Deschamps seeks winning start as France opens World Cup against Senegal

Didier Deschamps entered his last World Cup with France carrying rare pedigree and unusually immediate questions. The defending powers from 1998 and 2018, runners-up in 2022, opened Group I against Senegal at the New York/New Jersey Stadium, a match that revived memories of Senegal’s 1-0 upset in the 2002 tournament opener.

For Deschamps, this was more than a group-stage first step. It was his fifth World Cup overall, after appearing as a player in 1998 and then as coach in 2014, 2018 and 2022, and it will be his final major tournament in charge of Les Bleus before he leaves after the competition. France arrived unbeaten in qualifying, with five wins and one draw in six matches, scoring 16 goals and conceding four, but the numbers did not erase the sense that this squad still needed sharp tactical answers.

The 26-man roster Deschamps announced on May 14 on TF1 again showed why France can look so formidable and so difficult to settle at the same time. Kylian Mbappé, Ousmane Dembélé and Michael Olise give France pace, directness and invention in the attacking third, yet they also sharpen the central question Deschamps has to solve immediately: how to fit elite forward talent into a structure that stays compact, controlled and secure against counterattacks. He acknowledged the pressure around the team in his pre-tournament comments, saying, “There are expectations and demands, of course.”

That tension mattered because France’s group left little room for a slow start. Senegal, Iraq and Norway made Group I one of the tournament’s most demanding sections, and the expanded 48-team field with a new round of 16 raised the cost of every slip. Senegal’s history against France added another layer of urgency, especially in a match that invited comparisons with the shock of Korea-Japan 2002.

At Clairefontaine, the atmosphere around the final gathering was optimistic, but the football problem remained clear. France had the individual quality to threaten any opponent, yet Deschamps still had to turn that talent into a balanced unit, with selection choices and tactical adjustments settled quickly enough to protect a team that looked, even in victory, less fixed than its reputation suggested. For a coach in his farewell tournament, the opener against Senegal served as the first true test of whether France’s ceiling could finally match its pedigree.