"They don't have any French players." That's what former Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy wrote in a World Cup column ahead of Spain's semi-final against France — and the fallout has been swift, furious, and completely justified.
Rajoy, who led Spain from 2011 to 2018, published the piece in online newspaper El Debate on Friday. He acknowledged France's credentials — two-time world champions, unbeaten in this tournament, ranked number one by FIFA — then torpedoed his own analysis with a line that drew immediate comparisons to the racist social media attack on Kylian Mbappé by Paraguayan senator Celeste Amarilla, who called Mbappé a "colonised Cameroonian, desperately trying to pass himself off as French."
Both countries' leaders responded — and didn't hold back
Spain's current prime minister Pedro Sánchez went straight at it on X: "There are those who still measure belonging by surname, place of birth, or skin colour. Others measure it by our roots in a country and our will to contribute to it." He ended with a message to France: "May the best team win and may racism lose."
France's interior minister Laurent Nuñez called the remarks "completely unacceptable." Olivier Faure, leader of the French Socialist party, made the legal position plain — the squad is composed entirely of French citizens. "France is not an ethnic nation," he wrote. "It has no skin colour or religion."
France's minister for overseas territories, Naïma Moutchou, went further, calling it part of a pattern. "The same racist obsessions and insults resurface every time wins," she said. "These aren't just 'slips of the tongue'. It's a methodical and normalised hatred of France and what it represents." She called on the French football federation — which has already filed a complaint with Paris prosecutors over Amarilla's remarks — to pursue every legal avenue available.
The timing makes it worse
This isn't abstract political noise. Spain and France are about to meet in a World Cup semi-final. The sporting story should be dominating every back page. Instead, the conversation has been dragged into territory that has no place near a football pitch — or anywhere else.
For France's players, this is not new. They've heard variations of this argument their entire careers. The squad keeps winning anyway. That, more than any political response, is the answer Rajoy probably didn't anticipate when he sat down to write his column.
