France were confirmed as one of the favourites for the 2026 FIFA World Cup and drawn into a testing Group I with Senegal, Norway and Iraq, and Malo Gusto will carry the No. 2 shirt as he heads to his first major international tournament.
The buzz around France FC is driven by the draw and the squad named for the summer: a team that still carries the core of recent finals runs while adding youth and depth, from Kylian Mbappé’s captaincy and scoring form to the emergence of right-back Gusto.
The evidence that France are both elite and vulnerable is in the squad list and the numbers. Didier Deschamps, in charge for 14 years and heading to his fourth World Cup, has picked a 26-man group that includes four 2018 winners, seven Premier League players and five Paris Saint-Germain players. The roster also contains names returning from late-season problems — Bradley Barcola, Manu Koné and Jules Koundé — plus veterans such as N’Golo Kanté and creative options like Michael Olise. Mbappé, captain and last season’s UEFA Champions League top scorer, still chases France and World Cup scoring milestones, while the team’s veteran manager balances experience and rotation.
There is a clear tactical question at the heart of the selection. Gusto arrives at his first major finals with nine senior caps, six of them earned in qualification, and he shared right-back duties with Koundé during that campaign. He delivered two assists in France’s final qualifier, a 3-1 win over Azerbaijan. With Koundé returning from a late-season injury, Deschamps must decide whether to settle a starting right-back or persist with the split that won qualification.
That selection dilemma matters because Group I is unusually awkward. Senegal will be France’s opening opponents, a fixture that carries history — Senegal beat France 1-0 in their 2002 World Cup opener — and Norway arrive with Erling Haaland, who scored 16 goals in eight qualifying matches as his team averaged 4.6 goals per game. Iraq make their first World Cup appearance in 40 years. The Opta supercomputer captures that complexity: it gives France a 13.0% chance of winning the tournament but ranks them sixth among the 48 teams for probability of reaching the round of 32, a position driven by the difficulty of their group even as simulations still put France into the knockout phase in 95.3% of runs.
Norway’s underlying numbers help explain the caution. Opta’s model gives Norway an 82.3% chance of reaching the knockout stages and a 25.2% chance of topping Group I, figures that turn what might have been a straightforward path into one that requires constant attention. For a France side that has reached the final in four of the last seven World Cups, and that won in 2018 and lost on penalties in the 2022 final, the margin for error in the group stage has narrowed.
Deschamps, one of only a handful of managers to reach four World Cups, must weigh his established core against form and fitness. Mbappé, who scored 12 goals and recorded 14 goal involvements across the last two World Cups and famously netted a hat-trick in the 2022 final, remains the primary offensive lever; he sits four goals shy of Miroslav Klose’s all-time World Cup mark and one shy of Just Fontaine’s France record. How Deschamps protects him and how he allocates minutes across his right-side defence will shape France’s early tournament trajectory.
France open their Group I campaign against Senegal, and the immediate question is sharp: can Deschamps find a settled right-back and keep Mbappé productive enough to overcome Opta’s cautious forecasts and navigate a group stacked with threats? The answer will arrive quickly — starting with that opener — and it will determine whether the tag of favourite is ballast or burden for France FC.
