THE FRENCH national football team’s shambolic performance at the World Cup claimed its latest high-profile victim yesterday when the president of the French Football Federation, Jean-Pierre Escalettes, announced he was stepping down.
Minister for health and sport Roselyne Bachelot had suggested last week that Mr Escalettes’s resignation was “inevitable”, prompting world football’s governing body to warn the French government not to interfere in the national team’s affairs.
“After a weekend of reflection, I consider it my duty to resign from the position,” Mr Escalettes said in a statement. Taking responsibility for what he called the French team’s “fiasco”, he said he hoped his decision was in the interests of an institution he had served for decades.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy reacted furiously to the players’ strike and the national team’s humiliating elimination from the tournament in South Africa, and called for an explanation of the debacle. Ms Bachelot has also been publicly critical of French football’s governance and the players themselves, castigating “the disaster of the national team made of immature gang leaders in command of scared kids with a coach at a loss and without any authority and a federation with its back against the wall”.
Such political pronouncements prompted a rebuke from Fifa, whose rules prohibit any government interference in a national team’s affairs.
“I spoke to the sports minister’s office and told them to be very careful,” Fifa general secretary Jérôme Valcke said before the announcement of Mr Escalettes’ resignation. “There is an autonomy of the sporting movement, and there can’t be any political interference in what happens.”
Iraq was suspended for state interference in 2008 and Mr Valcke, who is French, said there was “no reason to have a different approach for a European country. We will definitely look at what France is doing,” he said. “It means that no one can ask for someone to resign. The person is elected. If he has the feeling that in what he has done he failed, then he can resign. And then elections will have to be organised.”
Mr Sarkozy met veteran French forward Thierry Henry at the Élysée Palace on the team’s return to France last week in order to hear his version of events. Mr Valcke said such high-level contacts over the fiasco were an understandable reflection of the national trauma.
“It’s the French way of dealing with a situation somewhere, if I may say so,” he said. “Maybe the world took it as a bad joke. In France, it was not a bad joke, it was a sad story and a lot of people in France have the feeling that they have been cheated by these players.” Officials should, however, know where to draw the line, he added.
At their annual congress last year, Fifa members agreed to take a tougher stance against federations whose work was interfered with by third parties – namely “politicians, governments, states, media, etc”
Greece was European champion when it was suspended from world soccer for several days in 2006 because its parliament tried to change a law regulating professional sports organisations. Iraq was suspended for a number of days in May 2008 after its government disbanded all national sports bodies.