Les Bleus will be traveling to Sweden for a friendly on August 20th, a game which will hopefully get the team ready for the World Cup qualifiers that will be starting soon.
There a lot of old faces on the squad, but there are also some players missing, including Franck Ribery and Francois Clerc, who [...]

726.
That’s how many days it’s been since France kicked off their 2006 World Cup campaign with an unimpressive draw against Switzerland. We all remember - quite painfully - how that tournament turned out. And we know now that being in second place is not enough. Les Bleus cheated themselves out of a World Cup victory, [...]

I wrote up a tribute to Thierry Gilardi over on The Offside’s main page that you might be interested in. He really was irreplaceable, and so much a part of so many France team memories. French TV may fill the job, but they’ll never replace the passion.
The above link is for the English [...]

I’m researching a post for World Cup Blog’s main page on the incomparable announcer Thierry Gilardi, who passed away last month while I was in France. (If you’re a France fan, you know his voice, even if you don’t realize it.)
In the process I thought I’d share with you a couple of [...]

Can you believe that Euros are less than two months away? That’s feeling painfully close.
So close that it’s time to mark our calendars for May 18 — the day that Raymond Domenech will announce the squad for Euros. Kind of.
Apparently he’s going to name more than the 23 players allowed on the roster, [...]

Hello Swoosh!
Hold onto your old Adidas France jersey. It’s a collector’s item now that France has signed with Nike.
Or…well, maybe not yet. But in 2011, for sure. That’s when the contract starts, and it runs through 2018. In other words, for most of the Karim Benzema/Samir Nasri/Hatem Ben Arfa years. [...]

First off, thanks so much for posting all of the links in the comments after the games. I’ve had African Cup of Nations going on at the World Cup Blog main page. (And I’ve also had my first experiences liveblogging. It was more fun than I expected. Now I’m probably going [...]

To get ready for the Euros, les Bleus will now be playing three games in France in late May and early June against South American teams.
(Please, please, please do not let anybody get injured.)
Tuesday, May 27
Friendly
France-Ecuador at Grenoble, Stade des Alpes
Saturday, May 31
Friendly
France-Paraguay at Stadium de Toulouse
Tuesday, June 3
Friendly
France-Colombia at Stade de France

And you thought November was going to be dark and dreary.
It just got a little less so for France fans with the announcement that les Bleus will be playing a friendly against Uruguay on November 19. Stade de France at 21h00.
Uruguay is currently ranked 28th in the FIFA rankings. [...]

I realized that I asked everybody else for your starting XI but never wrote out my own. So here they are. Some are purely rational, others just because I like them. My first choice is listed first, second choice in parentheses. Like I said before, I went with 4-4-2 because I [...]