France did it tough in the World Cup down under, but were they given a fair chance to compete?

SOMETIMES inspiration comes unexpectedly. Mine, for the following column, came from an old comic strip I have at home, “The Olympic Games from 1896 to 1984”.

In it, I found a significant story. In 1904, the USA hosted the Olympic Games: 651 competitors, 523 of them American. It is said that the New York Athletic Club collected an “Olympic” gold medal by beating — wait for it — the Chicago Athletic Association. Pierre de Coubertin, who declined the invitation, called the whole thing an outrageous charade. Yet the good citizens of St Louis went home satisfied. The finest system in the world had crowned the finest athletes in the world. Who could argue with the results?

122 years on, rugby league prepared a kind of Oceanian remake, with a bigger budget and better tattoos. For the men’s competition at least. The 17th World Cup kicked off this month in Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. Ten men’s teams: seven from the Pacific basin, two from Europe and one from the Middle East, at least on paper. Lebanon, it is true, has a domestic championship of its own, kept alive through conditions no other rugby league nation, except perhaps Ukraine, has had to endure. France is the sole representative of continental Europe. Seventh in world GDP, second in the eurozone, carrier of 450million Europeans’ last hope in this code. The last one standing, and only the presence of France and Lebanon prevents us from simply calling the tournament the “Commonwealth Games”.

I should be careful here, because I am French and I know the clichés. The first thing a Frenchman is told by people who know better is that he has no sense of proportion. So, facts. Laurent Frayssinous’ squad, trimmed from forty names to twenty-three, has gathered repeatedly at Carcassonne, Perpignan and Toulouse. Departure from Barcelona on 6th October (an eventful journey, by the way), a trip to face Samoa in Sydney on the 16th; England in Perth a week later. Conditioning camps, video sessions, a genuinely ambitious medical operation. This is not a nation turning up for the tour photos.

Then the tournament supplied its own commentary. On that first Friday night in Parramatta, Samoa beat France 78-4. Fourteen tries, four of them to Sualauvi Fa’alogo. France’s answer was one try, from Guillermo Aispuro-Bichet, with Alrix Da Costa and Julian Bousquet already unavailable before kick-off. Afterwards, Benjamin Garcia cut through the platitudes: “Maybe you don’t understand where we are in France, the situation.” His example was simple: Samoa can call on players of the calibre of Fa’alogo and Deine Mariner. “We don’t have this luck in France.” And before a ball was even kicked, on Fox Sports, the same man had said it twice, like someone rehearsing a distress signal: “We need help. We need help here.”

Now look at what happened in Toulouse a fortnight before departure. The France squad spent a day at Ernest-Wallon, the temple of the most successful rugby union club in Europe. Ugo Mola and Clément Poitrenaud walked the national team through defensive systems. Laurent Thuéry, Toulouse’s defence coach, offered the sort of sentence I intend to frame: “They are better trained than we are at defending.” Not “they move well for a minority sport”. Better trained than us. Romain Ntamack, meanwhile, confessed he follows Super League and NRL, and spoke of league’s hold on Australia with the wonderment of a man discovering a continent on his own doorstep. French visitors have been coming back “surprised” from Australia for so long now that the surprise has become wallpaper. The map in their heads was drawn by Paris editors, for whom Australia produces Wallabies and nothing else. Every Frenchman who boards a plane to Brisbane or Sydney rediscovers the same country. None of it ever makes the corrections page. This is becoming like the film Groundhog Day.

All right, in the French sporting landscape, Stade Toulousain is a special union club, open to other sports (it even runs an Australian rules football section and has a joint initiative with a rugby league wheelchair club), but mark the picture.

A union club, from the code that once outlawed ours and seized our assets under Vichy, now lends its staff to the French national team. The code which almost managed to make rugby league disappear in France is now helping it prepare for a World Cup.

So France prepared like a serious federation and qualified like a guest. Like an unwanted guest? While Lebanon, quarter-finalists in 2022, entered automatically, the founding nation of continental European rugby league earned its seat through a play-off gauntlet against emerging nations. A promotional video launched this month under the slogan “Your nation. Your people. Your moment,” – France appears nowhere in it. Neither does Papua New Guinea, a co-host. The screen promises everyone their moment, then forgets to develop two-thirds of the negatives.

And where can my compatriots watch their teams? The answer came on 8th October, only two days after the Chanticleers’ departure: Premier Sports, a British channel and not beIN Sports as expected. All matches, all three tournaments (men, women, wheelchair), twenty-five American (and not Australian) dollars for the pack, which, as one French observer calculated, is about forty cents a match. Cheaper than the coffee you will drink while watching it. No geo-blocking. It is simply that no French voice, on any French screen, at any French hour, will say a word about it. The same country that will broadcast blanket coverage of the union World Cup next year, sometimes twenty-four teams of it, free to air on TF1, has outsourced this one entirely. I checked with a rugby journalist from a leading national daily, the sort who had written about the Catalans Dragons in the past: his newspaper will not cover the tournament. He is a good man. But nobody checks the co-ordinates of an island that is not on the chart. Finally, L’Équipe and Le Figaro reported the heavy defeat against Samoa in their online editions.

The same weekend, England, who had played no Test at all for a year, were beaten 30-12 by Tonga in Perth. When even the founders cannot organise themselves a fixture list, spare a thought for those of us further down the food chain. Lebanon, by the way, automatic qualifiers, were put away by Papua New Guinea as well. What is frustrating is that France does benefit from Super League, properly too: two clubs, Perpignan and Toulouse, a spine of internationals forged in that furnace. But it is an English-run competition with an English-run calendar. Beneficiary, yes. Stakeholder, no. Even Frayssinous, when an NRL footprint in Europe is mooted, answers “yes, definitely, no question mark at all”, while insisting grassroots must come first, and that the gap between the NRL and Super League widens every season.

Before you write in: I am not asking for sympathy. Adjust the lens, that is all.

A ten-team closed shop, a year of empty international windows, a broadcast deal stitched together eight days before kick-off in a currency we had to debate on social media. None of that was chosen in Toulouse or Perpignan. In Sydney, the chairman of International Rugby League assured anyone who listened that France occupies a strategic place in the game. A few days earlier, a French voice on television was repeating: “We need help. We need help here.” Both statements are sincere. But are both true? One comes from the supposed cartographer, who may use the maps of the NRL, the other from the genuine crew of a ship wrecked on an island the mapmaker swears he knows.

So, when the scorelines come in from Sydney and Perth, and somebody shrugs and says “How embarrassing!” or “you can’t expect anything from France these days”, remember what you read here and the words of Garcia and Frayssinous.

My compatriots will bring the full complement of effort, and rather less than a full complement of weapons.

If they are outnumbered on the scoreboard, say the scoreboard was counted fairly but the armoury was not.

Treiziste Diary is an opinion column written in a personal capacity and is © Pierre Carcau

First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 526 (November 2026)