But that was before their national team stormed into the final.
With France now gearing up for Sunday’s match with Argentina, moral dilemmas that once dominated French World Cup coverage are quickly becoming an afterthought.
“The French probably didn’t believe the team would get that far,” said Laurent Grün, a soccer history researcher in eastern France who decided to not watch the tournament. Even some of his own family members who previously joined the boycott have by now given in.
Among the France national team supporters watching Sunday’s match will be President Emmanuel Macron, a soccer fan who already traveled to Qatar for Wednesday’s semifinal and is making a second trip to the Gulf state this weekend.
“I’m backing the France team and I think that the French are too,” Macron said Thursday.
The French president is one of only a few top European officials who have attended this year’s World Cup. But his presence in Qatar — and his recent insistence that “sports should not be politicized” — appeared to capture the predominant sentiment among French soccer fans in these final days of the World Cup.
For those who were having second thoughts about their initial boycott plans, Macron’s defense of the tournament has served as a justification to give in. When France beat Morocco in Wednesday’s semifinal, over 20.7 million in France were watching on TV — the highest semifinal viewership since 2006, according to Médiamétrie, a polling company that measures audience and media usage.
“Clearly, there is no boycott effect,” a TV ratings specialist told Agence France-Presse.
But the debate over the tournament’s ethical dilemmas hasn’t entirely died down. Macron’s trip this week re-energized some of his political opponents, who have for months called for a boycott. On Wednesday, a group of left-wing members of parliament held a minute of silence to mourn the migrant workers who died in Qatar in the lead-up to the competition. And unlike during previous World Cups, major cities like Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille and Strasbourg won’t show the final on large screens in vast public viewing areas. Bars across Paris are expected to be overcrowded, and some fans may not find space to watch the match.
Defenders of a boycott are pointing to a moral obligation that might be stronger in France than other countries. Investigators are examining whether French officials — including former president Nicolas Sarkozy — played a role in helping Qatar win the bid to host the World Cup, French newspaper Le Monde reported last month. And amid an explosive investigation this week into allegations that current and former E.U. officials took bribes from Qatar, Macron’s government is facing mounting calls to rein in Qatari influence in France.
“It was out of the question to set up public viewing areas,” Paris’s deputy mayor overseeing sports, Pierre Rabadan, said earlier this year about the city’s decision to not host public viewing events. He cited Qatar’s labor conditions, environmental concerns, and the fact that fans would be standing in the cold because the tournament is held in winter and not, as usual, in summer.
Out of all the French cities that opted to boycott the World Cup, however, Paris’s move was the most puzzling one, critics said.
The city’s mighty Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) soccer club is owned by Qatar Sports Investments. And leftist Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who unsuccessfully ran against Macron in presidential elections earlier this year, hasn’t shied away from showing public support for the team when it appeared to suit her city’s interests in the past.
When Brazilian soccer star Neymar transferred to PSG in 2017, Hidalgo’s administration allowed the Eiffel Tower to be lit up in the club colors.
“She relies heavily on the image of PSG,” Bernard Caïazzo, a shareholder of French soccer club AS Saint-Étienne, said in October.
In many ways, Paris’s boycott of a World Cup hosted by a country that owns the city’s most valuable soccer club has encapsulated the dilemmas many national teams, cities, and governments faced during this World Cup: Sending a stronger signal would often have gone against their own interests.
For David Samzun, mayor of the city of Saint-Nazaire in western France, and like Hidalgo a Socialist Party member, a World Cup boycott would have been “unsustainable.”
In an interview, Samzun accused Qatar of a “disrespect for human rights” and criticized this year’s tournament as “environmental nonsense.” But he also took aim at the Paris boycott, calling it “hypocritical” and suggesting that local officials should never have been brought into the current position in the first place.
Unlike many other towns, Saint-Nazaire will show the World Cup final in a public viewing area on Sunday. A public transmission of Wednesday’s semifinal already drew over 1,000 people to the city’s fan zone on a former submarine base.
“The economic crisis, the energy crisis, the war on the doorstep of Europe. When we look at the news, it’s all very sad,” he said.
The World Cup, he added, is a rare chance to “bring people together, to seek out popular, joyful moments — and I think in France, we really need it.”
For Henrik Selin, a Boston University researcher focusing on global and regional politics, it’s an understandable position.
“There is a lot of evidence suggesting that FIFA is a thoroughly corrupt organization,” he said. “But I think that should be separated from the tournament once it has started.”
French cities’ boycotts seem to be “more about domestic politics than international relations,” he added. “I don’t think that helps to improve the human rights record in Qatar or any other country.”
But tournament critic Grün was more optimistic about the chances for change, largely because the focus on French officials’ role in awarding the World Cup to Qatar appears greater than ever.
“Unfortunately, it’s too late” for this World Cup, he said. But it “puts a lot more moral obligations on France for the future.”
