By Rick Noack, The Washington Post
PARIS ― Before the World Cup got underway in Qatar last month, a fourth of French soccer fans said in surveys that they would boycott the controversial tournament. There was widespread outrage over the Persian Gulf state’s treatment of LGBTQ people and migrant workers, as well as the contest’s carbon footprint.
But that was before their national team stormed into the soccer final. With France now gearing up for the Sunday match with Argentina, moral predicaments that once dominated French World Cup coverage are quickly becoming an afterthought.
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“The French probably did not 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 the match will be President Emmanuel Macron, a soccer fan who had already traveled to Qatar for the Wednesday semifinal and is making a second trip to the Gulf state this weekend. “I am 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 the World Cup this year. 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 fans who were having second thoughts about their initial boycott plans, Macron’s defense of the tournament has served as a justification to give in.
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