Poor strikers

Credit Agricole: You know France has a national crisis when Nicolas Sarkozy gets involved, and when ministers compete with each other to express their outrage. The pathetic showing of the French national football team in the World Cup has been a source of worry ever since Thierry Henry helped the side qualify by playing handball against Ireland. Now it looks like the inmates are running the asylum.

After the training ground walkout they orchestrated on Sunday, the team’s star players are fast plunging into public-relations hell. But that’s just the other side of the coin of the highly dysfunctional system under which French professional football operates.

Some of Europe’s top football stars are French, but most of them don’t play in France. The lure of other, richer football clubs in the UK, Spain, Italy or Germany is such that most of their poorer, vastly under-funded Gallic rivals can't compete. Tax reasons only partly explain the talent flight. The French championship doesn't have any star team with the prestige of the likes of Arsenal, Juventus or Real.

No wonder that the French crew can been compared to a band of mercenaries gathered every other year for the world cup or the euro championship. For the French this could à la rigueur be fine — but only as long as they win, or at least appear like they want to. As any brigade of mercenaries, a lot depends on their chief — and it can unravel fast when the upper command is lacking.

The French players simply haven’t noticed that the tolerance for high-paid divas who don’t deliver has massively shrunk of late. Footballers’ salaries, bankers’ bonuses, chief executives’ pension schemes: the people are demanding action.

Understandably, the French team’s corporate sponsors aren’t amused. Credit Agricole, the French bank, has withdrawn an ad campaign featuring its players, and a French fast-food chain has dropped another one with Nicolas Anelka, the player sent home (home being London) for profanities against the team’s manager. What the French players may discover soon, to their dismay, is that market forces don’t always play to their advantage.