They just can’t help themselves, can they? Following a welcome few months of stability, sensibility and actual football, the French national side was plunged back into crisis last weekend. When news site Mediapart published transcripts of clandestine recordings taken in a French Football Federation (FFF) meeting last November, discussing the possibility of quotas for dual nationality players, it knew the storm it would create. When it comes to the cultural and racial make-up of the national team, France is always poised on a knife edge.

While the already-suspended technical director François Blaquart, under-21 coach Erick Mombaerts and even FFF president Fernand Duchaussoy (who has pleaded ignorance) have their heads on the block, the biggest potential casualty is the head coach himself. The initial shock was reading Laurent Blanc’s comments. “You have the impression that they really train the same prototype of players: big, strong, powerful … what is there that is currently big, strong, powerful? The blacks. That’s the way it is. It’s a current fact.”

The delivery of these words jarred to the extent that few noticed, as the excellent Ligue1.com writer Matt Spiro pointed out, that Blanc qualified his comments – all the while not knowing that he was being recorded, of course. “If we only develop black players, and they feel French and want to play for France, that suits me fine,” he said. The overall picture tallies up with Blanc’s own explanation and apology, that he was “clumsy,” but not, by any means, racist.

There has been no previous suggestion that this was the case, and Blanc has been duly defended by Alou Diarra, himself of Malian origins. Diarra was Blanc’s skipper at Bordeaux and giving him the France armband was one of the coach’s first acts after taking on the national team job.

There is no suggestion that anyone prompted Diarra to speak up for his boss, as their close working relationship is no secret, but Blanc still shouldn’t be in the position of needing (at least in a media sense) to fall back on a ‘some of my best mates are black’ line of defence.

Why this issue smarts so much is that it brushes against a very raw wound in French football, which is more than a sport issue; it’s a social one. The media’s line is that Blanc’s words are shocking because he is a hero, a cornerstone of the rainbow team, the Black-Blanc-Beur (black-white-Arab) side that won the 1998 World Cup. 

Yet the polarised opinions of various members of that squad in the last week shows that while 1998 has huge symbolic significance, the World Cup win was at best just a positive step, at worst a placebo – but certainly not a cure to all France’s difficulties with integration or coming to terms with its post-colonial identity. When youths invaded the pitch chanting pro-Bin Laden slogans and forced the abandonment of the 2001 Stade de France friendly with Algeria, it was clear that those believing 1998 heralded the dawn of an über-tolerant utopia were kidding themselves.

If a national football team is supposed top be a cross-section of a country as a whole, the reaction of the 1998 generation showed the confusion perfectly. Lilian Thuram and Patrick Vieira reacted with incredulity, both saying that they didn’t believe Blanc was racist but Vieira admitting he found the coach’s words “shocking.” Bixente Lizarazu and Christophe Dugarry defended Blanc, with Dugarry – now a respected TV pundit – rounding on Thuram. “What annoys me about Lilian Thuram is him wanting to be the supreme court judge,” he said. “I get the impression he wants to give everyone lessons on how to behave.” Emmanuel Petit even called on the famously apolitical Zinedine Zidane to step up and have his say.

The funny thing is that the concern at the middle of it all – that the FFF will spend on training dual nationality players only for them to go off to play for another country’s senior side – is a red herring. Those dual qualified players who are good enough tend to choose France, whether they went to Clairefontaine or not (Karim Benzema and Adil Rami are examples from the current side), while those who do choose to declare elsewhere, such as Nadir Belhadj, have usually done so because they’re not good enough for the full side anyway. International football is now as careerist as any other part of the game.

So while Blanc’s words – or at least some of them – were ill-chosen and regrettable, those who argue that France has fallen a long way since the perfect integration of thirteen years ago are missing the point. Until French society at large deals with some very difficult questions, Blanc’s current discomfort is merely the thin end of the wedge.