France’s run of World Cup finals ends as Deschamps bows out a game short

Spain did not beat France so much as quietly take the game away from them. A Mikel Oyarzabal penalty, a second-half finish from Pedro Porro, and a night in Dallas that never once looked like turning. By the time the whistle went on a 2-0 defeat, France’s first of the tournament, the bigger picture had already sharpened into view. This is where the run ends, and this is where Didier Deschamps steps down.

For a decade France had turned up at major tournaments and reached the part of the draw where trophies are decided. They won the World Cup in 2018 and went within a penalty shootout of retaining it in 2022. Losing in the last four in 2026 is not a disgrace by any normal measure. But by the standard France set themselves under Deschamps, falling a game short of a third final in a row feels like an era closing rather than a near miss.

A semi-final that exposed the gap

The scoreline flattered nobody. Spain controlled the ball, controlled the tempo, and picked France apart without ever having to reach top gear. Deschamps admitted afterwards that his side were a notch below on the technical level, which is about as candid as a France manager gets in public. He grumbled about the penalty and the officiating, as beaten managers do, but the honesty underneath was harder to argue with. When a team keeps the ball this well and defends its lead this calmly, you do not lose to a soft decision. You lose because the other side is better on the night.

What makes it sting is that France arrived with the profile of favourites. They had scored freely on the way through, brushed aside the group and taken care of Morocco in the quarter-final without alarm. Then they met the one opponent capable of matching them for talent and beating them for control, and the flaws that a lopsided draw had hidden were suddenly floodlit.

Mbappe’s tournament, and the night it stalled

Kylian Mbappe leaves the tournament with eight goals and his own frustration. He carried France through the early rounds, dragged his career World Cup tally to 20 and spent most of the summer looking like the most dangerous forward on the continent. Against Spain he barely had a sight of goal. That says less about Mbappe than about the team around him, which could not give him a platform when the level rose. A forward this good getting starved in a semi-final is the clearest sign that France’s problems were structural rather than individual.

There were bright spots across the month. Ousmane Dembele looked reborn, and the younger players gave glimpses of a squad that should still be formidable in four years. None of that softens the immediate feeling, which is of a golden generation that will finish this cycle without adding the trophy its talent probably deserved.

The end of the Deschamps years

Deschamps announced long before the tournament that 2026 would be his last, and Saturday’s third-place play-off against the loser of England and Argentina will be his final match in charge. It is a strange, muted way for the most successful France manager of the modern era to sign off. Fourteen years, a World Cup, a Nations League and two more major finals, all reduced to a consolation game nobody really wants to play.

His record will outlast the disappointment. France under Deschamps became the most reliable knockout team in world football, and reliability at this level is worth more than the neutrals ever admit. Whoever comes next, with Zinedine Zidane the name that has followed the job for months, inherits a squad built to win now and a bar set impossibly high.

That is the odd inheritance Deschamps leaves. He made semi-finals feel like the floor, so a semi-final exit now reads as failure. Few managers get to distort expectations that far. France will spend the next few years finding out how hard that standard is to keep, and they may come to appreciate what they had only once it is gone.

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