It has become abundantly clear at this World Cup that the only team here that can actually beat France might be France. Les Bleus came to America with the most devastating attack in the game and all the swagger of a country that has perfected Champagne, haute couture, and Kylian Mbappé.
What the rest of the world also knows is that the French national team has a curious knack for self-sabotage. So opponents have settled into a new strategy of turning every game into a bar fight—and hoping France loses its cool.
Only this year, Les Bleus have come prepared. For days before their brutal and bloody round-of-16 match against Paraguay, they devoted hours of practice time to countering soccer’s Dark Arts—trash talk, persistent fouling, and relentless physicality. The prettiest team at the tournament was learning to win ugly.
“We showed that we’re not just a team that knows how to play attacking football,” Mbappé said after the 1-0 victory. “If we have to put our hands in the s—, we’ll put our hands in the s—.”
A battle barely won
France can expect more of the same when it takes on Morocco on Friday in Boston for a place in the semifinals. But by now, head coach Didier Deschamps has his players well versed in sang froid.
Ahead of the Paraguay game, he ran cutthroat training matches in which he simply stopped calling fouls. No matter how filthy a tackle might be, Deschamps instructed his players to bounce back up and carry on in silence. Only complaining was punished.
“Our coach reminded us for days that Paraguay’s main quality was going to war,” midfielder Rayan Cherki said. “But we were ready for this.”
No detail was too small to consider. Deschamps knew that on the off-chance France was awarded a penalty kick, then Paraguayan players would immediately try to scuff up the spot, making it harder to take a clean shot. So he assigned Ousmane Dembélé a top-secret job: The moment the referee blew his whistle, he was to run over and protect that patch of the field. Which is exactly what he did when France won that very situation occurred in the 70th minute.
“Until now, things had been relatively easy,” Deschamps said. “So it’s good to go through something like this too.”
Paraguay never really attempted to play soccer, completing just 108 passes to France’s 587. The team also committed 13 fouls to frustrate France and break up the flow. But at halftime and during the hydration breaks, the message from the bench was to ignore any tricks the Paraguayans tried to pull.
And by the end of the 90 minutes, Mbappé was meeting every aggression with a gigantic grin. (Just in case things boiled over, Deschamps had designated three players—all 6-foot-2 or above—to hop off the bench and act as Mbappé’s bodyguards on the pitch, according to the sports daily L’Equipe.)
“I’d never played a game like that with as many cheap shots and people shoving you in the back” forward Bradley Barcola said. “I had to make sure not to retaliate.”
The bet from Paraguay—and potentially any other opponent hoping to rattle Les Bleus—was that the French players would lose their heads eventually. And, to be fair, there’s history there. Les Bleus have racked up six red cards at the World Cup since the start of the 1998 tournament, more than any other team.
The most notorious of the bunch occurred when playmaker Zinédine Zidane decided he’d heard enough out of Italian defender Marco Materazzi in the 2006 final and head-butted him squarely in the chest. Even when Les Bleus lifted the trophy for the first time, after beating Brazil in 1998, they had finished the game with 10 men.
But these days, French players are proving a little more adept at keeping out of trouble—even when trouble comes looking for them.
“They thought we were going to show up to play in tuxedos, that we would just make pretty plays,” Mbappé said after the Paraguay game. “We know how to play against dirty football.”
Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com