The French justice has buried the complaint filed by the French coach, Didier Deschamps, against the former international player Éric Cantona for having hinted at racist motivations in the coach's call for Euro 2016.
As local media indicated this Monday, the Paris Court of Appeal annulled the procedure, considering, as it had already done in the first instance, that the defamation lawsuit was not clear.
Deschamps went to court after Cantona assured in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian in 2016 that the selection of the coach for the Eurocup that year in France, which did not include Karim Benzema and Hatem ben Arfa, had been made with racist reasons..
“Deschamps has a very French last name. He may be the only one in France who has a truly French last name. No one in his family has mixed with anyone. Like the Mormons in the United States,” Cantona ironically added that “it is clear that Benzema and Ben Arfa are the two best French players and they will not be in the European Championship. “
The former Manchester United footballer implied that the absence of these two players had to do with their “North African origins.”
Those statements came shortly after Benzema accused Deschamps of having yielded to “pressure from a racist part of France” when making the list.
Days later, the coach's home in Biarritz, in the French Basque Country, he woke up painted with racist insults.
The episode caused great discomfort to the technician, who has never hidden the pain he suffered from those accusations.
The Real Madrid forward stopped being called up with the French national team in October 2015, after he was charged with alleged complicity in a blackmail case with a sexual video of the footballer Mathieu Valbuena.
The trial for that case, for which he can be sentenced to up to five years in prison, will open on October 20 at the Court of Versailles, five months after his return to the national team.