In September 2025, the Ballon d’Or was won by Ousmane Dembélé. It was the first time a PSG player had won the award, the first time a player born after 1990 had won it in four years, and the seventh consecutive year in which France could have made a credible claim for the award if the selection had gone differently. Kylian Mbappé, who received votes but did not win, arrived at the ceremony knowing that his career’s most significant individual prize had passed him by again.
France have more talent available at this World Cup than almost any other nation. They won the tournament in 2018. They have been either finalists or semi-finalists in every major competition since 2016. And the question that follows them everywhere — through every squad announcement, every pre-tournament press conference, every tactically muddled group stage performance followed by a spectacular knockout run — is whether talent is the thing they have too much of, and whether the abundance creates a particular kind of inefficiency.
Didier Deschamps, who has managed France since 2012, named his twenty-six-man squad on the fourteenth of May. It contains three of the ten best forwards in the world. It contains the best left back in the world, the best defensive midfielder of the previous decade, one of the most physically imposing centre-backs in European football, and a goalkeeper who is arguably the best in the world at this moment.
They are, on paper, extraordinary. The paper is where the conversation always begins.
The Group
France are in Group I alongside Senegal, Norway and Iraq. Senegal, with Sadio Mané in the final stages of his international career but still capable of decisive interventions, and a squad built around the defensive intelligence that produced the AFCON 2022 and 2021 titles, will be the legitimate test of the group. Norway, with Erling Haaland as the single most threatening centre-forward available to any nation outside of France’s own squad, represents a different kind of danger — the kind that turns a misjudged defensive line into a first-half deficit in thirty seconds.
Iraq qualified through the AFC pathway and have surprised in competitive football before, their 2007 Asian Cup victory a reminder that underestimating national football’s unpredictability in a tournament setting is always a risk.
France should emerge from Group I with nine points. Whether they do it efficiently and carry momentum, or whether they do it with the grinding, uninspiring performances that have characterised their group stages in previous tournaments, will set the narrative for what follows.
The Forward Line Problem
France have nine attacking players in their twenty-six-man squad. Kylian Mbappé, who scored twenty-five La Liga goals this season as Real Madrid’s Pichichi winner and forty-two across all competitions, is clearly the first name. After him, the selection becomes one of the great tactical puzzles of international management.
Ousmane Dembélé, the reigning Ballon d’Or winner, has been the most productive forward in European football this season at PSG — part of a fluid attacking system that switches roles continuously, that does not require a fixed striker, that creates goalscoring positions through movement and combination. He arrives as possibly the best attacker in the world by recent evidence.
Michael Olise, in his first full season at Bayern Munich, won the Bundesliga Player of the Season award. He is twenty-four. He has seventeen league goals and twelve assists. He operates as a right winger with the ability to cut inside and finish — precisely the profile that makes him difficult to pair naturally with Mbappé, who likes to operate from the same areas.
Marcus Thuram, at Inter Milan, provides the number nine option — a forward of considerable physical presence who can both hold the ball up and run in behind, whose seventeen Serie A goals this season confirm his consistency as a goalscorer rather than just a linking forward.
Behind these four: Bradley Barcola, Désiré Doué, Maghnes Akliouche, Jean-Philippe Mateta. Each represents a capable international forward with specific qualities. Together, they constitute the most expensive bench in football history.
The problem Deschamps faces — and has always faced, in a version, since 2018 — is that fitting these players into a coherent tactical system produces different answers depending on which forward is asked to sacrifice their preferred position. Mbappé functions best from the left, carrying the ball at pace and finishing in the near post with his left foot. Dembélé, similarly, prefers left or right of centre. Olise works from the right. Thuram leads the line. There is no starting eleven that satisfies all four simultaneously.
William Saliba and the Defensive Foundation
If the forward line represents the pleasant problem, the defensive structure is where France’s real confidence should sit. William Saliba, twenty-five, playing his fourth full season at Arsenal, has become one of the two or three best centre-backs in the world. His composure on the ball — the ability to carry through the press, to find the switch pass, to step out from the defensive line at precisely the correct moment — has been the bedrock of Arsenal’s defensive record this season: nineteen clean sheets in the Premier League, an unbeaten Champions League group phase.
Alongside him, Dayot Upamecano at Bayern provides the second-ball physicality and the aerial presence that Saliba’s elegance doesn’t require but that tournament football often needs. Jules Koundé, at Barcelona, is the right back who functions as the attacking right-sided midfielder in possession. Théo Hernández, now at Al Hilal, remains one of the most dynamic left backs available internationally despite the slightly unexpected destination of his most recent transfer.
Maxence Lacroix, at Crystal Palace, and Ibrahima Konaté, at Liverpool, provide depth through the centre. The defensive unit is deep and of consistent quality.
