A day after the 2022 World Cup final, striker Karim Benzema officially announced his farewell to the French national team.
Benzema decided to leave the French team
Benzema was on the list of 26 players for the 2022 World Cup and went to Qatar with the French team.
But on November 19 – just three days before the match, he was determined to have a left quadriceps muscle injury and had to leave the team to return to Madrid for treatment.
Karim Benzema made the decision to say goodbye to France the moment coach Didier Deschamps said he could not continue the tournament. But Karim waited until the World Cup was over to make an official statement.
When he returned to Madrid for a check-up, Benzema was told by the medical team that his injury was much lighter than announced and that he could even feature in the final match of the group stage against Tunisia and beyond. match against Poland in the round of 16.
Benzema always wanted to stay in Qatar to wait for his injury to recover, but the fact that Deschamps and the French team of doctors asked him to go home was the last straw that led to irreparable conflicts between the parties and then decided determination has been made.
Benzema’s farewell announcement for France
“My story with the French national team is over,” Benzema announced on his personal page. “I worked hard and also made mistakes to get where I am today. I’m proud of my journey.”
“I wrote my story. Our story (with France) is over,” Benzema concluded, attaching a picture of him in the “Les Bleus” shirt.
Earlier, Benzema rejected both invitations to attend the 2022 World Cup final from the French Football Federation (FFF) and French President Emmanuel Macron.
Banzema and Didier Deschamps’ broken relationship
Benzema and Deschamps have been at differences for quite some time, with the Frenchman’s 2022 Ballon d’Or acceptance speech omitting any mention of the 54-year-old coach. Even Deschamps was taken aback by this.
It has been speculated that Benzema’s attitude and actions in the past have caused certain French players to loathe him.
In Deschamps’s French national squad, Benzema was a divisive figure. After his involvement in the issue involving the use of pornographic videos to blackmail teammate Mathieu Valbuena, Deschamps and the FFF banned him from recruitment for six years. So, this striker wasn’t a member of the squad that came in second at Euro 2016 and won the 2018 World Cup.
Benzema’s own animosity for Deschamps arose from his frustration at being neglected, as he accused the coach of caving to political pressure in order to treat him unfairly.
After Benzema’s comments, the French coach’s home was broken into and his family’s safety was in jeopardy for quite some time. On record as saying to Marca in January of 2021, “even to death I will not forgive Benzema,” Deschamps has now retracted those comments.
But by Euro 2021, the tournament was postponed for a year due to Covid-19, Deschamps put aside the feud, discussed with the FFF and then called back to Benzema.
Benzema made his first appearance for France in the match against Austria on March 28, 2007, when he replaced senior Djibril Cisse and then scored the only goal of the game after Samir Nasri’s free kick. In his career, he only attended Euro 2008, 2012, World Cup 2014, and closed his international career with 37 goals in 97 matches for France.
