The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, is very happy with the return of Karim Benzema to the French team, which he has shown at Real Madrid that he is “a great champion” and also that he has “matured” after everything that led to his exclusion.
Macron, who had lunch on Thursday with the players and the team's technicians at the Clairefontaine concentration camp, forty kilometers from Paris, where they are preparing for the European Championship, considered that his reincorporation to the “bleus” is “the illustration of great intelligence” on the part of Benzema and the coach, Didier Deschamps.
In an interview with the BFMTV channel at the end of that lunch, Macron pointed out that the merengue striker “for many French men and women in the first place is a great soccer champion”, and “For many young people who have come out of immigration, it is a model of success.”
But above all, he insisted that “he is a player who has matured and I am very happy that he is here.”
“I think – he added – that the coach has made a good decision, a good decision for his team and for the sport and a good important and symbolic decision for the nation.”
The head of state made indirect allusions to the exclusion of Benzema from the national team for more than five and a half years –“in life you can make mistakes”– but without entering fully into the scandal for his alleged involvement in an attempt to blackmail his former colleague of the “bleus” Mathieu Valbuena in 2015.
What he did elaborate on was the sporting praise of the one who said that “he has an immense playing career at his club.”
“I only aspire that now he writes the page of the immense player who is in the French team. And I feel that he wants to do it.” He said.
Asked if he would want to continue at the Elysee in 2022 after the spring presidential elections, just as Deschamps has said he wants to continue at the helm of the national team next year, Macron confined himself to confirming that he would want Deschamps to continue at the reins of the ” bleus “.
On his personal case, he threw balls out – “everything in its time – claiming that the French gave him a five-year mandate and that the time will come to pronounce on his future.
Regarding the financial uncertainty of the football league after Mediapro's abandonment of the television rights it had bought, the head of state considered that the two parties had made “a mistake” with their controversial contract because the figures “were out of the box. of reality “.
“Now,” he pointed out, “what I want is for football to recover” and with “figures that are viable for everyone.”
In his opinion, “we must find a more robust, more diversified model” because the current one, based on television rights and the sale of players “cannot be held.”