accept my choice and you don’t complain, or you don’t accept it and you don’t join the squad”. That was the deal: if you’re OK with that, great; if not, you don’t come. That way it’s been said, it’s been made clear.

That’s what Tuchel is doing – he doesn’t care about picking the best 25 players – he is there to win the World Cup.

And that was the strength of Jacquet – he created a team that felt like a club team, where we all got along very well, we all wanted to fight for each other and we all felt able to say our piece. If I had something to say to Zinedine Zidane I could say it and he’d say “yes, no problem Franck.” But no one was above the others – that can’t exist in football and especially not in a national team. There are huge egos involved but it’s good that Southgate did that and that Tuchel is continuing where he left off and that will help England to grow and, who knows, maybe win the World Cup.

Franck Leboeuf was speaking exclusively to Get French Football News courtesy of ToonieBet

GFFN | Jeremy Smith