At halftime of France’s World Cup match against Mexico, on June 17, 2010, the striker Nicolas Anelka insulted his coach, Raymond Domenech, in the dressing room. France lost 2-0.
Two days later the insult was on the front page of L’Équipe. Within hours the French Football Federation had sent Anelka home. The captain, Patrice Evra, told reporters that a “traitor” inside the squad had leaked it.
On the morning of Sunday, June 20, the winger Franck Ribéry went on the TV show Téléfoot, visibly emotional, and said things had to calm down because everyone was laughing at them. A few hours later the squad’s training session at its base in Knysna was open to the public, and children from the neighbouring township had been invited. In the middle of the pitch, Evra got into a furious row with the fitness coach, Robert Duverne. Domenech pulled them apart. Duverne threw his stopwatch onto the grass and walked off.
The players went back to their bus and shut themselves in, curtains drawn, for a good forty minutes. The team director, Jean-Louis Valentin, left the pitch saying he was resigning: “It’s a scandal for French people, for the youngsters who came here to watch them train.” Asked whether he was the traitor, he said “no, no, no” and appeared close to tears.
Then Domenech came out of the bus and read the reporters a statement from his players. “The players are unanimously against the French Football Federation’s decision to expel Nicolas Anelka,” it said. On the pitch on Tuesday, it promised, they would do everything “individually and in a collective spirit.”
An adviser to President Nicolas Sarkozy said on television: “It’s no longer football, it’s no longer sport, it’s no longer a team.” Sarkozy asked his sports minister to stay in South Africa and talk to the captain, the coach and the federation’s president. Zinedine Zidane said two things would be remembered from the tournament: the winner, and the French team refusing to train.
The players trained normally the next day. On June 22, in Bloemfontein, the midfielder Yoann Gourcuff was sent off in the first half and France lost 2-1 to South Africa. They finished bottom of their group, with one point and one goal from three games.
In August the new coach, Laurent Blanc, picked none of the World Cup squad for his first match. A federation disciplinary commission banned Anelka for 18 matches, Evra for five, Ribéry for three and Jérémy Toulalan for one. Anelka told a newspaper: “These people are clowns.” He never played for France again.
Ten years later, Eurosport wrote that none of the people involved had ever fully lifted the veil on what happened that day behind the curtains of the bus.