Of the last five winners of the football world trophy, four were eliminated in the first phase of the following competition. Does the same fate await the Blues?
Before even hoping to achieve the feat of winning a third star, the French team will have to extricate itself from a curious ailment that has plagued the outgoing champions since 2002. Of the last five winners, four have left the competition without having saw the color of the eighths.
Kazan, June 27, 2018: After an hour and a half spent trying to bring down the Korean defensive curtain, the Mannschaft are caught out in added time. Two goals in quick succession in five minutes, and here is Joachim Löw’s armada ousted from the Russian World Cup, bottom of a group yet within reach, with Mexico and Sweden. Almost irrational for a nation that was still among the favorites in Russia, and had not experienced such a fate from the chickens in the last eighty years.
The French supporters, they surely keep in a corner of their minds the fiasco of the Blues in South Korea twenty years earlier. Arrived in Seoul reigning world and European champions, with a workforce among the best in the competition on paper, Zidane’s teammates wallow from the pools, finishing dead last. In 2010, an Italy without game and without ideas does not manage to scratch more than two points against Paraguay and New Zealand, and ends its stay in South Africa humiliated by a loss 3-2 against Slovakia. A South African edition won by Spain, which will experience such a disastrous outcome four years later. In Brazil, the Spanish rout is such that La Roja is eliminated even before playing its last group match, after two corrections received against the Netherlands (5-1) and Chile (2-0).
“Too loyal” coaches
So, winner’s curse or real outgoing champion syndrome? Looking through the numbers and dynamics of each other, several similarities could partly explain these successive routs. Often, a large part of the group that won the event returns four years later. Not a bad idea when you think of cohesion and automatisms, but difficult, despite some tactical refinements, to surprise twice in a row teams who tumble over-motivated at the idea of outsmarting the last winners. “Coaches tend to be too loyal to their players, even more to those who made them win. They use them for too long without taking care to sufficiently renew their workforce,” abounds the British journalist Keir Radnedge, fourteen World Cups to his credit.
This goes hand in hand with the fact that almost every time, the fallen nations had renewed the man who had taken them to the top. Marcello Lippi was still on the Italian bench in 2010, as were Vicente del Bosque in 2014 and Joachim Löw in 2018. The only exception: Roger Lemerre replaced Aimé Jacquet at the head of the Blues in 2002. However, he appeared in the tricolor staff in 1998. This was seen during his tenure, during which he limited himself to leaving all the keys to the tricolor game to Zidane. The absence of plan B when the playmaker was injured in Korea is surely not unrelated to the fall of France.
After their defeat in the final of the 2010 World Cup, the Netherlands had four years to decode Del Bosque’s guardiolesque game, modeled on the Barcelona model, and stick a rouste on them. Lippi never wanted to abandon his defensive systems, used to nausea in 2010. And in 2018, a Germany more as physical and flamboyant as in Brazil was forced to force everything in the last offensive actions. Result: two goals in 72 attempts, the second lowest ratio in the competition (3%). For this edition, Deschamps is certainly still at the head of the Blues, but with a revamped squad. As for the game, mystery…