Four games into the 2026 World Cup, the French national team, which presently looks like it will cruise to a third straight final after winning all its matches by two or three goals, has started just three different white players. It only brought five of them to this World Cup. Its best players are named Mbappé, Dembélé, and Olise. They have Cameroonian-Algerian, Malian-Mauritanian-Senegalese, and British-Nigerian-Franco-Algerian ancestry, respectively. They are French.Time has vindicated the French approach to sourcing talent for its national team. Everyone else at this World Cup is doing what the French national team started doing 30 years ago: weaponizing its multiculturalism. Or, conversely, cultivating and capitalizing on its diaspora.Nearly a quarter of the 1,248 players in the 2026 World Cup were born in a different country from the one they represent. To wit: There are 99 French-born players at this World Cup—more than were born in any other nation—but only 26 of them are on the France roster. The rest play for other countries, which pick off the players eligible for their teams who didn’t make the grade for Les Bleus. Such is the glut of world-class players produced in France, emanating overwhelmingly from the super-diverse suburbs surrounding Paris, that the other nations contesting this tournament have eagerly gathered up the leftovers. Enough of them to fill almost three full World Cup rosters. And yet of the 48 teams contesting this quadrennial tournament, France seems to be having the most vociferous national discourse on how “French” the French team should be. Which is to say, how white. France alone bickers over what the racial makeup of its national team says about the nation, which, per the Institut National d’Études Démographiques, now comprises as much as 18 percent Arab or Afro-French citizens. Seemingly every two years, when a World Cup or European Championship comes along, another tired debate sparks off in France, which may well have the most politicized national team in soccer, clearing an extraordinarily high bar. All the more so since the French have been one of the planet’s most successful teams in the last three decades, winning the World Cup twice and the European Championship once, while making the title game of those tournaments thrice more. The men’s national team is the public-facing French institution that has consistently functioned the best—although you’d never know it from the way it’s spoken about.In 1996, Jean-Marie Le Pen, then France’s far-right leader, dismissed Les Bleus as “artificial” for having to “bring in players from abroad and call them the French national team.” They very much hadn’t—all but one player was born in France.Two years later, that team, popularly described as “black, blanc, beur” (Black, white, Arab), even though only star playmaker Zinedine Zidane actually fit the latter ethnicity—won the World Cup on home soil and was heralded as a paradigm for a new, more diverse and multicultural France. This, of course, ignored the rampant racism and substantial issues still faced by the nation’s minorities at the time, and which persist—from 2020 to 2024, the number of reported hate crimes in France more than doubled. Zidane and his Black teammate Lilian Thuram understood that nothing had been solved, even though many of their countrymen felt good about themselves. They remained vocal about the dangers posed by Le Pen and his movement. The National Front, Zidane said in 2002, “does not correspond to French values.” Zidane reiterated his stance on the National Front in 2017: “We have to avoid it as much as we can.”Kylian Mbappé, the face and captain of the team today—and currently the World Cup’s co-leading scorer, along with Lionel Messi, at six goals apiece—was born in that very year, 1998. Lilian Thuram’s son, Marcus, is his teammate. Ahead of another election that threatened to elevate the rebranded National Rally in 2024, now led by Le Pen’s daughter Marine, Marcus Thuram warned the nation: “The situation is extremely serious,” he said. “As citizens, we have to fight to make sure that the National Rally doesn’t get through.” Mbappé agreed and said so publicly, calling the National Rally’s ascent “catastrophic.” Whereas his fellow global megastars Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have been studiously apolitical all their careers—never mind that the latter was named for Ronald Reagan and both have taken many millions from sports-washing Gulf states—Mbappé has shown no compunction about wielding his enormous platform in opposition to the far right. Nor have the rest of the team, flouting convention in international soccer.Unpopular centrist French president and noted soccer nut Emmanuel Macron has been in power throughout the nation’s glorious soccer run and has attached himself to the team like a barnacle.