Mike Maignan, in goal, is arguably the best goalkeeper in the world at this moment: his reflexes, his command of his area, his distribution and his ability to act as the first attacker in a high-press system making him the ideal goalkeeper for what Deschamps needs. His performance in the Champions League this season — AC Milan reached the quarter-finals before losing to PSG — reminded anyone who had forgotten how good he is.
The Midfield Engine
N’Golo Kanté is thirty-five years old and playing for Fenerbahçe. His inclusion in this squad is partly the recognition of his tournament track record — he was central to France’s 2018 World Cup triumph, has consistently elevated his level in high-stakes knockout football across his career — and partly a concession that the combination of Aurélien Tchouaméni and Warren Zaïre-Emery, as capable as both of them are, does not quite replicate what Kanté does.
Tchouaméni, at Real Madrid, brings the athlete’s midfield control — the recovery runs, the ball-winning aggression, the ability to progress in transition. Zaïre-Emery, at twenty-one, is PSG’s most complete midfielder and one of the most talented young central midfielders in European football.
The creative hub sits between midfield and attack: Adrien Rabiot, still effective at AC Milan at thirty, Manu Koné at Roma, and whoever from the forward line drops into the false ten position in France’s fluid attacking structure. France rarely play with a recognised number ten in the traditional sense — their best moments of the 2018 campaign came from positional overloads and transitional pace rather than from playmaking in the half-space — and the same template is likely here.
The Eduardo Camavinga Question
Eduardo Camavinga was not selected. His omission from France’s twenty-six is the decision that most precisely encapsulates the embarrassment of riches the squad represents: Camavinga has won more Champions League medals than most players have won in their entire careers, he is twenty-two years old, he is a left-footed box-to-box midfielder of genuine world class. And he is not going to the World Cup with France.
The competition for the midfield positions was that concentrated. Deschamps selected Kanté’s tournament experience over Camavinga’s peak-year physical contribution, and Zaïre-Emery’s ongoing sharpness over the Madrid midfielder who has not quite translated his club form into reliable international performances. Whether Camavinga’s absence is vindicated or appears a mistake will depend almost entirely on how France’s midfield performs when the tournament gets difficult.
Randal Kolo Muani, another high-profile omission, was left out in favour of Mateta — a decision driven by form rather than talent, Mateta’s consistency at Crystal Palace this season outweighing the potential-ceiling argument for Kolo Muani.
The Deschamps Question
Didier Deschamps will turn sixty at the end of October 2026. He has managed France for fourteen years. He has won a World Cup. He has lost a World Cup final, a European Championship final, reached a Euro 2024 semi-final. His tenure represents, statistically, one of the most successful periods in French international football history.
He is also the subject of persistent and not entirely unfair criticism that the teams he manages underachieve relative to the talent available — that the conservative tactical framework he imposes limits forwards of Mbappé’s calibre to a fraction of what they could produce in a more ambitious system, that his risk-averse selection process frequently produces coherent squads of seventy percent of France’s best players rather than the difficult-to-manage but more explosive alternative.
The counterpoint is: he wins. He wins when it matters, in tournaments, under pressure. The players who have worked with him across fourteen years have generally spoken of him with respect and clarity about what he demands. The tactical conservatism has not prevented France from reaching finals.
The question, entering his likely final World Cup as France manager, is whether he can make the adjustments that the talent now available requires — whether Dembélé and Mbappé and Olise can be deployed in a way that maximises all three simultaneously — or whether France will once again be the team that should have won and didn’t quite.
How France Win It
The path runs through Group I, then through the knockout bracket. In the later rounds, France will likely meet Spain, England or Germany — their traditional opponents in European tournament football. Against any of those matches, Mbappé’s ability to decide a game from a single moment of individual quality is the factor that all three opponents will be most focused on neutralising.
France win this World Cup if: Deschamps finds the system that deploys Dembélé and Mbappé simultaneously in positions that allow both to threaten from their preferred areas; Saliba and the defensive unit reproduce the clean-sheet consistency of their club campaigns; Maignan makes one or two saves in late knockout rounds that prevent eliminations before Mbappé can score; and Kanté provides the midfield stability in knockout football that France’s system requires when the opposition has identified their attacking pattern and compressed the spaces.
They lose it if: the forward line’s tactical complexity produces again the kind of muted group-stage performances that make opponents think France are vulnerable, only for the panic solution to arrive too late; or if they meet Spain in the quarter-final and Dembélé finds himself trying to explain why his side played so much less well than they can.
The Verdict
France are the second-most talented squad at this tournament, behind a version of Spain that has arrived in the best collective form of any major nation. They are also the team with the most recent evidence that talent alone does not win it — that the question of how you use what you have is as important as what you have.
If Deschamps gets it right, France win. If he gets it close-but-not-quite, they go out in the semi-finals again and the cycle continues: another major tournament, another squad that was good enough on paper, another conversation about the gap between potential and outcome.
The talent says yes. The manager says probably. The history says we will see.