Didier Deschamps is France’s greatest ever manager. Could he have been greater?

Has Didier Deschamps underachieved as France head coach?

It’s an opinion that, when it first crosses your mind, feels absurd.

France looked the best side at this World Cup until they came up against Spain. Or certainly the best to watch, with Kylian Mbappe, Michael Olise and Ousmane Dembele seemingly taking it in turns to do something that would dazzle us.

This is the third World Cup in a row that France have reached the last four, losing in the final on penalties in 2022 and winning the whole thing in 2018. They were beaten by Germany, the eventual winners, in the quarter-finals in 2014. It’s a sensational record on paper, only really matched by Argentina over the same time period.

The third-place playoff on Saturday will be Deschamps’ final game in the job, with the worst kept secret in football being that Zinedine Zidane is waiting to replace him. He can retire happy. The first line of his obituary will always be that he’s one of three men to win the World Cup as a player and a coach. Anyone who managed to win the big one even once is automatically in the one per cent of the one per cent, never mind twice, in different capacities.

He’s the most successful France coach in history. The most decorated Frenchman ever, in the international game, having also lifted the European Championship as captain in 2000. Beyond France, Tuesday’s game put him clear as the man to coach the most World Cup games in history, nudging ahead of Helmut Schon. He’s one of five coaches, along with Schon, Franz Beckenbauer, Carlos Bilardo and Vittorio Pozzo, to reach two World Cup finals.

His CV is impeccable. In his post-match press conference on Tuesday, when addressing his body of work, he said: “I am extremely happy. I am very proud of everything we’ve done to reach this stage and to win a World Cup — to take the French team to the highest level.”

And yet, there is a sense that it could have been even better.

Deschamps took France to seven major tournaments and won one of them. Even just one win in international football is superb, but the point about Deschamps is that he has been blessed with one of the most astonishing generations of talent the game has ever seen.

Kylian Mbappe has been in five of his tournament squads. Antoine Griezmann in six. He had the peak of Paul Pogba and Ousmane Dembele. At this World Cup, at various points he could afford to leave out Rayan Cherki, Desire Doue, Bradley Barcola and Marcus Thuram. Circumstances prevented him from having the best years of Karim Benzema’s career, but he was still able to take him to two tournaments.

Then in more defensive roles, he has been able to pick Raphael Varane, William Saliba, Aurelien Tchouameni, N’Golo Kante, Hugo Lloris, Patrice Evra, Jules Kounde, Dayot Upamecano, the Hernandez brothers (Lucas and Theo). And that’s not even counting the players he’s been able to leave out, that other nations might have built around. During his tenure, no other country has had such depth and quality of talent.

Perhaps he did all he could at World Cups, but consider his record at European Championships. He reached the final on home soil in 2016, but their failure to beat a middling Portugal team in the final, who lost Cristiano Ronaldo to injury after just 25 minutes, remains baffling.

Their Euro 2020 campaign was a disaster, winning only one game in the group stage and then crashing out against Switzerland on penalties, having been 3-1 up in the 80th minute. It was a tournament more remembered for the players’ families fighting in the stands than anything France did on the pitch.

And then there’s Euro 2024, where they reached the semi-final but scientists could study that for years and still not come up with a convincing explanation as to how. They got to that stage without scoring a single goal from open play, with two own-goals and two penalties somehow proving enough to heave their way into the last four. To turn a team featuring Mbappe, Dembele, Barcola and Griezmann, among others, into such a stodgy mess feels impossible.

The difference between his record at the Euros versus the World Cup, is admittedly strange, although perhaps inevitable for someone who has been an international manager for as long as Deschamps.

But it all feeds into the sense that here is a man who was given an enormous pot of gold and made one — brilliant, dazzling, crowd-pleasing — necklace from it.

There is other context here. When he took over in 2012, he had to refashion a side from the rubble still smouldering from 2010, when the team went on strike under Raymond Domenech, followed by Laurent Blanc’s underwhelming two years in charge.

At four of the six tournaments where France have been eliminated, it’s been to the eventual winners, and that will be five if Spain win the final on Sunday. The strangeness of the Benzema affair, which not only prevented him from picking one of France’s great centre-forwards in an era not over-blessed with players in that position, but also created a strange rift in the team, is something that no manager can budget for.

At this World Cup he also had to deal with the tragedy of his mother passing away, returning to France for her funeral and missing their final group game against Norway.

There’s also the inherent pressure of managing France, the expectation created by his own playing generation, and Zidane looming over him. It’s an achievement to even stay in that job for 14 years.

And yet, you still keep coming back to Mbappe… Griezmann… Pogba… Dembele… Olise. Olivier Giroud said on CBS that the team at this World Cup was France’s best ever, based purely on talent. It feels like this should have been a generation to rival Spain between 2008-2012. An all-time era of achievement, rather than merely a great one.

Deschamps is the greatest manager France have ever had. But while it’s probably churlish to say it, he could have been even greater.