PSG’s Mbappe, Dembele and Kolo Muani look set to prosper for France

With a rugby World Cup taking centre stage in France, Paris has temporarily relocated its true national game. But the country’s best men’s footballers, runners-up in their last World Cup, champions in the previous edition, should not mind too much that Thursday’s Euro 2024 qualifier against Ireland has been shifted from the Stade de France, which is readying itself for seven weeks prioritising the 15-man sport, to the Parc des Princes.

The Parc is, after all, home to an ever more dominant band of Bleus, the Paris Saint-Germain cadre, from which the entire French forward line may well be drawn by the time Didier Deschamps, the national head coach, begins next summer’s bid to win the European championship. Qualification is on course, with four wins from four so far, and the depth of talent available to Deschamps means, fitness permitting, France must start among the favourites.

PSG spent €350m on new signings during the summer, a sum exceeded only by Premier League side Chelsea and Al Hilal of Riyadh, and a high proportion of that, unusually for PSG, was spent on Frenchmen. Lucas Hernandez, a stalwart of Deschamps’s defence, joined from Bayern Munich for €45m, winger Ousmane Dembele came in for €50m from Barcelona. And, after an attritional tug-of-war with Eintracht Frankfurt, striker Randall Kolo Muani was prised from the German club for €95m close to the deadline for completing deals.

They were first welcomed to their new club by resident superstar, Kylian Mbappe, around whose future PSG remained nervously uncertain for much of the window. On Monday, they were welcomed again to Mbappe’s other kingdom – Clairefontaine, France’s practice headquarters just south of the capital.

Mbappe, six months into assuming the captaincy of Les Bleus, likes the idea of Dembele attacking from the opposite flank to his preferred left wing and Muani dragging markers with him through the centre, while criss-crossing positions with Mbappe.

That’s now part of the PSG plan, and for the first time in Mbappe’s career, there is the possibility that the same relationships he builds week in, week out, on the PSG pitch and training ground will segue smoothly into the national set-up.

When it was put to Deschamps that the complicity shown already for PSG this season between Dembele and Mbappe pushed the case for starting them on the right and left of a front three against Ireland, he joked to reporters: “How kind of you, you’ve chosen the line-up for me already.”

Deschamps is sensitive that the likes of AC Milan’s Olivier Giroud, France’s all-time top scorer and still part of the plans at the age of 36, and the younger strikers Marcus Thuram and the injured Christopher Nkunku, who joined Inter and Chelsea this summer, do not worry about the PSG trio becoming privileged in France’s attacking hierarchy.

But Deschamps nonetheless acknowledged “it can only be a positive that the three of them [Mbappe, Dembele and Kolo Muani] will be together at club level.”

Dembele and Mbappe were close before they became club colleagues and have holidayed together in the past. They have shared the pressures and joys of rapid, precocious rises. Six years ago, Barcelona paid Borussia Dortmund €117m to sign Dembele, who had only just turned 20 at the time. In the same summer, PSG committed €180m to Monaco for the 18-year-old Mbappe.

Mbappe and Kolo Muani have a shared background that goes back even further. Both were born, 15 days apart in late 1998, in Bondy. It’s a suburb of greater Paris that, while beset with social and economic challenges, is an extraordinarily fertile nursery for young talent. William Saliba, the Arsenal defender who could line up alongside Lucas Hernandez in the French back line against Ireland, is also from Bondy.

But Kolo Muani, by comparison with Dembele and Mbappe, is a late developer. He won his first France cap less than a year ago, at 23, shortly after joining Eintracht from Nantes. He first shared a professional pitch with Mbappe only at the 2022 World Cup.

There, they gave enough of a glimpse of a fruitful tandem when Kolo Muani came off the bench early in the dramatic final against Argentina. Kolo Muani, having replaced Dembele in the first half with France 2-0 behind, won a penalty via one of his trademark direct runs. It galvanised the French comeback. Mbappe converted, for the first goal of his hat-trick before Argentina won on spot-kicks.

A minor thigh complaint that prevented Kolo Muani making his PSG debut at the weekend may mean he starts on the bench on Thursday. But longer-term, the PSG cohort look set to spearhead Les Bleus in the year ahead. And Paris’s ambitious, wealthy superclub now looks as if it better represents the city’s native football excellence, with Kolo Muani arriving at PSG to fill some of the gaps left by the departure of two of the club’s most glamorous foreign players, Neymar and Lionel Messi.