After a friendly tournament in France where The Blues came out with their heads held high, the announcements of abandonments of the French team followed one another. The movement started with Wendie Renard, then the wave of withdrawal took away Diani and Katoto.
At the origin of this announced debacle, tumultuous relations with Corinne Deacon, the inflexible coach of the France team. Does this event threaten the future of France for the next World Cup next July? Decryption of a modern day mutiny.
In France, strikes are normal. However, the successive withdrawals of three French players does not say anything good about the health of French women’s football. It was first Wendie Renard who split a press release on social networks, indicating that she did not intend to participate in the next World Cup. She implicitly evokes a “pressure” harmful to her vision of football.
In general surprise, two of his comrades follow the movement, striker Kadidiatou Diani and striker Marie-Antoinette Katoto, who share with Renard the same feeling of fed up and feeling of moral fatigue.
For now, it is too early to say if the players want to end their career in the France team. However, their failure to participate in the World Cup is recorded. It remains to be seen whether the French team will be able to perform without their shock teammates, or whether they will have to rely on luck, as in a game of blackjack.
Corinne Deacon, the inflexible coach
Behind this ambient gloom hides the harsh management of Corinne Deacon, a former international footballer who has become a coach. If she managed to engage in a satisfying, albeit friendly, Tournament of France, the announcement of the defection of the players fell on her in a brutal way, revealing the flaws in the way of training the blue team.
Because Deacon has a reputation for being a demanding coach, sometimes to the extreme, and her public personality depicts her as a cold, determined, unenthusiastic person who has made risky strategic choices in recent years.
It is in particular by removing the captain’s armband from Wendie Renard in 2017 that Corinne Deacon had made people talk about her. At the time, the decision is made as a gross injustice, which the manager was trying to pass off as a kind of strategic trial.
Women’s football in search of recognition
Even if the name of Corinne Deacon is not mentioned by the three players who have withdrawn, it is not complicated to understand that it is their toxic relationship with the coach that pushes them to put their international career on hold.
Since the events are still recent, Deacon has not officially responded to them. However, she will have to speak out on this affair when public rumor would already have pushed her to resign.
We can see this misunderstanding between players and coaches as a symbol of the difficulties of women’s football, a discipline that has to deal with pressure, salaries much lower than their male counterparts, and difficult access to professionalization.
Other countries affected by the abandonment of players
The episode Deacon against the Blue is not the only crisis to enamel the middle of women’s football. In September 2022, the greatest players of the Spanish national team recently abandoned ship in protest against coach Jorge Vilda.
